Brian LICHOROWIC - Intro

Chris LaFay: Ryan, how are you? Today has been a day of conversations for me, so that's good. Been a, it's been a nice change of pace from the back to back to back to back client calls that I had yesterday. And I basically went from client calls yesterday to more like social connection calls today to no calls tomorrow. And hopefully we'll actually like deep dive into work tomorrow.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Where are you located?

Chris LaFay: So I'm in Atlanta, AKA the ice belt of the next four to six days.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, you're getting a warning on that. Yeah, I'm in Virginia where they've already closed the school for Monday and Tuesday. You can't find a roll of toilet paper, white bread or milk in any grocery store.

Chris LaFay: What? They've already. Oh man, I wonder, I wonder. I haven't really checked today to see if they've made any changes. My wife has been like eagle eyed on it.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Virginia is the wussiest. The wussiest state that I'm from, upstate New York where you get a foot, you still go to school. But man, they are this. It's like. And all. I don't, excuse me, I don't get the white bread milk. It's like we're supposed to have a, you know, French coast festival or something every time it snows, but. Well, here it comes.

Chris LaFay: A fridged. Yes. Yes. I, I don't, I don't, I don't understand. Like, you would think that like the propane tanks would be the things that go away because it's like, hey, if you have a gas grill, you could at least literally cook anything you want. Yeah, like if the power goes out, like, give me, give me some of that.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, that's my big problem here. I'm in the middle. I'm the only house in the middle of a 300 acre farm. Farm. And my power goes off when a cow farts sideways. It's just the most annoying thing. And I've gone through generator after generator after generator, but yeah, it's just, it's the most. The infrastructure, particularly out here in hunt country, is just terrible. It's all just, you know, it's, it's. So I'm got my generator ready, you know, propane's all set. I'm just so used to this crap now, but man, yes. This type of thing. So did you, I'm sorry, how long.

Chris LaFay: Have you lived in on 300 acres of land?

Brian LICHOROWIC: 12 years now. I moved to, I moved to Virginia in 1989. You remember the, remember the.

Chris LaFay: I don't know if you were around.

Brian LICHOROWIC: The World Series Earthquake. You remember when that happened and all that stuff I got buried. I got buried under my desk for an hour and a half at that thing, and I moved here a week later, man. Yeah, enough of that. I didn't like that at all. You remember? You know, most. Most just shake like this, you know, they just kind of.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, they do. Like a little bit. Yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah. Well, this one was, like, all of a sudden, standing on a waterbed, and someone hit one end real hard. It was a wave. And I. I couldn't get out the door. So I climbed back under my desk, and I was working at a place called the Wollongong Group. It's a Macintosh company, and a bunch of Max behind me running test suites. So I went on there, and the bookcase came over, and a drop ceiling falls down, and my idiot brother, who is the VP of marketing, goes, okay, all right. Yeah, I'm fine. Stay there, Stay there. I'm going to call a newspaper a news channel, you know, he didn't know. He thought we could get some press out of it. And then we finally figured out how serious it was, you know, and they got me out and I. I went out and I'm outside, you know, all of a sudden people are talking about how the Bay Bridge fell and all this shit's going on, and I just remember standing next to everybody going, you know, Jesus, you know, where. Where'd you guys have lunch? You know? And then I walk over a bunch and I go, what the hell? Do you guys all go to the same Chinese buffet? What is that smell? And it was. I was down in the bottom of the bay and the sun camp. This is where they were. It was the methane. The. The earth literally farted.

Chris LaFay: The.

Brian LICHOROWIC: The salt marshes bubbled and. Oh, gosh, terrible, terrible. So I moved here a week later. Called up a guy, said, hey, you still want to start that little Macintosh networking Internet thing? And he says, yeah, I' week I left, man. They never been back. Yeah. Don't like that place at all. Hey, what'd you do with Sal? Did. Did you do anything with Sal before?

Chris LaFay: I. I've. I'm just over the last, like, six months or so, I've been kind of riding this train of, like, hey, you know anybody interesting? And Sal was one of those people on that train. And so I. I forgot who introduced him to me. Another, like, fractional CMO type, I'm sure.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And so chatted with Sal. We record a podcast together for fun, and we just kind of stayed in touch. And then I was like, hey, yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: You know, anybody interested?

Chris LaFay: He is interesting. Anybody kind of in the marketing space. That was a fun, that's a fun conversation. He was like, should meet Brian. I was like, that sounds great. We're just gonna keep the train rolling. So.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, that's fractional stuff. I gotta tell you, you know, I did, it's my third one now that, you know, it's lucrative but it's my third one that I've done a 90 day plan. And you know, my strength is product life cycles. I do the whole plan from product management, marketing management, Markov deployment, the whole bit. And I put them, you know, put the whole plan together at the end of 90 days. Yeah, we're not going to renew you. And then they go and hire a, you know, intern from Virginia Commonwealth University or someplace to come in and run it and it's just like, ah, you son of a. You know, because you get it, you get invested, you know, because you're really working with something.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: So it was just kind of a little bit annoyance out there. So it's, it's an interesting little thing because people still don't get the marketing side. I mean, you know, I'm a, I'm a 27 year AMA member. And the good thing about that is AMA isn't so much of a, you know, a resource. It's data. They just have collected data and they now they keep collecting data and you're finding out that like AI marketing is just fall flat on its face. I mean it just doesn't work. You know, companies shop now and all them. In fact this one company I was a fractional for RTS Labs, they wanted to use this product, I think it was called Hotshot. But you gave your email address, it went out and found out something about you and said hey Chris in the subject line, you know, sun makes a national basketball team. And I say, in your bay, Chris, I saw your son made the state basketball team. Congratulations. Have you thought about AI for your supply chain logistics, you know, that kind of crap. So people would get high openings but then all of a sudden this thing would go out and grab something and it would say like hey Dan, I'm sorry that your mother passed. Have you thought about AI for your, you know, fly line logistics, you know, unsubscribe. And then you get an email going, this is really uncool man. That kind of. Yeah. So we know unsubscribe rates were at an all time high. We know spam folders are filled with this. But I asked them, I go, have you Ever bought a five or six digit number of, you know, product from yourself off an unsolicited email in your spam pool, you know, and they look at you like a dog watching tv. You get that? You know, I don't know. So, yeah, it's. We're learning as we go, Chris. We're learning as we go that side.

Chris LaFay: The noise level will increase drastically to where the people that I. I like to. The way I like to think about it is like, I look at email. Let's just like pick on cold email outreach because it's easy. Everybody is. In order to stand out in cold email or an email in general, even emailing somebody that you know, you have to be like, at a certain volume level, I feel like, because inboxes are noisy, they're loud, they're like, you have to be so interesting even to the person that you know, to have him open it to them. To open it.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: So I feel like you have to find the, the quietest room possible so that when you talk in a normal voice, you are heard. It's like going to the library and like whispering gets you attention. I'm not saying that's a good thing to do, but like, where, where is the quietest, most logical place to where you don't have to scream and yell and like text messages for a while.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Y.

Chris LaFay: Because if you were texting somebody, you knew them and unless you're me, and I suck at texting, if you text me and I'll respond to you like, ain't personal. I just suck. Like, but you, you get, you start. The people that initially started doing text messages got good visibility into it because like, oh, it's new. Like, oh, great. I got a link to the thing directly in my inbox. Great, that's fantastic. And now it's overran. Now it's noisy.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Now there's none of the stuff outside. Yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: And so it's like, how do you. Where do you. How do you find these quiet places so that you don't have to yell and scream, Bill?

Brian LICHOROWIC: Depends on a lot of it. Depends on your audience too. I mean, I'm talking about the people you're working for. I'm on the board of this thing called mach37.com. If you take a look at it, it's a DoD funded cyber security incubator and it's one of the most well known on that site. You come in and you get, you know, you get 50 grand, you get a little office cube, some heavy metal and a big pipe and you start doing your stuff. And I went and I jumped out as a mentor for one of these guys. And, you know, it was pretty cool. He was doing encryption at the code level. Okay, that's unbreakable code. Really cool. But his whole marketing plan, and he's a, you know, 28 year old, you know, narcissist, you know, can do no wrong. And he comes up and he. His whole marketing plan, and he wants to advertise this, you know, again, encryption at the code level. He wants to advertise it on Snapchat because that's where he lives, you know. And you, and you're like this, you know, do you. Well, that's what I'm on. And I know a lot of people that know me are on there. I go, I just. But the people that are gonna buy your product aren't on there. And you can't win, you know, you just got, okay, fella, just go ahead naturally. Just kind of fell flat forward, then comes back. Well, maybe you were right. But it's, it's hard because, you know, one of the things about marketing is a cyclical and you can always learn from it. You know, you can always learn what's, what's. You know, there's a lot of really good bad examples out there. You know, I always tell that. And that's like a Sal. I don't know anybody that utilizes HubSpot better than Sal. He's, he's quite a HubSpot maniac on that site and a lot of direct outreach stuff. But, you know, it's just, you know, it's the same thing that, well, it's like the guy, you know, in these cyber security things, you know, they. We know three things that work in marketing. You know, we know that. Fear, humor. Excuse me. And free. Free sells. Fear sells that. And all these guys in their marketing efforts all want to say, you know, your, your platform's under attack, you're getting attacked every day, you better lose your data. All this kind of stuff, and we can help that. So if you scare the customer and then you tell them how your product's going to benefit the customer, and I try and tell them, I go, that's cool, and that's fine. But when everybody's doing it, you know, including your competitors, you're white noise, you know, so find. Find a freaking other angle to actually go at them. And yeah, you know, it's just, it's really ridiculous. I love your guitars in the back. I guess you play, huh?

Chris LaFay: I do, I play, I play a little bit. I played since. Since high school.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Me too.

Chris LaFay: And I. Music is. I just. I just. I love music. I am. I basically have only really played in, like, church band settings forever. And the churches that I've been a part of are all relatively small. So it's not like these, you know, highly produced things where you have, like, legit, really quality musicians on every instrument. It's like when you surround yourself with normaly, you kind of get to that level effectively.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Exactly.

Chris LaFay: And so I'm really great at what my. My, like, my thing is I can basically fit in with anybody. So, like, I'm not gonna blow you out of the water, but I'm also not gonna screw up. So if you give me a chord chart, I'm. I'm fine. And I will. I will be exactly what you need in a little bit more. That's great.

Brian LICHOROWIC: I'm a woodwind guy. I've been. I have. You know. One of the things you don't realize when you learn flute, it's the same, you know, once you learn the fingering, you can go flute, big flute, clarinet, old bow, soprano sax. All the way down. It's all the way onto the side. But, you know, I'll tell you, I had braces when I first started playing saxophone. And you can't do a reed instrument with braces on. You had braces too? I had the night breaks, dude. I had also, my dentist said three years without it. A year. If you could wear the thing 24 7. I said, put the thing on. You know what I'm talking about? That.

Chris LaFay: The thing that, like, went around your head, that looked like ultimate nerd thing.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, yeah, it. Kids, man. Kids are cool. They would snap the back of that. Ain't nothing hurt because that's attached to your molars in your jawbone, you know, and they would snap that thing. But then again, you know, I had glasses that were four pounds of glass and carried a briefcase. So no girl spoke to me, but to the age of 22. So, you know, it took me a while to come out of the shell. I had to form the shell. Form the shell, then come out of it. Yeah, I was a. Oh, my gosh. That was a keeper.

Chris LaFay: Dude, that. Those. Oh, man, you just. It's just piling on all the stereotypes of, like, the kid in the cartoon that gets picked on.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Oh, yeah.

Chris LaFay: Here, here, here, here they all are.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? I mean, it was the way until, you know, like, I started running in track, you know, And I ran track in 9th grade and in 10th grade, I started running. And I, I never lost until my, you know, sophomore year in college, and that's including the Olympics. So it was a. You find a way to be a little bit of a jock, then you do what you can. But it was, it was an interesting time in life. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So I had, I had braces, regular braces. And I started my music journey in middle school and I played trumpet. And so I did trumpet from sixth grade through 11th. And through that period of time I got braces. I started without braces.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Then got braces on for a couple of years, then braces off and then braces back on for a year and then back off again. So I had two. I had two rounds of braces. So think about like, you know, embouchure and stuff, right? Yeah, I had. So it was off, on, off, on off.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Poor bastard.

Chris LaFay: So when they were coming off for the last time, I was in 11th grade going into my senior year of high school. And I was going to get them off that summer. And during that time I went to a very large high school. Like we had like eight or nine hundred kids just in my one graduating class. And so we had like four different bands of like different levels. And so I just got promoted from the. I got promoted to the highest band going into my senior year. And I'm like. But I'm about to get my braces off. So you know what I'm going to spend my summer doing? Relearning how to like, how to. How to embouchure the mouthpiece.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Was it still really? So with definitely big time difference in the braces with that too. Really?

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah. Because like with braces, with like with woodwinds you kind of not. Not counting the night brace thing, but it's like braces. Like with, with a flute you're kind of blowing down.

Brian LICHOROWIC: You blow over trumpet. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: You are smashing that mouthpiece right into those. It's almost like the. In like, you know, like with the guitar you get calluses on the fingers.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: It was almost like the inside of my lips. So there was like, it was able like, because, you know there's like little square brat. Like braces are like little square metal brackets. You kind of figure out where to put the mouthpiece on the mouth to kind of fit into like a groove of like in between braces. And then you just learn to play through the pain. But then when that goes, the mouthpiece just like slips around all over the place. It's like. So you have to learn a different like mouth position that would Suck, man. So I stopped.

Brian LICHOROWIC: I remember you guys, though. I mean, because I. I played violin first for like, seven years. I got a funny story about it. But I just, you know, I was always stuck next to the French horn players and always watching them empty. You know, they're spitting out to the floor. Yeah, there would always be a puddle. You guys are catching. Put a napkin down or something. It's right near my foot, you know. You know, I take my read and hit it with it, that kind of stuff. But it's funny, my. I started playing it, like, in. I guess I was about 8 or 9 years old, and my dad had brought a violin over from Germany when he came back from the war. And I didn't think twice about it. And right around that time, I had met a guy named Johnny Unitis that was a quarterback for the Baltimore Colts. So I kind of. Something broke and I started just being a big cult fan. So I actually, like, carved Colts into my violin. And I can show it to you. So after I stopped playing, my mother took it and she passed away, like, six years ago. And I finally got the violin back. And I turn out, and inside, I swear to you, it says Antonio Stradivarius. And I'm like, holy Christ. I go. I carve Colts into a Stradivarius. How big of an idiot am I here? I'm wondering if this is a real one. So. So actually a buddy of mine who's a big guitar thing, he just rebuilt something. He took it and he's like, you know, I look at if this is. I want to get it back, but I even put an itune or I thing on button in there. But, yeah, I think I might have been like a really idiot. Dude. I think pulse into a stratum.

Chris LaFay: Oh, my gosh.

Brian LICHOROWIC: So I can't tell sometimes if it's just the Pollock in me or Alzheimer's kicking in. It's one or the other.

Chris LaFay: I don't know that that is hysterical. I. And so in. In high school, my senior year, I decided not to play trumpet anymore because I didn't want to learn. I wasn't going to play trumpet in college. And I was like, I'm not going to do this anymore. And I was like, I'll pick up guitar. And so by the whole braces coming off, that was when I got that thing and started playing it. And they're going back to, like, stringing instruments. And like, if I had more mental bandwidth in space, I would love to learn how to play, like, either the cello or the viola. And I like the. I like both of those instruments because you can go low, not bass low, don't get me wrong. But you have the ability to go pretty high and stand out.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: But also you can fill in the low to mids as well too. And I like that range and depth. I really.

Brian LICHOROWIC: But you could do that. I mean, right now you could do that. Because literally, playing a violin is like a fretless guitar. It's the same.

Chris LaFay: And that's the terrifying part. To me, it's the fretless part. I'm like, if you had freaking frets on here, I would be okay with this. But also the other pieces of all this, like, puzzle are. So if you know how to play guitar, you can pretty much play bass as well too. So I know how to play bass. I know the basics of bass. And I realized because I learned how to play chords on guitar, I had this magical moment of realization. I was messing around, like in GarageBand and stuff like that, like strumming around and playing. I was like, no, I'm gonna play like G, D, E minor, C and record that. And I was like, I wonder if I. On my piano that I have over here, a little crappy piano that had like an inch of dust on it. I was like, if I played a G, D, E minor, C chord, those would actually match up together. Yeah. And I. I thought about this recently and that's how I learned how to play piano is I learned chords on piano and I kind of learned which notes were in which keys. And I re. I was. I was thinking to myself, actually relatively recently, like, why was this such a big revelation for me that a G chord on piano would sound the same as a G chord on a guitar is because a trumpet is a B flat instrument.

Brian LICHOROWIC: It's great.

Chris LaFay: So like, when we were doing tuning and it was like, play a C and everybody else was playing a. I'm making this up. I knew that the instrument that I played, I couldn't play a C on this instrument and a C on this other instrument and it'd be the same.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And I learned that in my musical formidable years. And I did not realize that most instruments are the same.

Brian LICHOROWIC: That's amazing because you're so cool that you learn music theory. And that's one of the things that's really lacking these days. Between auto tune and GarageBand, you don't have anybody. You know, you got three, you know, three chord power guitar players, and that's about it. But if they don't have that, you know, connected into their iPad. They don't sound like anything. I. I grew up at a restaurant that seated 900 people. So every, like, Saturday, we would have, like, you know, Four Weddings of 250 going on at the same time. And my senior year, I really wanted to be a musician. I really wanted. I was playing bass. I was playing sax and flute, and I got in with a house band at my. My family's restaurant. Just. Just pissed my dad off to no end, you know? I mean, I grew up thinking it was normal to clean and debone 500 chickens every Wednesday. I mean, that's how up my childhood was. So, you know, we sit on there, and I had to learn all the standards. You know, the more I see you, My Funny Valentine, the girl from Ipaneba, and that kind of stuff, and it was just really cool. But I played with this. A guy named Vic Nicotero, who was my piano teacher, used to tease him. He was so skinny. We would say his fingers would get stuck in between the keys, but he would play with Kenny Barron and a few other ones. And he got me into just hot jazz. Just. Just walking the bass and Hot. And really just rocking St. Louis Blues. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man, I just love that type of stuff. And, you know, so, like, the bride would cut the cake and it would do. And we just got into this thing where at the very end, after cake is done, and then we would just. He got us to kick into this, and he would just go nuts. We did it one time where we just went crazy. And all of a sudden we turn around, the whole bridal party. 300 people looking at us like, what the hell? Hell's wrong with you guys? You know, screw you. But we had a hell of a lot of fun there, lady. You know, eat your cake, shut up. You know, that kind of crap. So it was an interesting little time in life for this side. So Atlanta, the Vortex. One of my favorite places in that.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Brian LICHOROWIC: I still have a site, and I think. What's it called? Provisions. That restaurant.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: There.

Chris LaFay: I. It's. So I don't. So I don't live in Atlanta, so I'm actually very. I'm not as versed as I would like to be about, like, restaurants and stuff around there. But, yes, the Vortex. 10 out of 10. Absolutely fantastic. I drive by there relatively often, and I. I've heard of Provisions as well, but I don't know much about it.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Fantastic. It's a. The front end's like a. The front of a house is like a Williams Sonoma kitchen store. But yeah, but the back of it is just a beautiful good restaurant that actually, you know, apply down that side and there's several places because I, I licensed stuff to Earthlink down there and they're still using that. So I got down there's the other place, the best barbecue place, the Swallow in the Hollow. You ever hear of that place?

Chris LaFay: What? No.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Hello? I hope it's still open for you. Yeah, it's a barbecue place someplace. I think it was north of closed. Bummer.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, it was, it was north of Atlanta in a city called Roswell.

Brian LICHOROWIC: It looked like.

Chris LaFay: Looks like.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Ah, bummer. That was a good one.

Chris LaFay: Oh, the, the overview says that the, the buildings are gone and they replace them with town homes.

Brian LICHOROWIC: As we have up in here in Jinia. But our, our places are like, you know, garage with living unit attached. Now up here, Just Virginia. I, I'm. If I had my fill of Virginia here, I'm been here long enough. It seems to be a very, very odd place that's happening on the side. I don't like DC anymore. It's a very. Not a good place. It's safer than it was. I've actually, I've been to D.C. four or five times now in the last year, which is rare to have dinner, but, you know, six, eight, bunch of white guys walking the monuments at 10:00 clock at night. Not a single person bothering us was really kind of nice. So it's getting better, but it's just, you know, I, I'm literally about 40 miles southwest right at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Chris LaFay: Oh yes.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah. And all the. Let a guy use the paddock for cows and all the horses I got are all rescues from, you know, two of them from an Amish slaughterhouse. I name all my horses after dog food. So Alpo, Karina, Kennel, Rachin. He's an idiot, but yeah, that's kind of fun. Makes a lot of the political correct people. I think that's just cruel. Take a look at Elpo.

Chris LaFay: They don't, they don't know what I mean, they don't really know.

Brian LICHOROWIC: And he comes running, you know, he's that kind of stuff. But he's a beautiful, he's a shire. So he's almost 17 hands, big horse and. But he's, he's brown, beautiful, chocolate, with a blonde mane and everything else. And these women look at him and go, God, I wish he was a guy, you know. Jesus. Well, you know, and well, there's, there's some circle facts that you could probably get into it with A lady and probably bring a lot. I mean it's still around central Europe, so it's really odd. But. Yeah, Amish. You're down in Atlanta, we're on the side, but Yamish notoriously. Really. Really. I don't want to say cruel to animals, but when an animal's hurt, it's. It's a tool and they have no problem putting it down. And poor Elpo, his little tendon broke so he couldn't pull anything and they just put him out to kill him. So. Wow.

Chris LaFay: So how long have you had him for?

Brian LICHOROWIC: Oh, six years now.

Chris LaFay: Oh shoot.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah, when they. When they get a. But they. Well, and you gotta remember. So in Virginia, if you have this much land, if you don't do something with it. So if I didn't have cattle and some horses walking around the stupid thing, I would. It would be about almost $70,000 a year in taxes. Yeah, you gotta get that land use thing that's coming on the side. So.

Chris LaFay: One of my friends has the same thing here in Georgia. He doesn't have 300 acres, mind you, but he's got something like 20 or 30 kind of close to where I live, which was still. Which is still a good amount of land. And good is like. Yeah, like he. They had to go build. They had to build gardens and orchards and stuff along those lines to make sure that they could file for that. So they didn't have the bazillion dollars of taxes as well. So. Yeah, yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: They just. The new governor here who's just a real piece of work. So where I live in Fauquier county, it's one house per 10 acres. So you can't. And that's going away. So you know, they ever get. So if they ever get a hold of this 300 acres, this will townhouse city, you know, Alpo land.

Chris LaFay: Oh yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: You just gotta watch it. So I've been looking actually down in the panhandle of Tennessee, Northern Georgia area, kind of get down there. I. I got a gut feeling something's going to happen in D.C. and I don't want to be around. I really don't. It's a. I had a. No, Sal told you. I actually, I pseudo retired out of it and I was living over in Paris and I. I found a double decker bus food truck in Krakow, Poland and I brought it over here. It was called Johnny Monarchs. You can look it up on Facebook. It's still up there. I can't get the page down. Some kid from Brazil hijacked it on me. And made us thinks that there's some kid in the Amazon jungle driving a double decker bus that they won't let me pull the page down. But anyway, I pulled. I served Jeff Bezos twice and two dozen Hell's Angels. So you show me a wider target market than I had, and I'll tell you Also, Bezos shipped 20% and the HA's gave the kids 100 bucks a piece. So. Which was pretty cool. But I just got out of that and I, I lost my, my wife to breast cancer during that, so I. Oh, shit. So I just kind of backed off and I sold it and got out of there. And now I've been just trying to get my head back into something where I could, you know, focus and, you know, you know, just forget about this. So. A lot of good, a lot of bad in Virginia, which is why I kind of want to get the hell out of here. I ain't going to California though. None of that, you know, bury me once. Yeah, you know, pull me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So outside, what's a cool place?

Chris LaFay: This is a really nifty little, little Johnny model red bus and whatnot. This is pretty cool.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Yeah. The little red bus was 16 tons, had an inch and a half steel plating around the kitchen. The kitchen on the bottom, it's seated 22 upstairs. The kitchen was literally armored. You know, I thought if I see mushroom cloud in dc, I'm putting a, you know, I'm putting a rotten on top of it and a cow catcher in front. And I'm, you know, I'm mad maxing this thing west, try and stop me. But as soon as I got in here, Virginia goes, okay, okay, okay. You know, you can't drive it anywhere without a, without, you know, a permanent escort. So fifteen hundred dollar permit, you know, a two thousand dollar escort just to move it a quarter mile. So they go, you got to get a permanent place. So I bought a lot. And then they go, you can't prep on it. You can't cook raw stuff on it. Well, you need a commissary. So I bought a abandoned grocery store next to it cooking out of that. So do the prep there. One of the cool things. I was growing 75% of what I served, particularly vegetables and herbs. Anything that wasn't root based. I grew up and it was a lot of fun. But Virginia really, I mean, I started doing weird. I had senior citizen speed dating on Tuesday nights. If you could climb up, you qualify, you know, get it, you can get up on top of the bus. It's all you have. And there was a. There was a freaking Mars up there. A couple times I thought I'd, you know, one of the lesser billionaires. I thought of going up and hitting on her myself. But it was, it was a really fun time. We had some pretty wild parties that kind of nay Virginia and then they just started doing construction around me and they cut me off on that side. I needed 20 people. Everybody made money, everybody got paid. By the end of it, I got so pissed I was averaging 14 people a week because no one could get in my entrance and they had cut off the town right after Covid this idiot government here says hey everybody, let's shut down Main street and put new street lamps in. And yeah, that just killed us. But. But when she passed, I actually got rid of that and got back into the stuff. So. So now I. I work on a. Kind of taking a hobby and started. The last few years I've been taking classes. So I've become a pretty good news aggregator on space food, if that makes sense.

Chris LaFay: I saw a post about that on LinkedIn. I was like, what? So before, before I. I am highly intrigued about this, but I do have to. I have a call that's going to start in about 10 minutes.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Not a problem, brother.

Chris LaFay: That I need to do a little bit of prep work for ahead of time.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Y.

Chris LaFay: So, so interesting. Well, let, let. Let's schedule another time to chat at some point in the next like few weeks or so.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Love to talk about the gastronaut stuff, man. I'm. I got direct line into isis, literally into the space station and my big machine right here. I pulled data down real time. It's kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, that's dope.

Chris LaFay: That's awesome.

Brian LICHOROWIC: Think about food, you know, growing in space. It loses almost 70% of nutritional value, believe it or not. And they grow argoponically. Yeah, I'd love to chat with you about it. I've actually got pretty excited and I've actually got invited to speak at an event here about it and stuff. And so it's nice to take a hobby and turn it into something else, but you know. Yeah, but yeah, let's chat again. I'd love to bring up some more and I got some really cool interesting people you could talk to. Robert Stratton would be really cool. Bob Stratton is. His dad's got stuff in the Air and Space Museum. He is probably one of the most aficionados in cyber security and stuff within here. But He's a really cool. You know. You watch Big Bang Theory? Ever see that show?

Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Brian LICHOROWIC: He's a Sheldon Cooper, but can talk. You know, and it's. And those are. That's kind of my superpower, you know, Chris, is that I. I talked to a lot of those people. In fact, I live with Sandy Lerner for a little while. The founder of Cisco. Yeah. You know, and it's just, you know, 172 IQ with an identic memory and a type B personality is just not a warm fuzzy in any room. You know, so everything is. Everything's different. Conversations are different. You know, it's. It's just a pain in the ass. But, yeah, I. I enjoy our chat. Let's. Let's reschedule something up. But I'd love to talk to you about that. It's a pretty cool thing. And if you want some interesting people, I got some real good weirdos you can talk to.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic, sir. Well, love it. This was absolutely delightful. Thank you for the time. And I'll shoot you an email probably a little bit later this week. Does that sound good?

Brian LICHOROWIC: That sounds good. Just remember, you know a guy that wrote colts on a Stradivarius. I'm an idiot.

Chris LaFay: Yes, sir.