The Exchanges

Q Alright, so you make that loaf, your maintenance guy comes back the next day, you know that you're onto something, and then did you, did you go to Glenn, your brother, and say, hey, try this out, tell me what you think?

A Yeah, I wanted him to love it, you know, but It wasn't his idea of a killer, of a great bread. What I give him so much credit for is that even though he didn't really like my bread, he understood that it wasn't his taste buds that mattered. Yeah. Like I said, I totally give him props for that. He wasn't controlling. Like most companies would say, you know, hey, we got to keep this in this price range. You can't go beyond this, and fortunately he did not say that. I remember when we got to the point of realizing, we did a cost analysis on it, and we started realizing how much we were gonna have to sell this for, and it was a more difficult bread to make than, than the average loaf of bread.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I wanted him to love it, you know, but It wasn't his idea”

Q So when do you remember, like at what age do you remember starting to kind of rebel against, against your parents?

A It must have been about 11 or 12, probably 12 by the time I started looking at things. It's like, well, I don't believe this stuff, and I, you know, I read the Bible. I started, I was very sincere about it. I made a decision when I started having doubts that I would just read the Bible and hopefully God would tell me, you know, what I needed to know, and, ah, it didn't work. I mean, it just gave me more doubts. And so, um, I started being more and more, you know, fighting with my dad and mom by the time I was 1314, and my mom was just really bummed out about it. She could, she tried everything she could to try to help me, you know, to get back to the faith, and my dad was just mad. He was just angry.

AI assessment note: “It must have been about 11 or 12, probably 12”

Q Wow. I guess pretty soon after you kind of dropped out of high school and were trying to figure things out, you decided to, to enlist in the Marines, right?

A Yeah. It was just one more, one more, um, grass is greener on the other side kind of an idea, and a friend of mine went into the Marines. He was another misfit like me, another, you know, we would call ourselves losers, I guess, and he, he went in the Marines, and it was just, he came back transformed. It's the first transformation I ever saw in my life. And I thought, well, you know, they can make a man out of me too, right? But I went in the Marines, and I wasn't ready for that. Um, I just got hell. I got hell from those drill instructors, and I, I couldn't take it. I wasn't, I wasn't built for it in those days to, to, I didn't have a thick skin at all, and I eventually took off. Ran from there.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. It was just one more, one more, um, grass is greener”

Q Like you were just experimenting in the bakery and just trying different flours out and grains?

A Well, I had always wanted to make a bread with great texture. And, you know, one of the things I love is natural whole grain cereal that's not beat up too much. It's got to have some good chewiness to it. And, uh, it doesn't matter. It could be wheat, oats, whatever. So, I made a soaker where you take the cracked grains and you make them soft enough to make bread out of them, but not too soft. So, it was texture that I was aiming for, plus I was going for sort of a brown sugary flavor without brown sugar, so I, I used organic cane juice and molasses for that flavor. And I wanted it to be like a masterpiece of art too, and I didn't call it killer bread right away. Called it blues bread, the first one, and it was It had a beautiful blue color to it, like I was aiming for.

AI assessment note: “I made a soaker where you take the cracked grains and you make them soft”

Q When you were experimenting with the different kinds of breads and the, what would become Dave's Killer bread, like, I don't know, do you remember taking that first loaf out? Do you remember, do you remember knowing that, what do you remember about that?

A Oh man, it was great. Uh, I'll never forget it. It's, it, it had a great fullness to it, a great You know, beauty to the shape, and the blue cornmeal was, you know, just made it like no other bread before it. It was, it was beautiful, and I took it out of the oven. It was five loaves, and tasted it pretty quickly, and I was like, oh god, this is good. I mean, it fits my flavor profile, uh, you know, what I want, and then I gave a loaf to our maintenance guy. Um, you know, I think we had like, 25, 30 employees at the time, but the maintenance guy, he took one home, and he came back the next day, and he just couldn't stop raving about it, and eventually got, you know, more people to, more people were starting to say, hey Dave, that was, that's good bread. Really good bread.

AI assessment note: “I took it out of the oven. It was five loaves, and tasted it”

Q Pretty, pretty soon after you launched, did you, did you put the sort of cartoon, like the caricature of you on the, on the, on the wrapper?

A Yeah, you know how that came about was my, we, we, My, my brother, my nephew, and myself, sitting with the, uh, copyright attorney, Mike, uh, Mike Heilbronner, um, he said, you know, this bread's great, you know, you got a good name, I think the name's great, you know, what you're missing is a logo, and my brother had been suggesting that we have a picture of me on the back with my guitar, with my story, and I, I thought that was a good idea, but When I heard this guy talking about this, I said, I started sketching, and I ended up sketching. The idea I had was this guy who represents me with his guitar and Dave's bread in big block letters. All this is painted on the wall, on a brick wall in an alley. Now somebody comes along with their, ah, red spray paint can and tags killer over that. And that doesn't ever show up, that, nobody ever gets that from looking at the, um, uh, what we ended up with, but that was the original idea.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, you know how that came about was my”

Q So you're, you're serving your final prison sentence. You were gonna be, you're gonna be incarcerated for a long time. I guess around 2001, um, something happened to you that made you start to think about your life and, and what you want it to be. What, what was it? What happened? Did you, did you find God? Was it a religious experience? Like, what, what was it?

A It was like that, um, My own form of God, I guess, and I experienced enough adversity and enough time where I couldn't run away. I was either going to take myself out, I was going to find a way, because I really had decided there's no reason why I should be alive. But being at the end of my rope like I was, I finally did something that they talk about in AA, and I surrendered. And I said, well, I'm going to let these authorities who may be able to help me, I'm going to give them a chance to help me. And it was a big deal because it's like you're telling on yourself in there, you know. Last thing you want to do is tell the authorities what's on your mind. Um, but that was the wrong advice. The right advice was, yes, let down your guard and get some help. And, ah, it wasn't long after that I got called in and You know, I didn't tell him everything. I didn't say I was suicidal because I didn't want to get in more trouble. But he said, uh, well look, we, we got this stuff called Paxil. You want to try it? And I said, hell yeah, let's give it a shot. And it was, they say it takes quite a while to take effect, but it was fairly quick with me. And I, sometimes I don't know how much of it was just the humility and the The whole deal that it took to make that happen, that changed my life perspective.

AI assessment note: “I finally did something that they talk about in AA, and I surrendered.”

Q Wow. Um, your nephew Shobi went on to do other ventures, and he's involved in investing. You've got, uh, an art gallery in Portland. Um, what's your relationship like with, with your brother Glenn and, and your nephew Shobi these days?

A Well, it's, uh, it's in limbo, I guess. I haven't, I would like to think that someday we will be more family than just, like, Former business partners, but it's not, we just don't talk. Sometimes we have, um, family gatherings that have nothing to do with, that are not put on by any of us, and we might meet, meet up there, but what I want to do, this is weird, I'm telling you this instead of them, but I, I just want something real, real to happen, you know. I don't want, I don't want to Force anything, and I just hope, I just hope to have, at the end of this, before we all die, you know, uh, especially my brother and myself, you know, that we're gonna find something, some peace, you know.

AI assessment note: “it's in limbo, I guess... we just don't talk.”