Transcript
Sam Parr (0:00)
All right, Sam, I got a Billy of the Week for you. I'm excited about it. I got goosebumps thinking about this guy. He's an inventor. He's an innovator. You know, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison. Look, if those guys were going on a road trip, but there's only one set of keys, they would toss it to this guy. He would get to drive, and his name is Tom Ryan. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
Shaun Neff (0:25)
I put my all in it. Like, no days off on the road. Let's travel. Never.
Sam Parr (0:29)
Tom Ryan is basically the da Vinci of calories. Okay, this is a guy who has invented some of the most iconic foods in history. He invented the McGriddle. He invented stuffed crust cheese pizza. He invented Smashburger, the chain. He invented the beef dip sandwich at quiz. Does he. His guy has just been inventing things in the food category, the McFlurry. He's just been inventing things for, you know, just decades. And he is like the godfather of food science. And so I want to tell you a little bit about this guy.
Shaun Neff (1:02)
Okay? I'm. I'm interested because I didn't think that some, like, dipping a sandwich in aju. I didn't think that was, like, an invention. And so.
Sam Parr (1:08)
Okay, so some of these things, I'm using the word invention a little liberally, right? Some of them, he genuinely invented meaning, like, nobody had done that before. Some of it is he created that product at that company, which had. Was not previously a product. And so sometimes it might be like, oh, well, you know, somebody else said had the idea of, you know, a sweet sandwich. Okay, but cool. He. He invented the McGriddle. It's a specific thing that he invented that made it work, and here's why.
Shaun Neff (1:34)
But can we. Can we start by me asking, how did you even discover this? Were you, like, on the McGriddle Wikipedia page?
Sam Parr (1:41)
Just, you know when you're eating something and it's so good, you're like, I like to pay homage. Who's the man who invented this? I'd like to go put some flowers on his tombstone. That's not exactly what happened. I saw a TikTok about this guy, and I was like, there's no way one guy did all this.
Shaun Neff (1:54)
Okay. All right.
Sam Parr (1:55)
So this guy, basically, he goes to college, and when he's at college, he has his girlfriend. The girlfriend's taking a food science class, so she convinces him to take it. He goes there and immediately falls in Love. He's like, oh, my God, I didn't even realize. There's a whole science behind things like ketchup and ice cream. Like, there's literally, like, chemistry science, but then there's also sort of the brain science, psychology, the tongue science of, like, what flavors work. And so then he not only studies food science, he then gets a master's in something called lipid toxicology, right? So this guy's just studying, like, the science of fat. And I would say this guy, like, you know, I don't know what the. What the equivalent of the Nobel priest prize is, but for, like, obesity, what this guy deserves. So he. He decided. So he goes, and he gets a job at. At Duncan Hines. He then works at Jiff, and he's like, pioneering a lot of their peanut butter work that he. That, you know, does some really great peanut butter work.
