Robby Berger and the January 6th Lettuce Wrap Incident
Before Bob Does Sports took over the internet, "Bobby Barbells" took on a lettuce wrap in a Marina Del Rey aerobics studio while history unfolded. Let's dive in, shall we?
History is funny. When people ask, “Where were you on January 6th?” they usually have a noble, terrified answer. They were glued to Wolf Blitzer. They were doom-scrolling Twitter. They were texting their families about living in a historic moment in those damned unprecedented times. They were nervous, and understandably so, about the downfall of The Republic.
I can’t relate.
I was in a studio in Marina Del Rey that was a relic of the VHS era, a place that used to churn out Buns of Steel knockoffs in the 90s. It still smelled faintly of spandex and stale aerobics sweat as I stood there, screaming into a phone about burger aesthetics while trying to produce a low-budget version of Jon Gruden’s QB Camp.
To understand why, you have to rewind to the bleak, gray dawn of 2021. The vaccines were coming, but the fear of COVID was still very real... especially in overzealously cautious Los Angeles. The advertising market had spent the previous year cratering. At BroBible, we had spent months striking out, just trying to keep the lights on and the content flowing. And then, a miracle: We booked a whale.
Carl’s Jr.
They wanted to market their genuinely delicious lettuce-wrapped burgers as a "keto-friendly” alternative for New Year’s. 2021 was going to be a swing back in the right direction. This was our Super Bowl. We were dialed in.
The concept was ambitious, weird, and very specific to the time. I called it “Tale of the Tape.” The idea was that Robby Berger (1.6 million Instagram followers)—our talent—would do a brutal workout as a long-form vlog, and then we’d film him sitting in a studio, eating a burger, and breaking down the footage of his own suffering, “Picture-in-Picture” style. Like Jon Gruden grilling a rookie quarterback about a blown coverage, except the quarterback was Robby and the blown coverage was him trying to do a burpee without dying.
This was a few years before the rocketship of Bob Does Sports (1.3 million YouTube subscribers) took flight. At the time, Robby was still in the trenches with us. We were his first real media job home after he left the hospitality grind at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to chase the dream of being a full-time internet personality.
From an operations standpoint, the vision was clear: pivot him from a funny blogger—churning out 300-word takes on sports bloopers and viral freakouts—into a marquee face of the brand. And the blogs were electric. He was covering the important beat: Jamie Lynn Spears blaming Elon Musk for killing her cats, guys playing tug-of-war with lions, and 22-year-olds duping the New York Post about GameStop stocks. (You can—and should—scroll through his entire glorious back catalog here).
We were throwing everything at the wall. He was hosting a podcast for us, The Brilliantly Dumb Show, landing interviews with heavy hitters like Pat McAfee, Rob Riggle, Steve-O, and even Entourage creator Doug Ellin. I took him, Coldcuts, and a videographer to Forrest Galante’s house, and we made an instant classic of a video where Forrest showed Robby some of his animals. He even co-hosted a rough daily live show called The Morning Jog, which we tried to produce entirely over Zoom, and frankly, it didn’t really go anywhere. We wanted to build a franchise around him. But the pandemic hit, and executing that vision in a frozen ad market was a nightmare. The stakeholders needed to see hard business value—ROI, sold campaigns, CPMs—and it was my job to manufacture that value out of thin air in a world that had stopped spending money.
We were placing bets where we could. That summer, during the peak of the pandemic boredom, at Robby’s insistence, I bought a $130 camcorder from Amazon out of my own pocket so he could film his golf rounds with Joey Coldcuts. BroBible paid Binyamin “The Jet” a tiny sum per video as a contractor to make the edits on these “Bobby Fairways” videos, not really knowing what would come of it. It was a small investment, but a massive strategic swing. We were trying to arm him, to give him the runway to scale. And he was scaling. He was becoming Robby right before our eyes.
But in January 2021, he wasn’t Robby yet. He was “Bobby Barbells.”
We had filmed the workout portion a few days earlier. We hired a jacked personal trainer named Alex Hailstock—an absolute savage of a human being—to destroy Robby in a Hollywood alleyway with a workout. And destroy him he did. Robby flipped tractor tires that looked like they belonged on a monster truck. He did mountain climbers until his soul left his body. He hung from a pull-up bar in a moment he would later describe on the mic as “watching your own assassination.”
Fast forward to January 6. This was the studio day. In theory, the easy day. Just Robby, the crew, a food stylist, and a few lettuce-wrapped burgers.
The vibe was tense because the burgers were late. Not just political “sky is falling” tense—production tense. The client was remote. The agency was remote. If you’ve never produced a video for a high-profile brand before, the attention to detail is paramount. It comes with the check.
I was the point man on the ground, half-wearing a mask, sweating through my shirt, acting as the conduit for QSR corporate creatives and a plate of cold fast-food beef. Robby was in the chair, doing his best Gruden impression, narrating the footage of his past self struggling to lift a kettlebell.
But the real enemy wasn’t the workout; it was the studio lights. They were hot, and they were murdering the produce. Every twenty minutes, the “lettuce wrap” part of the lettuce wrap would turn into a sad, wilted, wet blanket. Tony, my right-hand man on brand partnerships, diligently put on his PA hat and was running laps to the nearest grocery store, frantically buying every head of iceberg and romaine at Gelson’s just so we could keep the hero burger looking crisp. I didn’t care if he overpaid; I just wanted it to look good.
Then, the murmurs started.
Our three-person crew had phones. The food stylist had a news feed open. Between takes of Robby describing the crunch of the iceberg lettuce, someone would whisper, “Uh, guys? They just breached the perimeter.”
“Copy that,” I’d say, sitting in the director’s chair, thinking I was Ron Howard-levels of Internet video marketing hotshit. “Robby, let’s pick it up from the ‘part salad, part burger’ line. And action.”
“Guys, someone is sitting in Pelosi’s chair,” someone from the crew interrupted.
“Crazy. Hey, Food Stylist? The tomato looks sad. Fix the tomato.”
“No, seriously, the QAnon Shaman guy is in the House of Representatives chamber, sitting at the Speaker Of The House’s chair.”
It was a surreal split-screen experience. On one monitor, I had Robby analyzing his squat form. On the crew’s iPhones, the sky was falling in Washington D.C. The push-notifications and texts to all of us in that room were nonstop. But I had a lurking feeling that if we didn’t nail this shot of the Guacamole Bacon Lettuce Wrap, the sky was going to fall on me professionally.
Then came The Call.
It is a moment etched into my soul. My phone rang. It was the agency. I stepped out of the corner of the studio where we installed a bunch of production lights. I picked up, expecting them to say, “Stop the shoot, the Republic is crumbling, go home to your families.”
Instead, a voice on the other end, completely serious, said:
“Look, I know everything in the world is crazy right now, and this is a really weird day to be doing this... but we need to make sure the cheese looks a little more gooey on the B-Cam.”
I stood there. While the stylist was glossing the lettuce wraps, the crew watched a man in a Viking helmet wandering the halls of Congress on an iPhone. In my ear, a creative director was worried about the melting point of pepperjack cheese.
“Understood,” I said. “We will maximize the goo. We are on it.”
And we did. We shot the food scenes last, which meant the once-delicious, fresh burgers had been sitting out under the hot lights for God knows how long. At one point, to get the shot, Robby just grabbed one of these lukewarm, hours-old prop burgers—something that had probably been fondled by three different people. He delivered a line, looked at the lens, muttered a quick “Shall we?” and took a massive, unhesitating bite, then deadpanned the camera with a “Sure we did!”
I remember watching the monitor, genuinely shocked he didn’t ask for a spit bucket. But that’s Bobby. Built different. A total team player. The man who turned “could be the difference” into the Internet’s catchphrase of the era.
The bite, at that point in the shoot day, wasn’t required. He just went for it, which makes him Derek Jeter of internet personalitie IMO, always willing to dive into the stands (or a wilted lettuce wrap) to make the play. It’s impossible not to have tremendous respect for the guy.
Around sunset, we took five. We walked out to the studio parking lot in Marina Del Rey to get some air and hit our mango-flavored Juuls, back before they were considered contraband. The sun was setting—that perfect, bruised purple LA winter sunset. We watched planes take off from LAX, roar overhead, and disappear into the twilight.
Everyone stood there for a moment, oohing and ahhing at the beauty of it, the cotton candy sky, the silence of the parking lot. For a solid two minutes, we completely dissociated from the fact that the Capitol Building was currently a crime scene. Just a bunch of tired creatives looking at the sky, wondering if we had enough iceberg lettuce to finish the day.
I want to believe, in a display of faux-wisdom, that I said to someone, “May you live in interesting times,” while the food stylist went back to doing their thing, but I have no clue if I actually did.
We ordered Joe’s Pizza for dinner during a break, and that’s when the second historical event of the day happened.
Robby and I sat there, exhausted, the smell of pepperoni and hairspray hanging in the air. We had a heart-to-heart. I looked at him—this generationally-talented Internet creator who was clearly a rocket ship strapped to a bicycle, who I believed in since meeting him for beers on a summer night in 2019 in an unmemorable sports bar in Beverly Hills—and I said, “You know, you probably can just go do all of this stuff on your own.”
What I meant was that he didn’t need BroBible. He had the grit and ambition. He had an audience. He had the talent. And it wasn’t the BroBible audience, it was his audience. He needs to own it, and we need to not run a Barstool-style content house playbook that would surely bankrupt us.
We wrapped the shoot in a daze, around 9 PM Pacific. I was already on the hook to the studio for a couple extra hours since the shoot went dramatically over time, and the hell if I wanted to pay more money via Peerspace while the studio manager lingered around, waiting to lock the place up.
A week or two later, Robby called me up. He was leaving. He wasn’t striking out on his own yet; he was taking a job with Kevin Connolly’s podcast company, ActionPark Media. The move made sense; he had history with Kevin. I vividly remember watching from the control room of Kevin’s studio while Robby interviewed Robert O’Neill—the guy who shot Bin Laden—sitting next to O’Neill’s dad (sidebar: I was super proud of how this one turned out). It felt natural, even if it stung to lose him. Robby had been with us for about a year, but the writing was on the wall. A mostly text-based publisher with a mostly pageviews-based business model was a weird fit to further incubate his aspirations, and while I desperately wanted to harness his growing starpower to level up BroBible, the mechanics just weren’t there yet. He needed a really good microphone and better production resources, not a CMS. In hindsight, there are a gazillion things I would have done differently to bridge that gap, but business is complicated sometimes.
He went there, launched Bob Does Sports, and eventually took over the internet, one Feed Bob chicken Caesar wrap and bagel at a time. He’s a megastar now, aligned with some of the biggest professional athletes and showbiz types. In that, a certifiable legend, reaching millions of dudes who just want to watch him shank a drive, Have A Day, and laugh about it. I couldn’t be happier about it.
But on January 6, 2021, he was a legend-in-training. He was just a guy trying to sell a burger without a bun while breaking down tape of his own athletic failures.
I got home late that night, frazzled and exhausted. My now-fiancée, Maggie, was on the couch, watching the cable news replay of the insurrection and talking about what it all meant—the tear gas and podium theft. The sense of horror, the gawaling sense of decency lost in the democratic process, or, idk… whatever.
I nodded, shell-shocked. “It’s terrible,” I said. “Truly terrible.”
I paused, staring at the TV, and then I thought about the footage I had just spent all day shooting while preparing to deliver it to the editor so we could turn this thing around to the client and get it live. I was up until at least 2 AM that night, writing notes for the edit and scrubbing through the workout tape from earlier days, looking for the right soundbite to play in Picture-in-Picture.
There was a moment in the raw footage, right in the middle of the tire flips. Robby, completely defeated, looked at the camera with sweat dripping down his face. It was recorded days before the insurrection when he was training with Alex, but when I heard it played back on a loop on late at night on January 6th, it was the only line that made any sense.
“I never thought I’d say this,” he gasped. “But I wish we were back in 2020.”
Here’s the video. We posted it on Facebook a couple of days before this, where it did its thing. It’s a gem of a Robby video if you’re a fan: