Corie Sheppard Podcast
The Corie Sheppard Podcast
A trusted space for honest, Caribbean-rooted conversations that connect generations, challenge norms, and celebrate culture through real stories and perspectives.
Hosted by Corie Sheppard-Babb, the podcast explores the lives, journeys, and ideas of the Caribbean’s most compelling voices—artists, entrepreneurs, cultural leaders, changemakers, and everyday people with powerful stories. Each episode goes beyond headlines and hype to uncover the values, history, humour, struggle, and brilliance that shape who we are.
Whether it’s music, business, creativity, identity, advocacy, or community, this podcast holds space for the kind of dialogue that inspires reflection, empowers expression, and preserves our legacy. It’s culture in conversation—unfiltered, intergenerational, and deeply Caribbean.
Listen, subscribe, and be part of the stories that move the region forward.
Corie Sheppard Podcast
Episode 251 | Gary Aboud
This week on The Corie Sheppard Podcast, we sit down with Gary Aboud — businessman, activist, and long-time Corporate Secretary of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS).
From building Mode Alive into one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most recognizable retail brands to decades of outspoken advocacy on issues like oil spills, coastal protection, and sustainable fishing, Gary has never shied away from standing up for what he believes in.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we cover:
- The origins and growth of Mode Alive and his approach to running a data-driven business.
- Why he believes entrepreneurship and small business are central to national development.
- The launch of his YES Program to support young entrepreneurs and educators.
- His views on environmental protection, public health, and what true sustainability means for Trinidad and Tobago.
- How personal experiences shaped his passion for justice, unity, and nation-building.
It’s a powerful and candid conversation about business, activism, and responsibility — and why speaking out matters.
Harvard Implicit Association Test
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html
Click the link in my bio for the full episode.
#coriesheppardpodcast #GaryAboud #ModeAlive #FFOS #TrinidadAndTobago #entrepreneurship #advocacy #sustainability
0:00 Introduction to Gary Abud
7:23 Data-Driven Business Approach
18:16 The YES Program for Entrepreneurs
30:22 Educational Challenges and Personal Journey
43:27 Environmental Advocacy and Fisheries
1:00:43 Social Responsibility in Business
1:14:51 Origins of Mood Life Store
1:29:36 Rebuilding After Disaster
Hi, my name is Corey Sheppard of the Corey Sheppard Podcast, and I have with me today Gary Abud. How are you going, sir? Great, you good, having a good day. Better and better Good. We're going to have you here for a long time. Mr David Ware is the one who got you here. You don't like when I call his name, so David is the man who wants to make us up in the background, right? So thank you for coming. I appreciate you accepting the invitation and for being here. So if I could start with this, more than life, I have a business question for you to start with, if you don't mind. I've been in business for a while and I see your videos where you just look at matt and ting and say take 50 over that take. You know the cost of items in your stores. You know the cost all these things you have.
Gary :Yeah, we're data-driven, so we have a computerized program. Before I started Model Life, I worked in my dad's company and I was a buyer. My dad, for whatever reason. He saw certain things and he trained me and made me a buyer. I used to sell. I used to be in the export department, so I would travel to sell four or five months a year and travel to buy two months a year. What was the business? All business.
Gary :No, that's business, it was fabric at the time, but more than fabric was the sense of design. So we would create or modify designs and blend and create colors Fusion colors sometimes if the color wasn't readily available. Create or modify designs and blend and create colors Fusion colors sometimes if the color wasn't readily available. So the science of colors is a big part of style understanding your color and then the color that enhances your complexion. And in the Caribbean we have a different sense of who we are. People don't recognize it, but a lot of people wear foreign garments and buy foreign style. But there is an indigenous style of our people. In fact, even North, central and South and deep, deep South are different to each other in terms of how we dress and the kind of colors that appeal to us, the kind of home decor that appeals to us.
Corie:Sure, yeah, Tobago would be different when you look at it. All of us have a unique sense of style.
Gary :Oh yes, but there's more similarity amongst Trinidad and Tobago than there is similarity with Jamaica. Understood, but there's more similarity with Jamaica than there is with Oklahoma, for instance.
Corie:Understood, understood, see so there's, oh, it's a, it's a yeah, so more life has been a great success great success. It's been a staple of the business, the business uh landscape for a long, long time. So when I see you on social media a little more planned than I think then because it's look like it just motor life have at least a hundred thousand skews. How much different items you have in the store maybe, maybe about 70 000. Yeah, and add in every time I come is like an expander, especially the one in um in valsy.
Gary :But everything is computerized so we could keep track of performance. And it's expensive, but it's. It's good to invest in data if you're not data driven. If it's a small business, like it's a vendor's booth, you keep track of your inventory, but from the time it gets out of sight, then you need to have, um some mechanism if you have good people, maybe a husband, wife and brother and in-law, so each person could keep a track of something.
Gary :But if it grows beyond that, yeah, your mood. Life has 216 members in our team, but as you start from 216, yeah, 216 members in our team.
Corie:Oh, there's the staff right 216. Yeah 216. That's a blessing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see your. I don't know if it's a Monday morning huddle or what you have, but I see when you bring the team together, sometimes at the location, it's impressive to see.
Gary :Yeah.
Corie:There's a lot of people when you talk about inventory management. There's one young his name. He started selling coffee at the highway ever so he has a little backpack on you have hot coffee there and he could do different, different variations. He could make a latte for you right at the light and he said he really got the idea from being at the light himself and noticing that you know you want to pick me up, you have to drive yourself to go and they're only selling water and things at the light. So he said no, it'd be a good idea to have coffee. I find it such a unique and innovative idea.
Gary :Well, we wanted, we plan, to have an entrepreneur's training program online and we keep starting it and not getting enough resources to proceed with it, but I'm a firm believer that we don't have enough encouragement for young businesses and small businesses. Covid displaced a lot of people who started little businesses. Some of them have gotten very, very big because they've gotten into more exports to particular markets and some of their production has grown. So back then, we started promoting them in different ways. We started a grocery, because when they produce, they need somewhere to sell it. So we have a health grocery now, which is a real battle.
Corie:At the same location.
Gary :At the same location, because people don't want health. People want cheap, tasty poison. So you still have people drinking beverages, even though these carbonated beverages scientists have shown that they contain 12 teaspoons of white sugar, which is poison. I mean, we are currently writing the Minister of Health to ask him, in the same way that you put warning signs on a cigarette pack that it's dangerous, and they should have warning signs on every coca-cola, seven up, juicy, the whole gamut of them, yeah, and other foods as well yeah, I guess if people left to the choices about convenience and a lot of times prices, just what cheap and available and taste.
Gary :You see the taste, the taste like people still eating kfc and I suppose People still eating KFC and I know, as a matter of fact, that the owner, the principal shareholder of KFC, doesn't eat it. Yeah, so when we started Mood Live because we wanted to have a place where we could find things that we like. So I believe if you're going to produce something as a commercial project, you should produce something that you like. I buy barbecue from a guy on the avenue it's called Kerry's. I swear that's the best barbecue I've eaten anywhere on planet Earth and I love barbecue. But when you talk to the guy, he loves his food, he tastes it and you can see his whole face brighten up if it tastes good and he'll inquire how it tastes and he'll see me with a little half smile waiting to see a reaction. I see that. So that passion is what people need to follow. If you love to swim, then you should be a swimming instructor, got it. You have to find the thing that you love and make it commercial.
Gary :I want to mention, in case we forget, that during COVID Alatulio, we really I am more Baha'i than a Christian or a Muslim, okay, and I believe all of us have to come together. I believe there's one God, but I am sure that that one God has chosen me for some reason and I'm searching for the reason and he has put me in a position where I'm not hungry. I have earned, the company has done well enough that. Now my big mission is to look after my team and for teams outside of my team. So we started a program called the YES program, the Young Entrepreneur Subsidy Program, and it is something I want your audience to know because I want them to encourage other people. If you've started a business or you're considering starting a business, or I met somebody this morning. He is teaching underprivileged children skills, remedial skills, reading and writing because oftentimes yeah, that might be.
Gary :Anyway, the teachers don't come to class and tutor, keep negotiating salaries, but tutor never gives us an attendance. I see how many teachers are absent without notice, how many children in public schools, government schools, can't graduate because they can't read and write, of course, and it's tragic. So the yes program is that if let's say this teacher, this young man who's doing it without salary, him and his wife, if he needs to buy a projector and it costs $10,000, we will pay $3,500 of the $10,000.
Corie:So you're helping them with 33%, or whatever the cost is, towards their goal 35 or 40% Got it.
Gary :So if let's say your broadcaster, which is local, healthy, conscious, are not supporting, poison it has to be something that's good, right? So this guy's teaching underprivileged students.
Corie:He could get behind that. Yes, but this is separate from what you said about helping train entrepreneurs, or is it all part of one program?
Gary :No, the training program is something we want to do in 10 five-minute broadcasts where we have professionals who are successful, like Adams, because he knows a lot about how to succeed, but you know, so yeah. So the YES program, if they want to apply, they can apply by WhatsApping 355-7674.
Corie:JD. We'll keep that number eh 355-7674.
Gary :It's a similar to my number.
Corie:It just ends with a four Right and it's something that I want because we're not getting enough um exposure on it and I find it's yeah, it's a great program. When you first told me about it, I find it's admirable. You know that there's the notion we were talking before we started recording, about the notion that people don't help, people not doing enough. You know and and I'm happy to to get to shed some light on some things that more people doing. But in your earliest days, for instance, if you you're growing up, you're what was the genesis of starting motor life as a business? What was that kickoff for you that you needed to start your own thing? Because I would have worked in daddy and them company for the rest of my life, like I do now. What was your impetus?
Gary :you do work with it, yeah work for my father. And I ain't starting no business.
Corie:neither I stay in mine, just in case you're listening to this.
Gary :Well, I have a different beat, you see. So when I was in university, I studied political sociology. You know governments and bad governments.
Corie:Where is this? What's the university?
Gary :I went to a university called Western in Ontario. In fact I'm dyslexic, so when I was small I had a real hard time in school. But I love school and I love reading. But my P's are B's Got it. So it throws off my ability to read a sentence. I would have to come back and read it a second time and a third time even now. But I'm not stupid and I don't think that people who are challenged are stupid. It's just that we're differently abled. So when I went to university I didn't make it in school here. No, I didn't do very well in my passes. I got four passes and my best subject I failed, which was English literature, because, again, the same problem with reading.
Corie:I get four passes too. There's a little bit of a. There's a good place to be.
Gary :Yeah, but I want to. And what schools were those here? I went to St Mary's College, oh, okay, and I lived, I grew up, I was very near to there. I was very near to there, mm-hmm, I see, and in fact all my brothers and my uncles went there. Oh, that's a scenario. But I got in fair and square. My first choice, mm-hmm, and I went to a mixed primary school with Mr Peters, I see, yeah, yeah, he was a retired St Mary's teacher, Okay, um, a fraternal dad that had a mixed school. Mm-hmm, um, afro trinidadian that had a mixed school. And maybe that's where I learned to be colorblind more than anywhere else. Um, but, yeah, so mr peters was a real disciplinarian right and a hard task master and a mathematician, so I was actually very good up till now in understanding numbers and ratios and retools that's why you could put it on sale on a whim like that.
Corie:You just, you understand it.
Gary :Yeah, yeah, yeah I remember numbers better than ideas and facts sometimes. Okay, so after St Mary's I went to a high school in Canada where the problem persisted. The same reading problem persisted. But I got into a university where I studied. I was interested in at the time, world orders and why the whole world had so much starvation.
Corie:So much war, so this is just something innate and new. Since then, that's all I did, so go and study governance on those things when a 16-year-old child is an adult.
Gary :So when we grew up, I mean, newspapers was something that we read. Now I don't know how many people read newspapers, but to get, I love the horoscope. But to get to the horoscope, you know, you see world news and I'm a firm believer in reading. I'm a firm, it's the way out, it's the way of the future. So if a child can't read, the child might as well be crippled. So we have a duty to.
Gary :In any event, when I went to university, I had real problems keeping up and problems with my grades and then my I wasn't doing well, but it's the same, reading problems and then. But I read way outside of the required work of each of the subject, of subjects. So I think I was the best student in the class and sometimes I'm being commended by people who are very informed that I have a broad base of knowledge. You're reading wide, yeah, and I'm still reading wide and I'm still learning things. Like yesterday I was reading in depth about the US tariffs and I always thought that, like Trinidad, who had common tariffs, that the US had common tariffs.
Corie:But no, they don't. They don't Tariffs vary?
Gary :Oh yeah, they would. So they had Guyana 38% tariffs up until a week ago and we were at 10. But other CARICOM nations were less. Now they've increased us to 15. And they've lowered Guyana but they could adjust it to suit it's phenomenal that they could choose who to penalize in terms of import strategies. I support what Trump is attempting to do, which is to save his economy, which is being, in fact, propped up by international investments because his, his company, his country, in my respectful view, earns their wealth overseas.
Corie:Yeah, most of it, most of it here. The manufacturing and everything is over there. But going back to the early days, you, you, you, you, going in to study governance as a means of looking at how you could solve some of these same things that you're talking about. Understanding the world's problems, but understanding and solving it.
Gary :I mean, look at where we're at, look at where we're at look at. Look at the wars in the world. Look at what the united states are selling in military armaments and bombs every year as an export industry, which is a massive industry, and to who they're selling it to and what it is being used for. I don't think there's any God that would condone what is happening in the world, where governments sit back and allow private companies to sell military armaments to kill children. I mean, there should be rules of war. I wear this badge proudly today, but when I put it on I didn't remember I was coming here.
Corie:It was the badge. I didn't even notice or stand with Palestine.
Gary :Stand with Palestine. I mean, I'm not saying that Hamas are justified in some of the things that Hamas have done, but certainly there's no justification for what is happening now. And if you're following what's happening in Palestine, they're decimating a people and there are peoples of all religions and races that live there. I mean so when we talk about I mean yesterday we did a short video on the Emancipation celebrations because I was there and I felt so proud of the manner in which it was conducted In the savannah. In the savannah on Frederick Street, the parade, the parade, the dancers were clean, there was no vulgarity, there was no exposed nipples or no shaved pubic hair. It was beautiful and it was all ladylike and masculine and creative and artistic and rehearsed. It wasn't what we see in Carnival. Tuesday.
Corie:I like to see, but I hear you.
Gary :I mean, but I love women, I love seeing beautiful women half naked, but it's really not culture. I understand it's not culture. We have a heritage and what has happened with modern culture? It has gone lascivious. You know, it's like all of us have our tongue hanging out and we're dripping and ready to attack, like you know, like hungry wolves. It's our talk, like you know, like Hungry Wolves. We should commend and congratulate Zakir and the dancers and the presenters for beautiful commemoration, but we need a wake-up call to understand that women are still discriminated, buggered, raped, murdered. Nobody's taking it on Most of the rapes. You would be surprised that rape the world average for rape a country like St Vincent is 12 times higher than the world average. Jamaica is 11 times higher, and Trinidad I suspect we are as bad as St Vincent and Grenada. It's just that the women they don't want the shame.
Gary :Of course. Yeah, the shame that you've been raped to go into a police station and they have to come and examine you and find evidence of you having been cut or sperm. It's a traumatic experience. And then there's whether or not our girls feel confident in the criminal justice system that we brought to justice. And then there are other things, like something like 38% of all women murdered in Trinidad are murdered by somebody they know, of course, and we're talking about emancipation. What about emancipation? The average woman that she could walk without being some man saying something offensive to her?
Corie:Yeah, but the thing is when you look at it, because I saw some of it as well there was one night they had a celebration for Corriga Mandela. It's like the news headlines go in one direction and the country is what it is. So, before we start, I prefer to live in a country where we discuss some of these very things openly. They are touchy subjects, but I think if you bring them out in the open it could help. And I usually commend the emancipation committee for taking, even if it's a day, a moment, a month or whatever it is, so that we could celebrate not necessarily emancipation to represent freedom as a point, but to represent freedom as a journey, and you know, sometimes you take these little miles, like david has always reminded me that you know where the podcast started versus where it is now is worth celebrating. So I feel as though the emancipation committee has done they do a good job, as you say, as you see the people behind it but are we emancipated from our children swimming in, swimming in sewage, I mean?
Corie:think about it Like what Maracas or something you mean? Oh, swimming in sewage, yeah.
Gary :In 2018, the IME produced a state of the environment report. Every couple of years they produce it. Cabinet has to release it. The 2018 cabinet released it. But it was bad. Yeah, it was terrible. Not bad. I mean, why would a tourist come to our country when half its recreational beaches have sewage content that will make you sick, give you hepatitis. If you're immunocompromised, it might kill you, poison your children, give you eyes, nose and throat infections. And plenty of our beaches the whole of Chagrama's peninsula, maracas, las Cuevas, blanchiches, mayaro, bonas, fullerton it goes on the whole Gulf. So, but we're talking about national development In 2022, another report was done. Now you pay tax, I pay tax. The tax goes and pays the officers at the IMA. They do the research. It's ready for publication, but cabinet didn't approve the 2022 cabinet. So now the 2025 cabinet is the UNC cabinet. Will they approve it? It's three years old. 2026 is supposed to have a new report.
Corie:Yeah, and we didn't see the old one yet. We didn't see the old one yet. But you have a broad, because even in talking to you here, before we get into some of the history, you talk about several different matters over several different things, and some of the most controversial things. Is it that your studies then led you in that direction, or how come? How come so broad? It's almost like no one man can take on all these issues. I'm frightened for you now yesterday.
Gary :I'm going to cry. I can't talk about this, I'll talk something else. Adam, yeah, it's a problem because if you raise too many issues, you would accomplish none. So we constantly battling with the idea of just focusing on one thing, so sewage we're going to focus on sewage.
Corie:So when you say we now, this is through Friends and Fishermen of the Sea, fishermen and Friends of the Sea, fishermen and Friends of the Sea.
Gary :Yeah, we have, I think, about 25,000 members, I see, and we have 52 fishing ports where our approach is to get the focal point leaders to disseminate the information to the leaders and then the leaders hopefully, hopefully, will disseminate down. But we have plenty, plenty of people that depend on us. But yesterday, emancipate ourselves from cabinet corruption, cabinet corruption. So, when we talk about sewage, this country, this current government, when it was in power the last time, approved $1.2 billion for SIS to build the Betam wastewater sewerage facility. It was never completed. It was never completed. The man was never prosecuted. The money that we paid to him was never given back to us. There was no accounting to say well, you know, this is what we gave him and this is what we got.
Gary :What were the alternative quotes? There was no procurement law, which even now should be re-examined and revisited and tightened, because when Rowley passed it, he didn't pass it in the way that we had initially visualized it and we have fought for the procurement law for 25 years when nobody else was even thinking about it. So $1 billion was spent. Then the man pulled out of the job. He claimed that he got cost overruns, he couldn't complete, wasn't efficient. So what we are left with is the same government come back in power? Okay, kamala, you're in power. Now what are you doing about the beaten wastewater plant? Are you going to borrow more money from?
Gary :international agencies and ransom the public to spend interest money, to pay back double its rate, to give us, what If the last time you were in power you spent a billion and the facility doesn't work? What can we hope?
Corie:for now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so the matter still isn't solved as far as we're concerned. Well, I guess the evidence is there.
Corie:No, but even when you start to talk about motor life, like I saw as you get into politics. Right, I saw a video you made really just talking about the type of campaign that UNC was doing at the time. When you're making them videos, you don't be worried. Like, for instance, you have a staff that is a wide range of people diverse group you don't have people who support all different parties. When you make statements like those, are you conscious that the backlash will come, or is that?
Gary :The video that I did where I spoke about Kamala and Philip Alexander was when she appointed them to join. Now, when Mario Sabga, the guy with Pizza Boys he's my first cousin and I love him, he's a good guy, he's a family man, but he made an asinine statement that itself was arrogant, about how many restaurants he have and how much he's this 1% and the influence we have. I don't grow up in that world. I'm not in that world. I still work with my team and when I made the video the morning I was coming out of a funeral. I looked at the people and I saw that Kamala had invited Ansel Roge. Now, when five years before the 1% comment was made and today plenty people who are haters and I'll talk about haters after when it was made, I dissociated myself from it. I made a public statement that I refuse to accept, that I do not condone that kind of arrogance and comment and I totally reject it.
Corie:So you don't see yourself as 1% when people say the 1%, because your name people will say Coussals is the 1% Persads.
Gary :the food king is 1% Persads. Everything that I own is probably my the scale of my little fingers in the air compared to Posades, and on low price, you sure, wow. Well, I know about the size of the projects that they're doing. Okay, got you. I'm struggling with my projects. As I get money, I spend it and I spend it and I don't sit back with no big set of money sitting on the bank and go on these lavish holidays. I don't live like that. I still live in a house that I rent for three thousand a month. The rent just went up to four thousand. I am not a classist. I don't look dark on the poor and I don't look up to the rich F all of them who do that is their problem.
Gary :But Ansel Rougie calling a boycott of all the Syrian Lebanese businesses and I mean I used to be a member of the OWTU when Errol was alive. I used to speak at the cassavos, I used to march frontline with them and speak and be invited on the podium. I'm a supporter of all of the good things in our society, but not classism and racism. So when Ansel Roge say, come, boycott them, I say but hold on. You can't say boycott me.
Gary :What did I do? I struggled with my team. I I do. I struggle with my team. I struggle day by day to balance all the multiple things that I do. Who are you to come and say that? So he showed his true colors and I understand the man, what his biases are. I sit on a committee for the past eight years in which the OWT is eminently present and I've come to understand the overtones of what is coming from the head. But he is joining the UNC. I was on a chat group with 42 UNC high-level officers. 12 of them were members of parliament. The other 30 of them were all kind of high-ranking people in the party. The 30 of them were all kind of high-ranking people in the party. So when I made that video in which I said that Philip and Ansel have no place in the party, I still stand by that because I maintain that the language that they were using at the time was discriminatory, classist and, I'm brave enough to say, openly racist.
Corie:And I. You have to be brave enough before you go forward, because you're telling me now that them things could go to court. It could be libelous, it's in court. It's in court. It's in court. You have to be careful what you say, philip. Well, I love Philip. Philip is my friend too, you know.
Gary :Remember, I've been interviewed by Philip on his program Right. He's commended our work Right. I've known him in and out in different environments All the time. Before I made that comment I was speaking to Philip In the background On WhatsApping him. Okay, gotcha, if he said something was accurate or inaccurate, I would comment or guide or WhatsApp him and he would reply. And I knew, sat, who's the man behind the social media program. And I mean I still have, I mean I have, I don't hate nobody. So I have no hate for philip. I've messaged him, I've asked him for peace. That you know. He has a mission ahead of him and a job to run our country. We have no time to be going to court. We should be working on the matters that are national development and nation building.
Corie:But these were just politicians, you know. They could say a message and then now we're kind of in power. They would say, if you had lost, you would have a different kind of message to send to them.
Gary :Well, anytime a person says something that's hateful, racist, discriminatory, biased, unreasonable, open lies, you'll hear my mouth. I don't like that because you're using influence to mislead or to harvest bad things. So in the instance of that video, the video I made was for a closed chat group and it was supposed to have been circulated only there, but I didn't know that. I understand it was never my intention to embarrass the leader or Philip or anybody involved. I just find all the UNC 14 persons who were carded to run for that election resigned after that video Because they also share my opinion and I speak to all of them and they agree. Like why you bring this kind of person in the party. I understand.
Gary :But in any event, he served his purpose, he galvanized and got a certain vote. But I just don't think, I don't think it's godly.
Corie:Yeah, you see, there's better ways to get it done, but I have to ask you your advocacy started long before there was social media.
Corie:So when you say, for instance, you make a video and you don't expect it to go anywhere, that is anybody who was born in this era of social media understands. Because I send texts different from voice, no difference of video, because I'm conscious of the fact that it will go when you're around, david Weir and these kind of people, anything you're saying now people want to hear. You know what it is and you've been in that space for a long time.
Gary :But we have a rule in Mood Live never to employ anybody that is not as smart as the interviewer.
Corie:I see.
Gary :And I do all my interviews.
Corie:Really yeah Still.
Gary :Still no the third interview I do so there's a first and second. And I review the comments and then the third one I do.
Corie:For all levels and stuff.
Gary :For all levels, but maybe 70% gets removed, or make it to the final interview.
Corie:Of course, of course I understand Shortlisted candidates. First two interviews. You're coming on the last one, yeah, and what we're?
Gary :always looking for is some level of brilliance in some field. I recognize that not everybody is equally gifted in all fields.
Corie:And everybody has four passes, like us, but yeah.
Gary :Yeah, no. But I don't look at the passes. Actually I look at the presentation and the enthusiasm, what they love, where's their passion. Because where your passion is, you'll acquire knowledge. But the people who manage the social media inside of Model Life, they guide me a lot and plenty of times I believe it's good to be. You have to rock the boat a little bit. You know you have to. To get into someone's mind, you have to say something that will gravitate, that will make a meaning. So I hope that people would gravitate to the idea wait now we're swimming in sewage.
Corie:I understand we have to clean up this wasa act. So for you, it's important to you that even with the team members you have on Mood Alive, you like to see they taking a greater purpose.
Gary :Yeah, man, Okay, gotcha Mood Alive. Somebody called me recently and he wanted to do a film on Anthony Sabga, who is the founder of Ansama, and now they purchased in his lifetime. He purchased McEnany Allstones in 86 for 26 million, which is a great investment value, but they've made it into a great company and the things I'm learning that I didn't know about how they treat their team. But Moodle Life has a little internal thing about how we treat our team and I always tell myself that we are the best company that I have ever come across in terms of staff management. So one of the things we do is we have an education fund that anyone can access. I think it's 10,000 a year for juniors.
Corie:Is it staff members or public? Only staff, only staff.
Gary :Only staff 10, 15, and 20,000 per year of educational funding that they could go and study. So we have people that work with us that have gone and studied and done law and then done a master's of law and are still working in the company and, quite frankly, we don't need a person with a master's of law. But the person loves the company, loves the people and has a great value. But I'm sure they would earn more if they went to work with Douglas Mendes or a senior attorney.
Corie:Yeah, you said it. You know, if you find your passion, your knowledge, your knowledge will flow. But the size of your team now is what you said 400 and something Two hundred and sixteen when you started Motor Live. What year you started Motor Live?
Gary :Ninety-seven. So the reason why I started is because my father was very sensitive, right, and he's right to have been sensitive about public statements. Oh, he was, yeah, because you get victimized. I would imagine yeah, we get victimized, but we take it in stride. That is par for the course. More people should risk standing up for the truth, right? Otherwise, are we truly emancipatedated? If you see somebody violating a child, or you know that somebody is doing an ill to their wife or to themselves eating poisonous food, but you don't want to say it's not your business, you don't want to speak out against the big company, who's a billion dollar company, because you're afraid of this or afraid of that, then are we emancipated? So? So I spoke out.
Corie:So since then, and that he would have seen that. So he knows, I guess, at that point.
Gary :My first letter to the editor was when I was 18 years old.
Corie:I see About what. What was your student, you remember?
Gary :Then it was about education. I'm still stuck on education and I believe then, as I believe now, that the foundation of education starts at home learning tools to understand colors and shapes and children need opportunities to be able to understand first the basics and then they need. In those days we didn't have preschools, so I fought for preschools for six or eight years and then we got preschools and I used to write letters to the editor about things about nutrition in schools. The parents that didn't properly feed their children, so how can the child learn? The same problem's happening now, because they're sending them to school with a sweet drink to drink and get a rush, and then by two o'clock, their brain can't function, that's the way.
Gary :And then so my dad asked me not to write. I spoke about corruption. In those days, john O'Halloran was alive. Mervyn de Souza, I mean people, most people today.
Corie:Yeah, they might forget some of them names.
Gary :Oh my God, they forget. They never know the kind of corruption that we had in the first guard. I always say that Eric Williams is responsible for destroying this nation. He is not the father of the nation, he is the pimp of the nation to sell us out like whores Terrible terrible, terrible.
Corie:So since then you're writing against that. Well, if I was daddy, I would have telephoned me. Don't compete with you, you'll be kind of nervous.
Gary :So I used to have fake names. I see, yeah, but as I got older, yeah you're coming out of that. Yeah, I don't like the idea of having to hide. Yeah, I want to say it. And then I, you know, when I was 26, I was appointed as a commissioner of education.
Corie:By that time you have more alive and suffer no more. Life was when I was 37, I see um so them times you're still working in the company you're still working.
Gary :I worked with my dad until I was 36, until I started yeah, and then I took a study here and I went and I studied in washington dc at the world ecotourism society, where one of the professors asked me to to with him in the United Nations to get certain protocols then passed as conventions and today they are conventions. The SPOR protocol is the CITES for migratory species, things that I've always been involved in. But when I came back in that gap year when I read a lot and actually learning is really my passion, I fish a lot. Well, from a young man, from a child, I would always fish. I grew up next to a mangrove so we would go and fish on the front of the mangrove and catch plenty of fish, which is terrible now because we keep destroying our sea and poisoning our fish. Poisoning our fish.
Gary :People don't know that the Gulf of Paria has two type of fish. You have the scaleless fish and the scaled fish. Some of the scaled fish are migratory, some of them scaled fish are migratory. Some of them live here. If they live here, don't eat it. Yeah, the fish are contaminated, seriously contaminated with hydrocarbons and heavy metals, and it's an ongoing problem. Ongoing problem. It's not solved and there was a study done that there's a correlation between the frequency of eating demersals, which is the fish that live here at the bottom, and getting cancer. The more you eat, the greater the likelihood.
Gary :And it's Aaron Balgerman. He's a doctor. He did his doctorate under. The professor under whom he did his doctorate was sent on early retirement after he published his doctorate and she did a study for us, similar study to correlate the contamination levels of water in the age of 55, to lead this department of UTT. After her doctoral dissertation of her student Aaron and her publication of a report for FFOS, she was sent on early retirement with full salary and benefits. Where she sits now. She must be about 67 now. But why would Manning do that? Why would you bring a professor? Take Green Fund money, take $27 million to set up a laboratory to test water and to test fish and to test the air and a world-class laboratory with Green Fund money.
Corie:Yeah, and then pull it back.
Gary :Oh yeah, and then send her packing, dismantle the department and dismantle all the $27 million worth of equipment in the laboratory and send it off to the engineer. Half the equipment is getting cobweb and dysfunctional now.
Corie:Well, I know your passion is there behind that as well, and I didn't realize that that's something you went and studied, so you would have started as advocacy before business then, or at least friends and fishermen of the sea.
Gary :Is it fishermen?
Corie:and friends, or friends and fishermen.
Gary :Fishermen and friends of the sea.
Corie:Yeah, your origin was out of an issue or what, but I was aware, if I'm aware, of the term sustainability.
Gary :Most people still don't understand what it means. But yeah, back in the early 2000s I used to subscribe because I had a friend A lot of my friends as a younger man was older people even now and I got exposed to a document coming out of Washington, produced by scientists, when I first found out about that study. But it's an annual publication and it's produced by a group called the World Resources Institute and they are a collection of studies to examine world resources in terms of where we are at, where we're going, what we can afford, what we can't afford. So it's a global policy document and they liken dynamite fishing, they liken shrimp trawling to dynamite fishing in terms of sustainability.
Gary :And these are the world's eminent scientists that are saying that, unless it's a mono-fishery, if only the shrimp are there, like in the Gulf of Mexico, where it's sandy, nothing much lives there and it's shrimp alone come to spawn in the sand that you could harvest the shrimp sustainably, providing you don't over-harvest. Well, in the past 20 years, gulf of Mexico have over-harvested and their fishery has collapsed. Their shrimp fishery has collapsed. In Trinidad we have a multi-fishery where Jack Cousteau came here in the 1960s and determined that we were, at that time, the second most biodiverse body of water on planet Earth after the Philippines, which is still the best region because it's a completely surrounded coral reef island, so their biodiversity is phenomenal. But here in the Gulf of Paria, oh my God amazing amazing 462 species.
Gary :462 species, Shrimp trolling. When they fish, the nets are spread wide, like a mile wide, and they have chains, big, heavy chains. It pulls through the sand because the shrimp, when the shrimp is spawning, when it's laying its eggs, it goes under the sand. So the chain pulls it and captures the shrimp and they come by the million and when they come, every imaginable species comes with them and they also spawn.
Gary :So we are totally against the idea of shrimp trolling and the monofilament fishing, because the monofilament catches everything. Nobody can escape it because they're invisible to it. And the other thing is the size of the net. People don't realize that the smaller the size, the greater the mortality of unharvested species, so that if you have a fish this size and it comes upon a net this small, it will bonk the net. But if a fish is a little bit smaller, it could get the gill into the net and then you will capture it. It'll get stuck and that's how you catch the fish. So when you put a net that's only two and a half inches in size, the big fish can't get into it. Unlike the deer in the forest, they don't have the sense of direction to see. Let me just go around. So if I just go around a quarter mile, I could get around the net.
Gary :So they keep bouncing and bouncing, and bouncing and they actually die right there. And then there's another problem is, when they die there, the amount of decomposition. It consumes the oxygen and becomes a dead area.
Gary :So the crabs and the oysters they kill everything, which is the basis of the food chain, all the juveniles that are hiding, all of them. They die, they suffocate because there's no air, because so much mortality, of course. I remember one of the first issues I saw publicly was an oil spill, if I remember. They die, they suffocate because there's no air, because so much mortality, of course.
Corie:So I remember. One of the first issues I saw you publicly was an oil spill. If I remember right, that was the first time I remember your name. I remember I was on a boat.
Gary :I wasn't used to talking about it In 1988, lincoln Myers God rest his soul was the Minister of Agriculture, and because he had had a fast on the Hall of Justice, where every evening I would go and sit with him at the end of the day, because I admired that he would stand up. Um, he I. He was the minister of agriculture for a period, a short period, and he drafted the amendment to the fisheries law which prohibited the shrimp tra. Trawlers. It gave them less territory, but it didn't ban them. And then Devon Maraj in Kamala's government in 2010 to 2015,. He did all the footwork to have them outlawed and repurposed, retooled, and then the PNM came in and everything just got dismantled. Now the UNC is back in power and I pray to God that good sense will prevail and they would condemn those trawlers. I argue that Trinidad and Tobago will produce 10 times more fish 10 times more if we stop the shrimp trawling. Yeah, within five years, because it will take a period of time to build it up.
Corie:So yeah, how about you? So going back to that oil spill thing, because again, with all these broad issues, I'm starting to hear daddy. I feel like I'm hearing daddy voice in my head. Yours, your daddy. Were you not worried about, for instance, because if we could produce 10 times more fish, that had to be a good thing for all of us, for sustainability? Yes, but I wonder if, when you approach these things because you're not shy about saying these things publicly, or saying this one name, or saying that one name if you feel that they're the people responsible, you don't worry about the issue getting more difficult to solve.
Gary :Well, gaddafi was a hero. Gaddafi was a hero, you see. So I look at him how he spoke. I look at Mandela. I look at Martin Luther King. Look at all the people who had a vision for the future of unity. You have to be confrontational. I believe that it's important to call the snake out. You can't let us, you can't play.
Corie:I mean, a snake might be a snake. You might be hearing that for the first time when you say it.
Gary :Yeah, I'm a snake, I'm a snake, I'm a snake man. No, I shouldn't have used a snake.
Corie:No, I don't understand the sentiment, but yeah.
Gary :People don't realize that we have 53 snakes in Trinidad and only two of them are venomous. Right, only two are venomous. The rest of them are venomous. Only two are venomous. The rest of them, you know, are friendly, normal creatures. They're not, you know, but biblical term. They use the snake in a bad way.
Gary :But yeah, I just believe that you have to call it out. You have to name it and call it out. So I don't think we could. There's a way that there was a guy that I read. He was a business mogul. I can't remember his name, that was back in the 80s, but he always believed you have to name it to know it. So you know, you have to call it out.
Gary :Call her speed, her speed. So if somebody says something that is untowardly or improper, like Kamala, keep talking about the 1%. She is destroying our nation when she says that, because it's evil. It can't be good to be calling a person out. Why is she calling out successful entrepreneurs? For None of us inherited wealth.
Gary :Philip Alexander talks about what money I inherited. I didn't inherit nothing. I told my dad to give everything to my sister, and what he has given me is not part of the business at all. I have a special plan for what he's given me for Trinidad and Tobago, but it's not anybody's business to talk about what you have and what you have, what Kusals have and where Kusals get it from. If a person is honest and hardworking and they make it why you must make out that all honest, hardworking people are crooked. I know plenty crooked people. You do, of course, that's my job. Okay, that's my job. That's why I fought for the Procurement Act, because in government you have the biggest crooks in cabinet. Every single cabinet we've had have had crooks bar and except the NAR government, of which Basio, pandey and Kamala were part of and there was no record of corruption on TV but every other government.
Gary :It was just too short.
Corie:Oh yes.
Gary :Look at, I mean the last government. Look what happened with NH International in Tobago, transferring materials from a government project to a private project. When the Prime Minister Rowley was asked about it, he said no, it's not me, that's my wife, but it doesn't matter.
Corie:Let me switch from things I have no evidence of. I mean, I know court closing O'Garry. When you say that kind of thing, I end up in court with you and Philip. I want to focus on his success.
Gary :Philip is taking me to court now and I've attempted to make peace. I've messaged him a few times he asks. What he keeps asking is would I apologize? But when I look at the things that he has said calling the prime minister canal conch and a gutter rat I would never. When I made that video, I was defending the leader of the opposition and saying to her if you bring a man like this who call you a canal conch and gutter rat and said terrible things about Camille Camille Robinson-Rage, she's not my friend, but she's a woman Don't we have a duty to respect women? Don't we learn that as children Like you were talking earlier how you yawned and a vagrant told you close your mouth and he said but who are you to?
Corie:tell me, of course, of course, but it's a lesson learned.
Gary :I could imagine, was he dressed in a strange kind of robe.
Corie:Well, I don't know why he was barely dressed. That's why I tell him I say but you didn't have one, not me telling me about how I should be on, but to me the messenger is less consequential, or at least not material enough to understand that.
Gary :Yeah.
Corie:If the message resonates, I accept the message.
Gary :Yeah, but I still support our Support, our government. I'm a big supporter. I've written to our leader on multiple occasions she hasn't replied, offering services and recommendations, and I'll continue to write because it's my duty. I'm not in any party. I didn't even vote for the PNM. I went to the PNM's camp because I was with a friend and he said let's go now.
Corie:Nobody would believe that when you say that no they could say that.
Gary :They could say that I was closer to Gary Griffith and to his campaign and I thought that they brought something that was fresh and different and we should give young and fresh blood a chance. But the greatest enemy of our society greatest enemy is lack of opportunity. Our society greatest enemy is lack of opportunity and the greatest contributor to lack of opportunity is that. I'm willing to argue that 40% of our treasury is squandered by lack of productivity, which I consider to be corrupt, by mismanagement, which I consider to be corrupt, by theft of goods and services, which I consider to be corrupt, and, fourthly, by corruption. Kickbacks, inflating projects and giving money back and then boasting, like you, are something special to our society, while every week, every week, living Waters gives out 1,200 bags of food, and they give it out four times a month and each time they give it to different people. That means Living Waters alone have 4,800 families who are suffering and when you look at the World Bank data, something like 112,886, I totally remember numbers.
Gary :Citizens of our republic live below $1.50 US per day. Now we I mean you have this week, this week Monday gone, or last week the European Union say they're pulling out of Trinidad. We are now a developed country. They don't have to give us nothing. If you know how angry I am with them and IADB and the World Bank and the IMF, which I studied as a student as one of the greatest contributors to poverty and malnourishment and underdevelopment in the third world, because they give money knowing that kickbacks will be paid and nothing will be done. The project's never complete. In fact, I had a good buddy when I was in Washington in Washington recently studying, which was back in the 1990s, and he was working for the World Bank and he says it's the best job in the world because every project that he approves, he doesn't approve it unless he gets back 5%.
Corie:Oh, that's nice, that's got to work. But I hear the issue. You hear the issue, yeah, of course.
Gary :So you are the World Bank officer coming to a little banana republic where most of the people are poor and illiterate no universities, not a high standard of living, and that's what you're studying. Your mission is to help them to get out of poverty, to feed their poor and help their sick.
Corie:You're studying self. Common human issue.
Gary :Devils, devils, devils.
Corie:Well, I had to get back to David's agenda because David and them go pomo out and we didn't cover. I want to get to your origin story. So you said that when you started off Mood Alive. There's one thing that I remember in particular when you started off. Both was some of it you covered in terms of the fabrics, the colors. It was very different to see Brother, resistance and Adramo out there all the time. That's deliberate.
Gary :It's something that you all had a relationship or they just used to, but he was a friend and I believe that small business is the key to pulling ourselves, to developing our economy. Right, my father was a street vendor and those are good guys and they just not give them the opportunity. You know it. You said something earlier about everyone should do this study to determine their own bias and discrimination yes, I have a study.
Corie:Is the test available online? You know, I'll actually put it in the bio when I publish this, so that people could take it if they would like but I want to take it myself because I have a hard time.
Gary :I am biased against successful people who forget to look back. You see, that is yeah. Maybe it's my. I don't know if my dad and mom had a great influence on me. My mother told me I don't like beggars. I don't like beggars because when I was a child, they used to have something called beerum Right, yeah, it was a St James thing too. You used to see plenty of people drink beerum on the main road the cheapest serum you could get, like methylated spirits.
Gary :Yeah, and they were dirty and they were smelly and I didn't look at them with compassion, I didn't. You know, I still have a problem with vagrants, but I still buy things and give them, but never give them money. So mummy told me as a little boy, because I would have to walk down from school to come and meet her to get a drop home, because they had a shop in town. So we'd walk down and meet her and get a drop home and she would always bend down and give vagrants money. In those days 25 cents.
Corie:You could do something with it.
Gary :You could do something in those days, but she'd always give them something, but she'd always look them in the eye. So I said why are you stopping? She said don't ever not stop and give them. But if you go to India you will learn your lesson that you cannot give to vagrants, because if you give to one you surround you can't even walk because they look so. But I have a friend in India. What he used to do in his car he would always have a bag of coins because every time you stop at a traffic light.
Gary :50 people surround your car, but he always give his name is prakash atlani.
Corie:Yeah, so you think mummy and they were big influences on that?
Gary :yeah, this sense of charity and things. So there was a drive to prevent vending in the city, which I think we need to have order Street vending, street vending, you know, and oftentimes vending can get out of control. Right now it's way out of control on Charlotte Street because what the government has done the mayor has done in an attempt to be humanitarian, to provide facilities for them, but what it has done it's chased away other people who might otherwise go and shop on Charlotte Street. So the people who have physical build businesses suffer the consequence. So maybe it's a good idea, but in less density and spread more equally over the entire capital. Okay, I got you, and not to prohibit cars, but in those days I had a recessed pavement.
Corie:Oh, it's true, it's true. The way the store was built, the way the store was built.
Gary :And in those days I used to play African music because I love music. And there's a lot of new age music coming out of Africa Even now, the beautiful music.
Corie:And there's a lot of new age music coming out of Africa Even now there's beautiful music, yeah, but you're talking about long before Afrobeats, but now that whole Afrobeats movement.
Gary :Yeah, I was big in.
Corie:Afrobeats.
Gary :But even before Afrobeats, there's a lot of music coming out of Africa and you know it's strange, but Afro people would come in and say take off that music. Why are you playing that music? No, so there's this kind of bias.
Corie:Of course.
Gary :I like Lebanese music. I also like New Age Indian music. But even amongst Indo-Trinidadians there's a bias against.
Corie:Indian music, the thing we're talking about with the testers. It would be good if people could see their own biases. Biases are not necessarily against other groups. Sometimes it's your own group, so that started off with you playing that music and they just come and start a drama and that kind of thing. Or it was a relationship, because he used to sell there too, brother, yeah, yeah.
Gary :Yeah, you remind me about he's a good guy. But yeah, so over the years, yeah, so over the years, my dad also was sympathetic to vendors and vending. Yeah, so that was a good thing. So I always, when the police would clamp down on them because my pavement was recessed even now we have an agreement that they are selling my goods, so police can't take them so if they come to move them, they simply say no, no, this is Gary's goods, this is Moodle Life goods, because the pavement is recessed, right.
Gary :But they're really selling their own goods, of course, so they're going to stop them Of course, like now, we have a vendor's village in the Valsain shop, right and Although, because Philip Alexander and others have called for a boycott of Moodle Live, a lot of hardcore supporters of the party boycott Moodle Live, so we take a hit. But let me tell you, god has a plan and I'm willing to take any amount of hit, even a bullet to the head, for what I believe in. So that's what we need. The world needs more people to stand up and say no, yeah, don't speak to him like that, don't interfere with the woman, don't say racist classes, things like that.
Corie:You know, but I mean we appreciate you, like collectively, because you've been standing up for as long as I can remember myself, dude, see you standing up, something I was always curious about, and I feel like I sense of it today in terms of because you would find that people who are in advocacy I may have something about with women or with gender, you know singular focus, which I wonder sometimes if is which is a better approach, but it seems as though you're willing to come out and speak out wherever the thing is. So is it that injustice is at the core of what you are, but injustice is at the core of what you are? Is there one thing you could find that's at the core of all the issues you stand?
Gary :up for you think I haven't thought about that Injustice and advantage. Yeah yeah, john O'Halloran, bastards, we'll be Susza, you know.
Corie:I can't remember them, it's too far back. But let me talk about that Valsin location, as we're talking business, before I get you back on the corrupt. When was that location opened? Frederick Street was your only location for some time.
Gary :Frederick Street. We had a. Frederick Street went through real bad times because it started FFOS and fabrics. The import duty on garments was lowered, so the import duty on garments was 80%.
Corie:Why does that?
Gary :It was 80% and on fabrics was 20%, I see. So they lowered the fabrics to 5% plus VAT, right, or 10%, something like that, plus VAT, which stayed about 20. Right, but garments came down to the same level, I understand.
Corie:So pants like sub-cellar and people didn't buy clothes as much.
Gary :if they could get finished garments, they could get finished garments, and then all these small manufacturers, of course, lots of tailors and seamstresses.
Corie:I understand.
Gary :Unless they were producing a high quality garment for a wedding or special, or had a big brand or something.
Gary :Yes, they got squeezed out. So I still think it might have been a good idea, but it was done too suddenly, it was done in, so our business really collapsed. And when I started I started I had an eye for tourism and indigenous activity and rural activity. So when I left my dad, my dad was fair to me. He paid me off, so to speak, a lump sum of money for my years of service and for what I had accomplished. I was very successful in his company. I did a lot of things. I started an export drive, I developed the retail thing, I developed marketing. There were new stores that we opened and I did a lot of work. I'm a real work, committed to my hard work. So I went and I bought estates in the country, right with the idea that I would create an eco tourism destination for Trinidad.
Gary :At the time, costa Rica, in the 90s, costa Rica was just taking off. Um, so I went and I bought and I'm a bushman, I don't know, know I didn't tell you that. I spent a lot of time going to the mountain, any kind of cave, waterfall, river diving, all kind of outdoor stuff. It's my passion. So I bought several estates.
Gary :At that time property prices were depressed. So I got a lot of estates with different things, with oil birds in the Kumaka Caves, with Sulphur Springs, in Mahu, in Brasoseco, in Madamas, different places like that in Tobago, up in the mountains. So that was my clan and then 50% of the money I used to start in business. But the lands needed money to build the ecotourism and to start that whole project and the business. With textiles collapsing, I didn't invest in importing textiles. In importing textiles At that time I was importing very little from New York. I didn't have the capital to import from China. I promised my dad I wasn't going to compete with him on the markets that I developed, which was wholesale and export. So I was limiting myself to only being a retail or to having retails and the market collapsed on me.
Corie:But were you getting textiles from if you're not importing locally made?
Gary :I was getting textiles from my dad, oh, I see, but he had promised me to give me the best wholesale prices and I was also buying from at that time from Queensway, I remember they have since closed.
Corie:Yeah Well, everybody, when you look at the whole clothes store, that part of Frederick Street from Hart Street, go down.
Gary :Everybody. It was clothes stores. There were 26 importers and now I think there are only three or four.
Corie:Yeah, but where does that make sense? I never knew that those import duties had changed, because then consumers would buy differently.
Gary :So I went through a very difficult time, very, very difficult. So let me say there's more than life. Now I've been in town for a long time. The store in town is still cloth and stuff where it's variety version like, but we came completely out of the closet. It's not there anymore and we started um.
Gary :I went to india and where, when I worked for my dad, I used to go to india twice a year as well. In those days we were designing textile and having it printed or dyed in our colors. But now I went to a handicraft show where I could buy handmade things in very small quantities. So that's how I because I didn't have the capital. I had a property in Blanchiches which was part of the whole ecotourism. The ecotourism thing was something worth talking about because it was a concept that a foreign person who loves being outdoors could come here and spend three weeks outdoors, hike for two days to a destination over the mountain, spend two or three days there, recuperate from the rough ride, then hike another two or three days to another destination and in each destination experience different birds, trees, mammals, amphibians.
Corie:You know we have it here. We were getting traction of that. People would come, people would visit to do it.
Gary :Well, it never started, I see, I see it never started. And Trinidad? We lost Trinidad. We don't live anymore in a country. We live in a corrupt speck of sand that's half submerged and people don't want to own up to the fact that we're losing our country. Last night I was in a meeting and the chairman of the meeting said something to that effect that we are losing our country to crime. So how can I bring a foreigner, put them in a rural place when people are being raped and murdered? Oh, my god, my god. And then in Jamaica they came out with the exclusive facility where you lock them in. But ecotourism is the reverse of locking them in. It's a different mentality ecotourists wants to meet.
Corie:They wouldn't stay in an all-inclusive resort. They want to see the country.
Gary :They want to see the country eat the food, of course, of course. Meet the people, hang out, go in the rum shop Right and experience nature, of course. So it's a different thing. It shifted. It's a different thing, it shifted. So, model I even had a problem because textile sales collapsed. I didn't import, I was buying from a couple of people and maybe 20% imported products which you know, high quality silks and linens and stuff like that. It's not volume oriented, so it's not sufficient to keep it going, yeah.
Corie:And then if you say, all the tailors and the seamstresses and those types of businesses closed as well, they went under because imported garments went to cheap? Yeah, of course, of course. So that's when you shift to different types. So that's where you say Indian imports, you get any stuff from India at that point in time doing the imports.
Gary :Yeah, it was a couple of countries Indonesia, Thailand.
Corie:Where you would say that was that shift from.
Gary :I was 90. 99, 2000.
Corie:I see, and by that time your Valsane location already open. No, no, no Valsane.
Gary :And when we shifted, amazing thing was that 60% of the customers were Rastafari and 40% were white people. And of the white people, 20% of them were foreigners. So I said but how did this happen?
Corie:So all that time you're focused on data and things, you're looking at your numbers coming.
Gary :No, that was the early years Right, but you're observing your business. We couldn't afford that.
Corie:We had eight employees, but you were there all the time.
Gary :I remember coming in and doing it Right, so you're observing it.
Corie:You might not be system, but you're looking at who your customers are.
Gary :Yes, it was small enough to understand it, but I never expected that so much Rastafari, why? Did Rastafari buy into this concept and it was a blessing because in those days my home was my warehouse. I didn't have money for a warehouse, so my bedroom and living room and the kitchen and everywhere was inventory packed up and it took off and it's been a blessing. And then in 2006, some genius, some demon, put a bomb in a garbage bin.
Gary :Oh yeah, I remember that it's all over town. Yes, on frederick street, and it blew off the legs, I remember, of a street vendor.
Corie:Yeah, I remember that I was working park street at that time. You know, I used to work on tscd on park street right and it was chaotic. It was a few days where bombs start going off, and so I remember that story that was right outside my hill.
Gary :Outside my me Well, half a block. But business collapsed and I had a young lady working with me. She turned me on to Robin, a friend of us, who had rented a compound to produce to do something and he failed. But he had the option to buy it at a fixed price and he sold it to us at two and a half times the option the option. So we bought valse and I didn't have the money, but my dad guaranteed the loan, which was, in other words, if I faltered on repayment of the loan, my dad would pay it off. He would accept the liability and take over the property, which is something that I want to do now for other people to help them to build their businesses.
Gary :And it took off. It took clean off. We were doing really well. And then I got some messages on my phone we will gun you down. So when you talk about risk, you know I went to the police with it. I couldn't trace it. I came three times we will gun you down. And at that time fishermen and friends that you see were fighting the shrimp trawlers head on. So I actually suspect it was somebody from that group.
Corie:You might know, because so much people here see you're fighting plenty of battles. When you see that message, you can't know where it's coming from.
Gary :In those early days it was very, very specific to them about getting them outlawed, I see, we mobilized the North Coast fishermen and we were marching a lot and demonstrating publicly. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't arrested. Yet then, though, I was arrested three times, two times in the Kamala regime. I got arrested and incarcerated. Yeah, I'm there to watch it now. That's okay, they could take me. I'm happy to go.
Corie:Why don't you say I don't put us out of the way, I'm happy to go? Listen, what have to come have to come, I suppose, I suppose yeah.
Gary :I'm not afraid. And at that time, a couple of weeks after getting the messages we will gun you down, which I didn't make public and I didn't want my dad to know, because my dad and mom were alive and they worry about me like that, three persons came into the business. Three of them came in on a Saturday and something wasn't right about them. This is in Valcine.
Corie:In Valcine, it wasn't what it is now.
Gary :Yeah, when it just started and so I was called. I had a little office there. I was called out hey look, we have some suspicious characters moving around. And I came down and I stayed with the one who I thought was the most dangerous of the three and I told him listen, no matter where you go, I'm staying with you. I said let me help you. He said no, I don't want anything. I said no problem, I'm going to stay six inches away from you. Wherever you go, I'm going to be right with you. So let's, since you don't want anything. And that was when fire was called. But the other two persons who were with him had dispersed. So I suspect and there was a door open, I suspect that somebody might have done something.
Corie:But it's a blessing, yeah, but I guess he kept going.
Gary :But people say that how I burnt it down for insurance Right, which obviously those people don't know their head from their tail in business. Because after it was a long battle, at the time of the fire the fire services sent four trucks. The first one came didn't have a hose. The second one came, the pump didn't work. The third one came, there was some other problem, and then the fourth one came, and when the fourth one came we now had water, by which time the whole 60,000 square feet building was up in flames.
Gary :So I spoke about it when the media asked me. I said what a disgrace our fire services are. If that was a chemical fire in Pointe-Lysas, how many residents in the community that live behind Pointe-Lysas there are four communities along the stretch might have died. We need to equip, and I still say it now. Are we prepared for a chemical fire, which is very different? Yes, it is. And then the chief fire officer. He made a statement that he knows that building and he knows the inventory in that building and it's overinsured. I see it wasn't overinsured, it was underinsured, but he said that. And then the insurance heard that, of course.
Corie:Launched a whole investigation.
Gary :So 11 and a half months it took me to get paid, In which time I committed that nobody would be laid off. So just imagine that stress now. Now I have people that I have to pay. Just imagine that stress now. Now I have people that I have to pay. I don't have a place for them to work.
Gary :So it was very very difficult, you get rid and then when you get the insurance, the way the insurance works is that if you're insured for $10, the government treat that as a seal so you have to pay VAT on it. I see, then you have to do your audited report for that year and you have to treat VAT on it. I see, then you have to do your audited report for that year and you have to treat it as a seal. It's not a recovery of a loss.
Gary :So now you have to pay 30% tax on it. So we were insured at the time for 25 million. The insurance paid us 24.
Corie:VAT took out yeah, probably 15% of that 15% is about 5 million Of course.
Gary :Then, of the 20 million, I had to pay 30% tax, which leave back 14 million, and I owe the bank 12 and a half million. So I only stay back with 2 million in hand, of course. So all the people who say that hey, you know, you burned down yourself and you're the fire king.
Corie:None of this could change and that, hey, you know you've burned down yourself and you're the fire king. None of this could change any of that. People say that they will say it, but you advance from there. You know, Because I was driving through Cook and I was driving the other day randomly and I saw a big motor live down there too, next to Halliburton. What year was that? That's pretty recent.
Gary :That was open in 2021 or 2022. Okay, okay, so you in 2021 or 2022. Okay, okay.
Gary :So in the height of, COVID, yeah, yeah, that remix, yeah, yeah, and now we want to expand it. We're doing very well but, as I say, the same problem. I'm accustomed to it when, when each time, governments change, we see a change in the demography of the ethnicity of who shops with us. So when Pandey came in, we saw a big drop off of the typical urban Afro-Trinidadian support of the PNM. And when Pandey kicked out which we fought to have him removed for all of the corruption that he was so eminently qualified to execute, remember we don't really have a democracy, we have a democratic dictatorship. You get into power and you could do to the people what you want.
Gary :That is not right and what we need is leadership that amends the constitution to give people back a sense of authority, a sense of transparency of how you're spending their money, why you're taking it, who is doing what? I mean, we talk about URP and the UNC cancelling the URP and all that. Now, I don't believe in the shock techniques of what they've done by just automatically shut down 10,000 workers. But have those workers really advanced in our society as a result of being in CPAP Classes, programs? Yeah, what is the opportunities for them to become literate, to start small businesses, to own small shops to produce something, to cook, something, to learn. So you know, are we really cultivating a futuristic society, prepared for modern world where computers are going to take over, or are we just using our extractive industries, short-term wealth and blowing it for politics 20 years from now? Where are we going to be when the gases run out?
Corie:Yeah, yeah, yeah, when you extract all of it, we have a problem. But I want to ask you just a couple of quick things before we go, because David will put me out In terms of advocacy and you talk about the politics a lot. Is that something you feel you will do? Run for politics and those things, because you're passionate and you're very emotional sometimes about these things that you're talking about and seeing it different. You intend to put yourself there.
Gary :I never thought I would be in politics. What I do is real politics. Advocacy is real politics. Being in parliament is not a politics. That's a puppy show.
Corie:So that's not for you.
Gary :That's not for any progressive citizen. If you want to represent people, represent them where it matters by what we do. This is the real politics, the politics on the ground, where we're free to approach issues without having to toe a party line. You see? So I don't want to be in elected office. I thought I mean it's not an ambition, but I really believe that I have a contribution to make in parliament as an independent senator. But they freed me because I can see why. Now the the independents here, they have to toe a line and I know too in a line if we're gonna get our nations to survive and to be able to compete against Singapore, malaysia, thailand. Those are countries real, poor, but super progressive. There's no laziness, there's no freeness, and if you corrupt, they lock you up for life we need that.
Corie:Here I'm with you. But one of the things I admire that you've been doing is even just where we started, because things like the, you're really opening it up and I want to tell folks who listening to that you made it a point before we start that you wanted to get the info there about how we help small businesses and so on. I think it's admirable because there's a general complaint that people have that say nobody in this country to help nobody, nobody doing anything, and I feel like it's good that the private sector. So I want to wrap up on that that a little bit. Just to go back to your years program and kind of like why, what made you decide that you want to start that?
Gary :My father, when he was four years old, was taken out of school and made to work with his father. His father was shot in the one knee by the Turkish military because they were forced to fight the war. The Turks were invading after the British came out of that world, that Arabic world, and the Turks were coming down and invading and they would take the prisoners and put them on the front line and shoot and then be shot. So the first time he ran away they shot him in his knee. The second time they gorged out one eye. So when he came to Trinidad as a young adult as you know, he came at 52. He was already handicapped.
Gary :His wife's three brothers, who were all Sabgars, so I'm related to all the Sabgars, they had come in the 1800s. But she, my grandmother, stayed back with her parents to take care of her parents and to work the farm. They were grape farmers. So when they came here my grandfather was handicapped, both in terms of language, and then he couldn't walk, he couldn't take the load. So they would leave Port of Spain on a Monday morning and they would stop off in what we would call Phyllis City and drop off a bag there, a suitcase, and then they would travel on to I think it was point 14, which was the end of the train line, and then they would start walking and selling. You're talking about 1946 or 48, like that, probably before that. No, it was during the war, so it could have been 1939, like that. So my father was a vendor. He was a street vendor.
Gary :So if we don't understand that, hey, listen, all the richest people in trinidad have very humble origins. We don't have any british royalty here descended from the king and all of that crap. But I suppose you still have some descendants of some people who were old landowners from the Delimas or whoever else. But a lot of that wealth has changed so that if we don't have a sense of a nationalistic sense of all of us and being willing to help all of us, we're not really a nation, we're just a bunch of scavengers. You know like they have pictures of salmon going up the river. You know the salmon struggle to go up and we always look down on the animal kingdom as these beasts just eating and grabbing like hyenas. But even the hyenas have a sense of protection and loyalty to help each other and save each other, and this video that I saw was that there are some salmon going upriver that deliberately jump onto the rocks and very carefully assist those who are beating up, who don't have the navigational sense to say, look, that's the water, that's where I need to go, and they knock them in and then they jump in. So if a fish has that sense, if in the animal kingdom you have that sense among birds we have seen videos now there's a lot of things that are coming out in knowledge in the world if the animal kingdom have that sense, then where is our sense gone to? How could we stand by and look at palestine bombed and murdered? And no, regardless of what you think about the war, the fact is it's a war, it's people.
Gary :So you know, I I am a big supporter of Gaddafi and many people don't like to hear that because but what he had? He had a vision for a unified Africa. You know like United States of America got together If they were not united, they would never be what they are today. Europe has caught onto the idea and are now unifying themselves, but it's far gone and they're still very separate. India is unified. If India was separate as it was 200 years ago or 500 years ago, where would India be today. So likewise we in the Caribbean and this is a grouse that I have is that we're really not unified in the Caribbean. We need to get together and we don't have a unified response to Donald Trump that properly considers each and everyone's crisis. When Guyana was paying 38% tariff to get Guyanese goods into the US, nobody in CARICOM objected.
Gary :Oh my God, what about Suriname, now that Venezuela is falling apart? I mean, because Venezuela is not a member of CARICOM. Venezuela is our brother, like it's Chile and Cuba and Costa Rica. We are all part of this Latino vibration and movement of people, but there's not this hegemony amongst us, just like families are not unified, ethnicities are not unified and nations are not unified. So we are in a problem unless we can really get that unity together. That is colorblind, classblind, educational blind.
Corie:Yeah, we're not going nowhere.
Gary :Not going nowhere. If it was my last comment, one of my friends in Las Cuevas lost his boat two days ago and he complained to me. He owes the bank $180,000. He owes the bank On his boat. He has a family. He has two children and a wife. He's a hardworking man. They took the engine.
Gary :We put it out on our group because we have a group with 500 fishers on it on WhatsApp. We're looking for this boat. The one person that I know who's a responsible person from the community somebody called me and said the boat is here in the deep south. The boats always make their way down in the Gulf of Paria into the deep south. We called the police. The police go right away, but the boat out. We call the police. The police go right away, but they both left. But the person down there is afraid that they would be killed. Here's the problem. Murderers are taking over our country. They're stealing from each other, destroying people's lives. The man who owns the bank the $180,000, he's going to lose his home and he's a 50-year-old man working hard his whole life. But here's the problem why doesn't the Coast Guard have radars that they could go back on their radars? This is 2025, with artificial intelligence and see the boat yeah, see exactly where it went, Exactly the boat that pulled up when they took, stole his boat and trace it and follow the boat to exactly where it is. And we keep calling on the Coast Guard.
Gary :When Rawley was in power, we begged them. They wouldn't listen to us. They went and bought two ships from Sural, the company in Australia where we already own nine ships, and of the nine ships that we own, seven of them were condemned three months after they arrived. It's a crappy company. They produced these ships that we bought when Rawley got into power Without any tendering procedure, without consulting the Coast Guard boom, he went and bought them, but no radars. See there. Without consulting the coast guard. Boom, you went and buy them, but no readers.
Corie:Yeah, you gotta run for position. That's the only hope that you gotta run for position and get beyond the advocacy that you're doing. But we have that time. I want to. I want to take out to thank you for coming first and just to commend you on some of these things, like as I have more people here, because a part of what I do here is to get entrepreneurs, younger entrepreneurs as well, not just the ones that known, known like Mood, alive and yourself, or Adam even and I want to put them in direct contact. I appreciate it, you have the number.
Gary :You want to share the number again 355-7674.
Corie:Right, and that would be the number for your funding. Part of it, yeah. For the training how for the training? How do you join that?
Gary :well for the training. What we want to do is we want to do that with people like Adam.
Corie:Okay, good, oh, you want to bring them, to bring them together.
Gary :Yes, we'll have 10 sessions, 4 minute sessions. Right about what to do, how to start a business, how to prepare what to look for.
Corie:I appreciate that, but once you have info on how people can join, that, let me know as well. I want to be able to share it with the audience here, as well as guests who will come on who are trying to figure this out, like that guy selling me coffee I was telling you about. But thanks a million.
Gary :I appreciate you having me on. I hope it was good for you. I hope.
Corie:I yeah, david, go tell him.