The guest
Sarma Melngailis: Chef and restaurateur behind NYC raw-vegan restaurant Pure Food and Wine and the One Lucky Duck brand. She became the subject of Netflix's Bad Vegan after pleading guilty to fraud and serving four months at Rikers Island.
What this episode covers
Melngailis walks Lex Fridman through her life: childhood as a loner, building a celebrated raw-vegan restaurant empire in New York, and her destructive relationship with Anthony Strangis, whom she met on Twitter and married. She argues the Netflix documentary was disturbingly misleading, contending she was psychologically manipulated cult-style rather than a willing criminal. The conversation ranges across sociopathy, manipulation tactics, her dog Leon, prison life at Rikers, food ethics and veganism, the Epstein/Maxwell and Depp/Heard cases, love, and her hopes to repay her debts and relaunch her brand.
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Big reveals from this episode
- Sarma argues she pleaded guilty not because she felt guilty but because a trial would be too stressful and expensive, saying people plead guilty all the time without intent.
- She describes being taken on a 'road trip from hell' across the country, later realizing every stop had a casino.
- After her arrest she recovered deleted Google Chats and discovered Anthony had accessed her email and was emailing and texting people as her.
- She reveals she intentionally recorded the closing documentary phone call with Anthony to get him to repeat his fantastical claims, not a hot-mic moment.
- She admits one reason she kept contact with Anthony was fear he would harm or take her dog Leon while she was locked up at Rikers.
- Sarma openly discusses having considered suicide and hoarding medications around the time before the road trip.
- She says she met Harvey Weinstein on the street once and believes she might have gone along had he later offered to finance her business.
- She reveals she has fallen in love again since prison, kept entirely private, describing it as possibly doomed due to an age gap.
Worth remembering
- Tom Brady used to order the restaurant's raw-vegan malomars shipped on dry ice to Boston.
- Alec Baldwin was the person Sarma was trying to convince to adopt a dog when she became fixated on Leon.
- Andrew Huberman convinced Lex and Sarma to delay morning coffee an hour or two so the body's natural wakefulness isn't blunted.
- Sarma replied to a stranger who messaged calling her 'trash', sparking an insightful back-and-forth conversation.
- Lex's next-door neighbor is anarchist author Michael Malice, who was writing The White Pill about 20th-century atrocities.
- Sarma calls Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where she was first jailed, carnival-esque and so trippy it doesn't seem real.
- At Rikers, real chicken was served Thursdays and Sundays and the most fights broke out on 'chicken day'.
- Both Lex and Sarma independently say their core life advice for young people is simply to read a lot of books.
- Sarma argues meat is cheap mainly because of government subsidies and that prices would flip if subsidies shifted to vegetables.
- Sarma tattooed the One Lucky Duck logo on her arm, reflecting how strongly she believed in the brand she hopes to resurrect.
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