The man who made a billion off blueberries

0:00 This guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire. Love it. And Ten. I feel like I can root

0:10 Well I know. Be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song. Okay, let me give you this one. This is kind of a crazy story. So Do the words John Bragg mean anything to you?

0:25 No. Didn't mean anything to me either. Shout out to uh Shame Parish. Over at Farnham Street. He did a great podcast with this guy that caught my attention. Um this guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire.

0:39 Love it. And In There was only two sources for this. Fardom Street and the Van Trump report had written about this guy. There's only things I could find. He's got a biography as well. But um all right, so so here's this guy's story. I just think there's like there's a bunch of factoids about this guy that I just think you're gonna love. You're gonna love this guy's whole aura, his vibe. He is The Billy of the Week to the music. Million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool?

1:09 A billion Dollar. John Bragg. This guy grows up on a f family farm, like a sawmill or something like that. And when he's in high school

1:18 You know, what do teenagers do? They start to experiment, they start to dabble. Maybe a little bit of Maybe girls, maybe we no. Blueberries. He tries to harvest blueberries for the first time at thirteen, fourteen years old. You know, he starts to g he gets the itch.

1:31 And then he goes to a local blueberry farmer, he decides, Hey, hey can I pick blueberries for you? And he picks blueberries all year. His last year of high school. Him and four or five other blueberry pickers. end up making four thousand dollars each picking blueberries, which was a lot of money at the time'cause this guy's very old. And

1:49 Pay he realizes, Oh wait, I can pay for college if I just pick blueberries every year. And so he's making college was like ten or twelve grand. He's making four grand. He realizes, Oh, I can do this. My parents otherwise weren't weren't really gonna be able to send me, but I could do this. And so he makes more money the next year and the next year picking blueberries. Finally when he graduates He's got a couple of options on the table.

2:08 Uh, you know, plan A was gonna be to become a teacher. And he was gonna make I think like thirty eight hundred dollars or something like that, big a teacher, an extra hundred bucks if he coaches like the the the the basketball team or something. And plan B was let me go work on the family business, maybe over time buy out my dad uh on the sawmill. But he decides to go plan C. He's like, I think this blueberry thing

2:29 There's something to it. And he decides to start his own blueberry farm. So he buys a little piece of land. And he starts trying to harvest blueberries. And it goes pretty well the first couple of years. He's doing all right. But a couple of years in he

2:42 There's a problem in the blueberry uh industry, which was that one year there was just huge supply glut. So there was way too many blueberries, not enough buyers. And um prices crashed and so he's like shit. You know, could have quit, but he's like, No, no, no. I'm just gonna figure out what I should have done differently. He's like, I need uh basically like a backup plan, a sort of you know, an insurance. And he wasn't doing financial insurance, but he's like, I need another way to make money in case this ever happens again. Never again will I let this happen to me where I'm at the mercy

3:11 Of the prices. And so he decides, I think I need to build A packaging and freezing plant. For blueberries. No, he's got no money.

3:19 But he's like, uh, I'm gonna try to do this. So he goes to the other blueberry farmers. He says, Hey guys, we all just Got whipped. Let's put some money in together and I'm gonna build this plant. And then you can use the plant too. You could freeze and package your stuff too if it ever if we ever have it oversupply. And

3:36 So they do that. Ta he borrows money from the bank, he gets money from the other farmers. He starts to build this thing. Never no experience, by the way. No manufacturing, no factory experience, but he's like, I can do this. So he builds this plant. And in the first year that they build the plant. He's ready for two million

3:52 Uh Like a of capacity of two million. But they only produce a hundred thousand'cause there's this crazy frost that kills all the blueberry production that year. And he's like, Oh my God, I owe so much money. And I and like we came in at like five percent of the like the estimated like freezing capacity. This is terrible. I have this empty factory now. I owe a lot of money.

4:16 And basically it's like, dude, you gotta just let this go, declare bankruptcy. Move on with your life. Instead. He calls another guy, uh, who he knows, guy uh McCain, and he's like, McCain, he's like, Yo What's something you need to make but you don't want to make? Is there anything? Give me the the the last thing you wanna do, but nah, you should do it.

4:35 And the guy's like, All right, I got you. Onion rings. It's like onion rings? Okay. He's like I he's like Can you send me like a file like about so he gets like a little book on how to make onion rings. And he's like all right. Say less. I'm never gonna ask you another question. I will figure this out from here.

4:49 And so he He's got an empty factory, but he turns it into like just for that one season or whatever. He makes onion rings for this guy. It just tides him over enough to continue. And so He carries on and he ends up building something called Oxford Frozen foods.

5:05 Which today controls about forty to fifty percent of the global supply. Of blueberries. It's like seventy million pounds of blueberries they're making every year. Do they still have uh onion rings and blueberries and onion rings and mozzarella sticks on their website. You never forget. You never forget who got you there. And so he builds this absolute juggernaut over time, and they become bigger and bigger and bigger. His brother Invent.

5:29 this like blueberry picker that can do the work of thirty five like humans doing this. And he's like, Oh, amazing. And then what he does is he actually like gives it out basically like freely shares it with other blueberry farms too. He's like he's like what's good for one is good for all. Here we go. And so he wants the entire blueberry industry to grow because he's like The more the blueberry industry grows, the better we all do. I don't want to be the biggest fish in the smallest pond. I want the pond to get bigger. And we're competing with all the other fruits out there. So if we can up our production

5:58 And we can have more blueberries and we can build more innovative products, it's gonna be good for everybody. And so he's got this very interesting business philosophy. He ends up Then going in. To a new business. So it's um many years later.

6:12 Uh, actually I actually I think he kinda did this around the same time. I shouldn't say many years later. I I don't know the exact date on this, but it wasn't like once he is already like huge. It was like somewhere somewhere around the same time. Um, T V was picking up. And cable cable TV was picking up. And this guy's from Nova Scotia, population nine thousand.

6:30 And so they held a like an auction. They were like, Hey, all right, who wants to buy the T cable TV rights for Nova Scotia. Nobody shows up. He's the only guy there. And so he picks up the cable TV rights for that area. And he's like, All right, I don't even know what to do with this. Like, I guess I'll put like some old recorded programming on here. There's like no programming, basically. But he's like, Whatever, let's do this. And so he's in that business.

6:54 And he's losing money the first couple years. And his dad's like, Bro, you gotta figure this out. Like this, you can't just keep bleeding money over here. And so he cuts his costs, he tries to figure this out, and he finally gets it to like kind of a like a break even point or whatever. He ends up over the next you know couple of decades. building the largest private telecom company in the country.

7:14 And he owns cable TV networks, you know, everywhere. He does a bunch of acquisitions, he takes on a bunch of debt, and he ends up buying up others and he goes down uh he goes like sort of down uh the stack. So whereas most T V companies wanna do the sexy fun stuff. They get into original programming and content and they're like content is king. He's like, Yeah, no, yeah. You know what's king? Fiber.

7:35 Like, I'm gonna go own the underlying infrastructure for for cable TV and he ends up building this juggernaut. And so this guy ends up now, he's like whatever. Yeah. Like, you know, much older now in his eighties or something like that. And he's worth a billion dollars. You built the largest farm, but uh fruit farm basically in in the world. And it's built the largest

7:55 What largest private telecom company in in the country. Isn't this kind of amazing? This is amazing. I've I'm as you're telling me this, I'm I've noticed there's a trend. Amongst this era of people. Was this was he doing it right when cable was getting started? Yeah. Man, there's uh there's a trend. So Ted Turner, who eventually went on to start CNN

8:15 He owned a billboard company, which he parlayed into a radio station. And then eventually a cable. uh news network, CNN, c cable news network. Uh, do you know another guy named Jim Patterson? Have you heard of Jim Patterson? No, who's that? Dude, Google Jim Patterson.

8:31 Another Canadian guy. Look at what he looks like. He's like a Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen this guy before. He's like one of the richest guys in Canada, right? Yeah, he's like the he's like one of these guys who is like he's like an energizer energizer bunny. Like he like he's like a wind up toy. Like he just can't stop like moving. But he I think his story was He uh at a young age uh opened up a car dealership. And within three years He bought like a plastic manufacturer or something very like

8:59 out of left field. And then another thing and then another thing. Now he owns a telecommunications business, but he also owns like Ripley's believe it or not. And I think that like the Patterson group, which he owns the whole thing, I think has a hundred thousand employees or something insane like that. And then another one is his name's John. Cat his last name is Crazy. I'm

9:18 But right. Cat uh Cas Mantitis. Yes. Is that it? He's got a condition, kinda. Do you know him? Do you know him? No. So he started a grocery store.

9:30 Uh, I think it was called Apple Foods. Dude, let me just tell you this. Any guy who looks like this, if I just showed you this photo and I said Rich or poor? Yeah, you already know everything about him just by looking at him. One photo. Yeah, like when he this guy when he gives you a handshake, he's pulling you in.

9:45 Do you know what I mean? You can just look at him and you know what he's gonna do. He's gonna pull you in, he's gonna smack you really hard on the back shoulder. Yeah. And no chance this guy has one wife, by the way. Let me look this up. I bet you. I'll bet you anything right now. If you Google his kids, they're beautiful. First wife divorce. New wife Margot Uh this guy started um

10:06 Apple grocery store. It's like a twenty it's a twenty store chain in New York City. Like it's it's tiny. But then He bought a radio station. And then uh that's like how he got extra rich. And then I think he also bought a cable news network as well. And so my point being is there's this. And then a refining company and then like an airline. He owns I think he owns like a small private airline. He owns everything. There's this type of entrepreneur

10:34 where they're kind of cowboys where they start in one thing and they get in the media eventually. And a lot of it happened in the eighties to late seventies and the early eighties when cable was getting popular. Uh and it was sort of like uh the first aversion of uh of a of a SaaS business. You know, it was um Uh recurring revenue, huge TAM. uh kind of weird and unknown. People weren't weren't sure what what to do. And I believe that a lot of the cable new w news networks they were regulated by uh the FCC and you had a certain satellite, like you could only own X amount of satellites. Like there was some type of like limiting

11:11 blocker where only a certain amount of cable companies could even exist. And so if you were able to like get in on that, it was almost a near monopoly. Ted Turner came along and he was one of the first guys that would like uh petitioned Congress and was like, this is nonsense. We need more competition. And that's when CNN came about. But in this whole era I like how sometimes when we explain these things, it's kinda like when I explain stuff to my kids, like they're like How does um Like how does the picture come on the TV? Like where is this coming from? And I'm like, Oh Um

11:39 Satellites. And they and they're like, But how does it get from a satellite to our TV? I'm like It shoots it. It's shooting Gabby Dollhouse at our At that tower, I think. I think that's what the cables are for, or maybe that's electricity. I'm not sure exactly what's going on. It doesn't matter. No. But you're like they ran there's only so many satellite you had to buy these letters, but they only had so many letters.

12:03 No letters, okay? Spectrum available. There's like a yeah, yeah, we know a lot about spectrums. passionate speech to like politicians to convince them that they have to change the rules to allow small upstarts to to get a satellite. But anyway That's cool. I like this blueberry guy. Alright, so a lot of people will talk about how you need a million dollars and three years of experience to start a business.

12:36 Nonsense. If you listen to at least one episode on this podcast, you know that is completely not true. My last company, The Hustle, we grew it to something like seventeen or eighteen million dollars in revenue. I started it. With like Three hundred dollars. My current company, Hampton, does over ten million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe twenty nine dollars or something like that. Nothing. And so you don't actually need investors to start a company. You don't need a fancy business plan, but what you do need is systems that actually work.

13:05 And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under a thousand dollars. These are models that if you do it correctly, it can make money this week. You can get it right now, you can scan the QR code. Or click the link in the description. Now back to the show. Let me give you some of his uh his little business isms, his philosophies. Okay, so And this is again some of this from uh from from Shane Parrish's stuff. And I think I can just tell this guy is he Canadians are and midwestern people.

13:35 Where I'm from. They're the same they're the same people, aren't they? Yeah, it's like it's it's a species in its own. So he here's a great line by him. I have no reverse gear. I just thought that's an amazing line. Um, which is like

13:48 He's like, Yeah, uh you know, when things got hard and the blueberry crop died and then the factory is empty, like I just didn't consider going backwards. I did not consider like it was just not a gear I have. To either stop or reverse course. Like I just decided I have to find a way through. And the onion rings are the way through.

14:07 Um another thing that I thought was interesting. Which was kind of counter to conventional advice. So you know, most people who are in Uh, the business the game of business Buffett and all the real estate guys. The famous phrase they all say is. You make your money on the buy.

14:22 You don't make your money when you sell. If you buy it right. Then you're gonna make money. Dude, I read that line like after I bought three real estate projects that I totally lost money on. I was like Shit. Uh

14:34 It's not like the fine print, by the way. This is like this is like the first thing you learn. Like I was like reading a Warren Buffett book and I like read that quote and I remember thinking like That was literally the exact opposite of what I thought. Just doing the John Bragg. So here's John Bragg's philosophy. Intentionally overpay. Well I'm in. So he goes he goes early on, I intentionally overpaid for acquisitions. And word spread fast. If you want to sell

15:04 Sell to John Bragg. You'll get a fair price, a quick close, no games. Which I love that. Like if I'm the I'm I'm gonna put that on my uh on our like little mini private equity shop uh website. I feel like that that advice typically isn't right, though. Well, it typically not so here's the the caveats. Here's the caveats of you know, they say like You know, the amateurs learn the rules, or the amateurs don't know the rules, professionals know the rules, and then masters know when to break the rules or whatever that thing is.

15:30 This is kinda when to break it. So he goes. I will overpay as long as it's something that's only available once. Because when opportunities are scarce, you need to pay what it takes. I know many people who tried to nickel and dime and then spent the rest of their life regretting not getting that key asset. So I think in the in the In the realm of buying the T V rights when there's only g they're only gonna be up once and whoever gets it's gonna own it.

15:52 Um, those are that's like a time to overpay. Um, or if it's a key asset that locks down you know, a certain competitive advantage. Th don't quibble on price, in fact come in over So that you make sure you secure that asset and you develop a reputation. He he said something like you can't buy a reputation. I was like, I think that

16:10 Actually what you're saying is you can buy a reputation. It's like oh but the here's the reputation. I will overpay, right? Like It's like Softbank in the venture game right now. It's like oh You you want a bunch of money? And that a huge crazy valuation, go to SoftBank first. Right. And there's actually like some merit to that strategy when they you have these like you know, this this uh if you can get the things that have huge upside.

16:31 So was he uh like an M and A guy? Like or or It was a a lot of building the empire through M and A. And what was he buying, other cable companies or other farms? Oh. H here's another banger of a line. So he has forty to fifty percent of the global supply.

16:46 And about half of that is like stuff that he Owns and operates his farms and half his farms he's buying. Or owns like a you know, big stake in. And he's he goes. Here's the exact line, he goes.

16:58 We don't want to have one hundred percent of the industry. That that wouldn't be good politics. Like imagine having the choice to have a hundred percent market share in the That's that's not polite. Well, what a baller.

17:11 But here's uh here's some Sam porn for you. So Focus is absolutely critical, probably the biggest single principle you can have in business. Here's a big mistake people make. They make their first million and they think, now I can succeed in any business, even ones I know nothing about. Been there. Sam buying the ranch.

17:30 Um And then he goes, I just wanted to He goes, I wanted to just stick to my knitting. Figure out what I could do well and then just do more of it. Um

17:40 You know, everybody else who came into this industry wanted to make a book. I was this young guy who said I'm here to play this game for a long, long time. This guy's awesome. This guy's awesome, right? I think it's my own. Then he goes, uh here's a couple other great great quotes. The guy who asked the question to me looks better than the guy who knows the answers.

17:59 Like that. Done. Shane's podcast with him. Uh Shane's and then there's like a couple other people that have written about him, but a lot of this is from Shane's podcast. Which I didn't even get to watch'cause I I was doing the like I discovered this guy this morning. It was like on my list of like

18:13 Things to check out. And as soon as I checked out I was like, Oh man, this is amazing. I gotta I gotta go watch this later. So I've I've actually Only like scam the transcript and stuff for this. Um so I might be getting some of the details wrong. A couple other things. He's one of these like Buffett types where it's like

18:27 He's a billionaire. But the vast majority of wealth came like after the age of seventy. So it's like, you know, just same same way for Buffett, where they just they keep compounding. Um He had some other things I thought were pretty interesting. So

18:39 I would have thought he'd be richer. If you own all half the blueberries in the world, wouldn't you be richer than one point five billion? Yeah. Trunk. Yeah.

18:49 Weak shit. He better be a huge like philanthropist and have given it a lot away. Uh'cause I definitely would have thought he'd be richer, right? Yeah. I mean I guess. I don't know. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna knock him. Um all right, so he believes in Buffett a lot. He loves Buffett. And so he Buffett has this great quote, which is I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman, and I'm a better businessman because I'm an investor. Yeah. So at age seventy.

19:19 He was worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars. So he goes to each of the executives at his companies and he says, Today you're just businessmen. You're not investors. He gives them ten million dollars each. Not as a bonus, but as an investment portfolio that they get to run. And he said. I want them to see how strong companies operate and how weak ones fail.

19:38 There was no penalty for losing the money and no bonus for the gains. It was pure education. Yeah, isn't that like pretty wild to do? So he gave uh uh how many managers did he have? Uh I don't know. Six teams. So sixty million bucks. He gave them what, like a stock portfolio or or he gave them ten million dollars in total. Ten million dollars to go invest go buy businesses. Oh within the their their portfolio. Sure.

20:02 Wow, okay. That's badass. That's crazy. And this was at age seventy, and then he's like, Most people stop learning once once they become successful, but the outliers never stop being students. Love that. Uh resonated with me. All right. What else resonated with me? Let me give you one more. Shane went to his office, uh, which is really cool, and he's eighty four years old doing a podcast.

20:26 Like that's That's Amazing that he's with it and he's sharp and he's Had this pod. Dude, when I'm eighty-four, I'm gonna be in the metaverse.

20:36 I'm gonna be so just like plugged into what everybody's doing in the future. I hope. All right. You want to do one or you want me to go? Have you read about United Fruit? If we're gonna talk about fruits. Haven't you read about United Fruit. United Fruit, is that the banana king guy? Man, that's a great book. I'm in the middle of reading it, and it's the story of United Fruit, which is uh basically centered around bananas.

20:58 So like You wanna do the quick story? I think we've talked about it before, but it's it's on theme. It's on trend. In the uh the late eighteen hundreds, I think bananas were discovered. I think in Nicaragua. or somewhere in Central America and They brought'em to America. Yeah, we we want every banana we can get our hands on. We love it. Uh, it even got to the point where like I think in the nineteen twenties when immigrants would land at Alice Island, we gave them a banana and that was like, You're here now. This is Amer this American thing. And it's sort of American because when you get to Hawaii and they give you the lay and like

21:29 a banana and this the banana company, United Fruit, it became so big that it was basically a monopoly, and they did the same thing where they tried to hide that they weren't a monopoly for years and years and years. And Sam the banana man, I think his name's Samuel Zamuri. He was I think a Ukrainian immigrant. And he started out like uh with like a fruit cart, like walking the streets, and his whole thing was he would sell ripes. And so the way it worked is a banana train would start in one part of the country, I believe Louisiana, and it would slowly make its way up over seven or eight days to the northern part of America. And along the way, it would drop off at bananas at different markets. And his whole shtick was uh he was gonna sell ripes, meaning bananas that were already becoming a little bit brown that they previously thought were

22:13 Uh throw away bananas and he was like, Oh, I'll buy them for a fraction of the price and I'll just be really fast at getting them to where they need to go. And he eventually becomes so big that by the time he's in his sixties, he he takes over United Fruit and it's a big Well he he starts with a hundred fifty dollars. And by the time he's twenty one, he's got a hundred thousand dollars. And it's

22:32 Way back in the day, right? So this is like a lot that's a lot of money. And it keeps on going. And it gets to be and that's you're saying he's basically He starts as just like a dude on the dock or whatever, like a dude on the side of the road. Taking their discarded trash. And going and hustling it and selling it.

22:48 And by the time he reaches his peak, he buys the in he buys the whole company. Yeah. Where he was initially just like taking their discarded trash. And the book is called The Fish That Ate the Whale because he was the fish and he eventually ate the whale. But it gets even crazier. So Samuel Zamuri, he has a lot of admirable qualities. You know, he's this like hardworking immigrant, he's pretty quiet. Uh, and he's like a stoic guy. But he's kind of a warlord uh because because uh at one point uh Nicaragua like they have like some type of meltdown and a new president or dictator comes in charge and they won't sell them bananas and so he funds a coup.

23:27 So he basically gets like a small unit of like ten or twenty people. To like h help this other guy assassinate the current leader and take over. And that leader was like all right, thanks for getting our back. Now you can have some more bananas. And uh so that's kinda like the story of Zam Samuels Demurray. It's pretty badass. Got that killer instinct, let's go. Um

23:49 Y yeah, that's this is it's pretty wild, right? Like Imagine a story like that today. Is there such a thing uh I can't think of uh I mean Yeah, what Elon does in Rockets is like pretty like you're you're kinda like dominating another

24:06 planet uh like potentially I mean that's like the crazy of like the Republican Party this year. Like going to the point of like Actual Like funding a militia. I guess like Donald Trump is doing this, like where he's like for shits and giggles, I'm gonna like play a joke and run for president and it just kinda starts to work. Uh but Yeah, I mean it's a pretty crazy story. Um

24:30 Yeah, so It's been great. So I did something this weekend and I thought about you and I've been holding this in me, like waiting to like talk to you about this. But like a like a man in Lanter or or uh November. Holding it in. Yeah. Oh man. Uh yeah. If you know, you know.

24:48 Uh so I saw a Broadway play for the first time ever this weekend. Phenomenal. Wow. We have it all. Uh it's called Oh Mary. It's basically about uh Mary Todd, who was Lincoln's wife. And it's just like a comedy. It's it was fantastic. Never been to a never really been to a play, honestly, my whole life.

25:07 Because you judged it or just happened to not go, what what's the deal? Yeah, I don't know. Like you know, I it just went on the list of things to do. It just didn't it just didn't it didn't make its way into my life and I finally went. The first thing is I thought of you because you had made an offhanded comment a while ago that you cared about like writing a writing a show. Yeah, I just thought it'd be cool. I went and saw one and I was like, Oh, that would be kinda f a fun Fun thing to work on. Yeah. So you had the same thing I did, which is like it was like a new art form that you hadn't previously experienced, and then you go to it and you're like

25:35 I understand the appeal now. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. I had gone to a bunch when I was a kid and so I think I liked it. from that. Like I was a theater kid when I grew up, so I I liked it. Now, how's it related to this podcast? Well, for one, if you Google O'Mary revenue. You can see there's a website called Broadwayworld.com.

25:56 Where they estimate Um the the revenue of each show. I guess they look at like if they're selling out and uh the average ticket price online. And this thing, oh Mary. I think it's been live uh for uh uh June of twenty four it came out.

26:11 And it's been making uh a million dollars a week. So it's doing quite well. And It started off with about four million dollars in funding to to get going. And it all reminded me of this podcast that we did about two and a half years ago. You you didn't make it, but we had this guy named Michael Harris. Did you ever look into who Michael Harris was?

26:30 Wha what was it? Which record label was he the the guest? Yes, the founder? Yeah. So the short of it is uh some people call him Harry Ocause his name's Michael uh Michael Harris, they call him Harry O, like Harry OG gangster. So Harry was famous because in his early twenties He was basically a drug hang and he made a lot of money.

26:50 uh selling cocaine. And at one point in the podcast with him, I said, Yeah, you and I was trying to be nice. I was like, you know, I instead of saying you are a drug dealer, I said, I read an article saying that The article said that you were selling one million Yeah. I think that article said two million dollars a day. Uh you think I told that journalist it was two. I was like, Yes, sir. Uh and eventually at the age of like thirty two, I think, he gets sentenced to life in prison, one for attempted murder, one for cons uh drug conspiracy, which basically is like the Rico Kingpin law.

27:29 And he had a life sentence. And recently, I think like ten years ago, Trump commuted his sentence and that's how he got out of prison. And when he was thirty two years old, he founded Death Row Records with Doc Dere and Sug Knight while he was serving a life sentence in San Quentin. And that's like how uh Death Row got started and one of the reasons why it's called Death Row is because he was wait, they co founded it with him while he was in prison? And what did they Would they want from Wait, what was he able to offer them while he was

27:57 In prison for life. Money. Money. So his wife his his wife was on the outside. Okay. Uh, and she somehow had funds to fund Death Road Records, you know. Right. Now, how does this relate to Broadway? Well, on the podcast that I did with him, he said something that I didn't pounce on because I wasn't I didn't know anything about it, but he made this comment to me.

28:19 Where When he was Twine, I think. He was the first ever black producer of a Broadway musical or Broadway show. And he kinda s told the story

28:32 But basically somehow he got in cahoots. You know, he was he was considered Uh like well known for being like a drug guy and hope you said cahoots to him right after I said okay. Which button ends this podcast? I was like holy moly. Harry Oh, you dog. Holy moly, Harry. So uh somehow he got in the the loop at this. But he funded Denzel Washington, an early Denzel Washington, his first ever play.

29:15 Damn. Michael Harris, Harry O was the fund he was the investor that funded the show with a million dollars. I think this was in ninety three or ninety two, when Denzel he was just getting going. Yeah. Telling this story and while uh while I was at this play, I was like Holy crap.

29:33 This guy got his way into being the first ever producer of Broadway, like while I was there. I'm like Oh my God. Like he was so much cooler than I even realized. D if I invested in Denzel before he became Denzel That's like you know you know how Jason Calicanus is like I was saying he's the fourth investor at Uber. I would never shut up about it.

29:55 Goo Google um Michael Harris Denzel Washington. You'll see a photo of them together. And Michael Harris looks like a like a well to do guy, he's wearing a suit. Turns out he was Only I think twenty nine or twenty eight in these photos. And he he was a drug kingpin. Kind of amazing, right? Yeah, that's that's incredible. When he was twenty six uh twenty six or something. Was he twenty six? Like I think he was he was pretty young.

30:18 Very young and like allegedly had made something like a hundred million dollars selling drugs. Pretty crazy. And i when I was like sitting there in this play, I was like obviously what what do you and I do when we do everything? We go to the play and you type in like oh Mary Revenue on Google. And I started seeing the numbers and I'm like, It's like the plays going on in front of you. You're turned around counting how many seats are in the upper bleachers and they're like, Are you watching the show? What are you doing here? And this is how I remembered uh Michael Harris saying that, where it all like clicked together when I was like, Oh my God.

30:50 Do you know how much revenue these shows generate? I'm looking at uh it's a it's astounding. It's astounding. The number one This I'm just gonna give you the top top five. Top five highest grossing Broadway sh musicals of all time. You have number one Lion King.

31:05 gross over two billion and just Just the ticket sales. Wicked. One point seven billion. Phantom of the opera, one point three. Hamilton, which is new newer, already crossed a billion.

31:16 Insane, right? Our guys. From South Park. Are they number one? They're number five Book of Mormon. Number five, eight hundred and fifty million dollars. That could be us, dude. We just need to be talented and hard working. They are so talented. When I was at the show, I was like it's just they're oozy with talent. One of the guys, um

31:42 Abe Lincoln, the character was played by uh what's the guy from Silicon Valley, Kunal? Is uh is that his name Oh he's in the play? Yeah, he's in the play. And it's like it was like famous actors and actresses were like in the plays. He's like a jacked Indian Abe Lincoln. Like what do you me what do you mean he played Abe Lincoln? It sounds crazy and honestly it is crazy. The guy who played Mary Todd Uh was it. was a guy. Uh so like it's all tights of crazy. Yeah, there's a it's a it's a whole thing. Uh, but I just had to like

32:09 nerd out with you about this. So I looked into this pretty hardcore. Um so it's definitely a like outlier hits business just like most angel investing. Yeah. It's angel investing because uh and then I was looking at the venues. I was like Should I own the best venue in San Francisco? Like can I go buy The San Francisco like, you know, uh the I forgot what it's called, like the the the theater or the opera house, whatever. There's like a bunch of there's like three or four different um theaters for this. And I was looking at them'cause the theaters make money either way,'cause the shows have to pay rent. They gotta be like, Hey, we wanna do sixty days on stage. They're like, Great.

32:41 Take your money, right? Whether that show becomes a hit or not, they paid the money up front. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Then I was looking at the shows. Then I was looking at how much it costs to produce the shows. Uh,'cause I just seen the one about Lehman Brothers, which I recommend, by the way. It's like a It's too long.

32:57 First of all, it's way too long. Dude, the one that I went to, we only went to it'cause it was ninety minutes. I can't sit there for more than ninety minutes. Yeah. Less is more, guys. Uh less is more here in the theater. But Um But it was great and it was b uh it was business entertainment, which is what I consider to be my genre. And I was like, damn, if they could take I wasn't even interested in h learning about the Lehman brothers.

33:17 If they took an uninteresting subject to me. But they made it great and I remember the story because of it. This is cool. This is a really cool format. And so yeah, I'm definitely uh definitely interested in that. If somebody actually knows how to do these things, I would love to uh To talk to you. Email me. Maybe we could make some make something. We were a story in mind, but uh Tim Ferris on the pod and like the top comment on YouTube was like

33:39 Rich guys finally discover board games. And like that's what I've got to a rich guy's part. I was like, Yeah, hell yeah. No one's gonna be like The bros discover plays. Like Sam, they were singing in the middle of the talking one second, then they're singing. It's all part of the story. Listen up the old playbook is slowing you down. AI.

34:09 Broke the funnel. Loop marketing. Fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing traffic, channels are fragmented. And generating leads feels less predictable than ever before. HubSpot's loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption.

34:25 It's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter. The modern growth playbook for the AI era. Built by HubSpot. Designed for today's marketer. Get the loop marketing playbook at hubspot.com slash loop dashmarketing. To find out more.

34:40 and leave your competition behind. All right. Back to the pod. Alright, I got one more.

34:46 Uh cool business story for you. So I'm watching a lot of sports lately. I don't know it's like a like everything's kicking out like football season just kicked off. Tennis was awesome. Um

34:56 By the way, did you see the have you been following do you follow tennis? I went last year and like I kinda watched a little bit on TV. The the Russian gal. She's she's an athlete, bad. She's a freak. What's her name? Sabelenka, I think. She looks like a terminator. Yeah.

35:14 So I follow uh I've I I've gone in and out of tennis, right? There's many years where I won't even pay attention. Then there's like, oh my God, Nadal, he's amazing, and I'm watching these guys and the A great tennis match. is up there. It's like very thrilling to watch a great tennis match.

35:31 It's like a great UFC fight. Like there's some sports where Um You know, the m the median game is like really good. I put like you know, NFL in that category. But then there's some sports where there's the peak. It's just like peak drama, right? Boxing and UFC are like that. We're like the average thing's not that good.

35:50 But the peak, the biggest personalities when it's all on the line and it's w Just two guys going in there and they're t trying take each other's head off. Like it's hard for a basketball game to match that. Okay. So tennis, um tennis is kind of up there in that sense. So there's the new the new wave uh uh of tennis players. So this guy Alcaraz and um this guy sinner. Did that happen? Did the men's final happen? It just happened, yeah. And so um so I really wanted to send her to win because I just like went down the rabbit hole of this guy's YouTube highlights and he's on unreal. And um

36:18 And the other guy is also real uh unreal, but he's He's unreal when it's in the sense of like um Do you know a guy who just like does all the right things? So he eats right, he works outright, like he just does it. He just like prepares really hard. He's very talented. He's maximizing his potential. It's not like uh there's not a lot of like

36:38 flaws to like attach with there. You know, there's not a lot of like it's like oh see work hard and do all the right things. Great. Yeah, that's fantastic. Um In fact, they showed the warm up right before'cause I think Trump showed up at the US Open. So it was delayed like half an hour or an hour or something like that. And so the guys are just in their locker room, like supposed to be warming up. And Alcaraz is like

36:58 You know, doing a side plank. in midair with his trainer and like activating his core to get ready. And the other guy was playing dodgeball with his trainer and like running around the gym, like just throwing balls at each other. So I was like I was like I kinda like this other guy. Um Anyways, they go out there, Sinner loses, and he just keeps losing to Alcaraz. He's the he's the he's ranked number one because he beats everybody else. But Alcaraz has beat him, I don't know.

37:24 four out of the five last times that they've faced each other. And he's like I and so he had this great quote. Then I thought like, forget tennis. This is just like a great like mindset quote. So They were talking about like, you know, hey You know, it must be tough. You're at the top and then you you're ranked number one, but this guy seems to You know, you've had some tough matches, this guy's got your number a little bit.

37:44 And here's what he said. He goes I was very predictable on the court today. He changed up his game and the style of how he plays. And now it's on me if I wanna make changes or not. I'm definitely gonna work on this.

37:54 You know, for example, I didn't use a lot of drop shots. I didn't do one serve in volley. You know, you arrive at a point where you're gonna play this guy I gotta go out of my comfort zone. So here's what I'm gonna do. I need to start playing more unpredictably. I might even lose some matches, but I'm gonna have to do it. I'm gonna have to make some changes. I'm gonna have to try to become more unpredictable as a player. That's what I have to do to become better at tennis. And at the end of the end of the day, that's my main goal.

38:18 And I really just love this mindset from the number one ranked guy who's beating everybody else. And he's like, You know what? I'm here. But the top of the mountain is still a little higher. But this path I'm on doesn't get me to the summit.

38:31 I gotta go back down for a bit. And I gotta find a new trail. And that is so hard to do in life. It is so hard to go back to one of these things where he's like bottom. And reinvent yourself.

38:41 He's like I'm gonna I'm gonna learn how to play tennis, but I'm really learning how to play the game of life. It's like one of those tip type of moments. Totally. Totally. Like and and to be like I'm gonna lose I'm gonna probably lose some more matches because I'm gonna have to learn this I'm gonna have to experiment with this new style and that's gonna suck, but I'm gonna do it. And like I've whatever you're doing in life that analogy probably holds for you right now. Whether it's you as a parent, it's you in the book that you're writing, it's you at your job, it's you in your business, like whatever it is.

39:08 I guarantee you there's an element of like, if I want to get to the next level What I've been doing doesn't probably get me there. And I need to like be willing When the time comes, when the when I recognize the moment

39:20 I need to be willing to go back down the mountain for a little bit and then come back up a new way. I uh w ha have you ever heard of this guy named Meb Gerflusky? If you Googled him, that's a hard name. But if you Google Marathon Meb M E B, you might recognize his face. Marathon Meb? M E B. You see Mab?

39:43 I don't recognize this guy. He's fifty. Yeah. So I think in two thousand and four he was the gold medalist in the Olympics, uh in the marathon for America, but he's an immigrant and so when he won, it was sort of one of these things where Everyone got behind him'cause he's a nice guy and it was like the American dream type of energy. And I think it got to the point where he uh

40:05 Like spoke at Obama's a bu a bunch of Obama events and and and whatever. He's he's a big deal. He's uh He's great. His brother listens to M F M, his brother Howie. And he reached out to me when he heard that I liked running and I've been friendly with him for a couple of years now. And this past weekend was this thing in New York called the Fifth Avenue Mile. And so they get all these guys, these Olympian milers, and they get them to run one mile down Fifth Avenue, which is basically a huge street and it's slightly down.

40:34 No, no, no. They shut it down. It's a big event. It's like a huge event. And there's Tens of thousands of people there. And so I went with Howie and I got to like be like his like sidekick. So in Howie, who uh He runs a management company who um

40:49 He originally how he was managing his brother Meb, now he manages other runners because he Meb was like, Can you do can you help me make more money? And he was like, Yeah, fine, I'll do it. And then eventually now he manages I don't know, forty runners or something. And a lot of his athletes were running at this race. And so I got to be his like assistant basically and he like took me in, like I got to meet all these cool people, whatever. And these guys are flying by the way. I think the guy who won ran three minutes and forty six seconds for the mile, which is which is crazy. And the guy who won What's your mile time? Dude, back in high school, a minute slower. Four minutes and forty seven seconds. Okay, Ted Bundy now. What's your time now? Not your time. That was not my question. Seven minutes. So wait, did you run it or you just hung out with Howie and hell no, I didn't run it. I was watching. I was watching. I was just sitting on the sidelines.

41:38 And we got to watch these guys run. And they look like uh gazelles. They look like animals. It's like crazy. And I was asking him, I was like, What separates so like 'Cause when I was watching the race The winner. And the guy who got third, they're really close. Like it it doesn't seem very far when you see'em, but like it's like a second

41:58 Is only It's not that much, but it is a lot when you're running. And I was like what separates Neguse, the guy who won? Uh what separates him from from the guy who got last? Because They look kind of look the same. They're tall and they're skinny and they look like freaks. Like what's going on? And he was like, it's mindset. He's like once you get to this level and you're already a nine out of ten

42:19 What separates the guys that get first versus last in these big races is when they step on the lines. They're killers. He goes, he wants to kill you. And he acts like a nice guy. But the when they when they step there, they think

42:32 I am here to win. I am built to win. I am not trying to finish second. I am trying to be the best and I'm trying to win no matter what. And I was like, Well your brother was like a happy go lucky guy. Like he looks like really kind and he was like, Yeah, he is But he would sit down for hours and envision winning the New York marathon. And then when he got to the starting line You couldn't talk to him. He was an animal. He was out to win.

42:55 And I thought that was really fascinating. And I'm always finding it fascinating, particularly in sports, particularly in these uh uh individual sports, tennis, swimming. track and field, cycling, I think we had Lance on and like we talked to him a little about this. What separates These The freaks of the freaks. What makes you a freak among freaks? And it appears as though it is not physical. It is absolutely mental.

43:18 Running my company Hampton, it gives me the chance to meet with hundreds of different businesses. And I'm always surprised by how many of them still use spreadsheets. Emails and clunky tools that do not talk to each other. It's like watching someone build a house with duct tape. So here's my take. Custom software that actually fits your needs isn't just convenient. It's a competitive advantage to transform the way you do business.

43:40 And that's why you need to know about a no code platform called Bubble. With bubble, you can build powerful web and mobile apps by literally dragging and dropping different elements out of the screen. No coding required. By the way, I use bubble on a ton of different apps, including Hamton. And if you want help.

43:57 building something complex on bubble, you have to bring in zero code. They're the top bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plug in creator for the platform. They can build anything, custom portals, SaaS products, and they do it about ten times faster and cheaper than traditional development. Zero code is also all about AI business automation, transforming manual and slow processes into efficient automated ones. So stop cobbling together different tools and solutions and head to zero code.com. That's zero code as in the word zero and then code Q O D E. Again, code is with a Q. And tell them that Sam sent you.

44:32 Have you heard this um phrase. You probably heard it'cause you're like into running, but I d I don't Don't run. I don't do it.

44:41 It's not a it's like motorcycles, I just don't get on that. Um so Uh one of the guys who was filming for us, he was talking about this he wants to film this documentary about this woman and she's like this amazing long distance runner. I I don't know her name, you probably do. But the point is she he was talking about this phrase called The pain cave. Yeah, we go to the pain cave.

45:03 You go to the pain cave. Yeah. Not into running? But I'll just take that phrase out. That was a cool phrase. Like He's like so the pain cave describes like when you're in these like ultra long races, hundred mile race or whatever.

45:17 And it's like mile sixty or seventy. You hit this just like extreme level of like physical, mental, spiritual exhaustion and pain. And you Go to the pain cave.

45:31 And I'm like, but what do you mean what does that mean? You go to the pain cave. He's like, You go to the pain cave mentally, okay? And you basically I mean you you probably describe it better than I can, but my understanding was You accept. That there's gonna be this stretch where you're gonna be this in between pain. You go to the pain cave, you know you're there, you become comfort, you become Not comfortable, but enough y you've you become um acclimated to the pain cave.

45:53 And you're able to stay there where others want to quit and other and you even want to quit, others would quit. And then you push through and you end up getting, you know, to the to the second to the you get your second way and you get out of there and you get get to the end. Um Did I did I butcher the pancake or did I describe it? No, no, no. And a lot of you visited I've been on vacation uh a couple times. No, I I was training for an ultra before and it was miserable and I hated it and I remember going out for a three hour run. And it just is it's it's horrible. It it's not a fun experience.

46:24 And like you get to a certain point and what's it's Crazy to do a sport. Or an activity. Where even if you are winning You go through hell.

46:34 So we had Brennan Schab on the on the pod, uh, who is a former UFC fighter, and he said that One time he was fighting on a on a card and the guy who was fighting above him, Crowkop, who was the main guy, afterwards Brennan uh saw the Crow Cop like on a stretcher and Crow Cop had just won the championship, but Crow Cop still had gotten hurt. And he was sitting on a stretcher holding ice on his head or something like that. And he looked horrible. Like he just got beat up really badly, even though he won. And Crow Cop was like, give him a thumbs up and Brennan was like

47:04 These animals think that this is winning. And that's why I'm not going to be the best. It's because even when you win You are beat down and broken and they still are giving you a thumbs up of like yes We did it. And that's what separates the winners from the losers is the guys who like are willing to go through the pain cave because in a lot of sports, I think it's so fascinating. And I honestly I think this way about business or anything really in life, that uh when you win

47:30 and you get everything you wanted, you still have to go through hell. And that's kind of fascinating and interesting to me. It's like the the the mindset of of of these winners who can T. Eat so much.

47:42 Shit. And honestly, business is the same way. It's not as physical, but it's still emotional where even if you think that you're on top of the world or things are going well. I don't know if you've experienced this where but where everyone on the outside thinks like, Oh, you're the man, you must be killing it. I'm like, dude, it's really, really hard and it feels like it's gotta fall apart all the time. Yeah, I find that um These phras like pain cave or whatever there's some there's a lot of power in just having Like a label to put on a thing.

48:09 So that when you're feeling it, you don't feel like this is This is a bad thing that you don't panic. Um, and you don't feel like it's forever. You realize it's like a temporary phenomenon. And so I I know that one of the things that people brought up to me is that Um this analogy that's been very useful.

48:25 And it's like if you're gonna be an entrepreneur. Um You know intellectually. There's gonna be these ups and downs. If I told you that, nobody would be surprised at that idea.

48:34 Yeah, when it's happening. You're like, Whoa you got that feeling in your stomach when you're going up and down a roller coaster and it does not feel good and you want it to stop and you don't like it and you think this is bad. And then you're like But the thing we talked about on the podcast is like

48:49 You got in line for the roller coaster. Like what What did you think was gonna happen? You stood in line, you waited, you chose this first. Um, you knew this is the nature of roller coasters and that there are no there are no ups without downs, there's no downs without ups. Like you this is has to be It's a necessary condition.

49:08 So don't complain and don't be surprised and don't feel like woe is me and don't victimize yourself and don't think this is forever because it's not. And so like that's been a very helpful metaphor for people is just remembering like You got a line for the roller coaster, baby. Like you there was gonna be ups and downs. Don't be surprised when they come. And an a a tactical thing that's helped me is I have this Slack channel I've told people about. It's called Highs and Lows. And any time there's an extreme high or an extreme low.

49:32 I go Immediately I put it in that channel. And might put my exec team in there as well. And Well the beautiful thing about it is

49:39 When you go in there. You see something from like Four to six months ago. That was like an extreme low in the moment or an extreme high in the moment. And now it has like no effect. You're like, ah Obviously we s if there was a load, like obviously we survived, it was fine.

49:53 And even if it was a high was like Doesn't have that same pull. And so it keeps you from In this moment going too high and too low,'cause you could just scroll back and see all the other moments. But

50:04 In the heat of the moment you thought were such a you know, such an extreme and now are like whatever, you know, m just random random things of the past. How often are you adding stuff to that? All right, so last one was four months ago. And it was oh cool. Trump just tariffed all of our goods a hundred and fifty percent. So like imagine a thing used to cost us ten dollars. Now we pay the ten dollars.

50:29 But then we pay an extra fifteen dollars. That same item costs us twenty five dollars. That's the full sales price of some items, you know what I mean? Like oh cool, we make no money now. Oh, got it. Cool. Uh business make the money, thing out of our control, like got it. The and then there was another one And then there's a high.

50:47 Two months before that. When you know this celebrity with six million followers is posting about our brand. And it's like oh That's awesome. But like now that I look at it, I'm like who cares? I don't care. Nothing I like nothing my life didn't change for either one of those two things. My life didn't change. We got through the bot we got through the low and I already forgot about the high. You know, another one.

51:06 Rihanna's manager emailed us asking for product. Like, you know, they she Rihanna wants her shit. That's cool. That's exciting. W wait, hold on. Was Brianna asking for free stuff?

51:17 Yeah. Yeah, they always stuff. Really? Yeah. Rich people don't pay for things. That's insane to me.

51:23 You thought we're sure you'll buy things? They request things. Are you Gladly give it to them. Have you DM'd I I think I've I've done it maybe twice. Have you DMed people asking for free stuff?

51:36 Asking for free stuff. Uh No. I've never DMed anyone. I think I've been like Yo, this is a great pro if anybody wants to send me one, I'm happy to take it. Like that's the I think that's the lowest I've stooped. I don't think uh maybe I have, I don't I can't remember ever DMing asking for his free stuff.

51:51 In fact, like we usually we go the other way, which is like if it's like a friend's product or somebody we know. We wanna be their like first customer and we want to like purchase it to like show'cause you know, like Yeah, feels good and seems like the right thing to do. Another one. Christmas Eve.

52:07 On Christmas Eve this last year, the Mexican president blocked all imports. So like hey, that's cool. Our warehouses in Mexico and On Christmas Eve. Uh all the ports are blocked.

52:19 With no notice and no there's no other thing you could do. Do you have a coup staging team? This is just in one business. This is just in the ecom business. This is not even like I have five other businesses. So imagine. Like if this is probably there's a high or low every two months. Three months maybe. But now you multiply by six businesses.

52:43 That means every single month you're getting hit with a high and a low in one of the businesses. I think it was um Cool. You so you said something actually that was quite good, which is uh it feels nice to label certain demotions'cause it makes it feel better. I went through a period. It's sort of what's that that's we always reference that meme where like Yeah.

53:02 This is like the opposite of that, which is like when I was really young and not very successful, I consumed tons of motivational stuff. And then I started like doing some stuff and I'm like, Oh That's for weaklings. Yeah, I'll bold it. Now I'm like, No, I actually do like reading about like other success stories and uh good quote nowadays. Yeah, like I I actually do love that stuff because it feels nice to like label something. It's sort of like when you read a book and you're like, well that was the best books, they you people say the same thing about them. They go, Everything they said was obvious. But it felt nice for them to say it out loud for me to read it and to be told what to do and remind me of the right things to do. And that has helped me uh all the time. I that's like I pretty much read like lots of like or it's actually my YouTube page is like only motivational shit. Here's the trick.

53:51 So I've rebranded it. Just liking motivation. That's a pretty low class thing to do. Okay. That's You know, very low status. Low status. Oh oh I need motivation.

54:03 I'm so It's a week. It's like I need a blood transfusion, is basically what you're saying. You don't need motivation. You don't like motivation. You like wisdom.

54:11 Yeah. High class thing to like. All right. There. I helped you out. I listen to tons of wisdom. My favorite wisdom channel speaker. Yeah. There's this YouTube channel called Motivation for You. Best the best wisdom. I'll give you another little label. So I was reading this book.

54:35 Um another high class thing they do I found this like old book out of print. Had to like Call a guy to get this book. And it's like it's amazing. It is such a such a thin book, and it's it's really amazing. But I'm not even gonna tell anybody about it. It's my secret gem. And so in it though, he talks about It's a book about Um how to have better ideas.

54:55 So he's like this this is great advertising exec who's basically like He's like You know, and somebody asked me this and I laughed when they asked me the question. And then I realized I didn't have a good answer for it.

55:05 He's like and then I started thinking about it. I couldn't get this question out of my head. And he's like I have now come to the realization that Producing great ideas. can be as reliable of a process as for producing model T's on the assembly line. And here's how the assembly line works to produce great ideas. And one of the things he says in the book, he goes,

55:22 This is just a great quote. He goes, The brain, much like the body, has a second wind. And'cause he's talking about like there's gonna be this point, like Pen Cave, there's a point in the process Or you kind of fatigue out? He's like And you're just gonna hang in there for like

55:35 Give it there's gonna be another you have a little like ten, fifteen percent left. You're just gonna give yourself a chance for the brain to have a second win, much like the body. And literally like the for the last two weeks as I've been working. I've hit this point where I'm like ready to like stop the thing, go be distracted. I'll go I wanna open up Twitter or I wanna go like go do go eat some food or do something. And it is

55:56 The brain the brain has a second one. Let me just give it a second here. And then I push through for like another fifteen minutes and it's actually like been like very, very productive. This little once one little simple idea. Can I g make a guess as to who wrote that and Ignore this if it gives away too much. It was by a copyrighter if I had a guess. Is that right? It was by an ad man, yeah. So copyrights. It's crazy. Copywriters

56:17 Like there's this weird underground world. I don't know. I don't know if you've ever have noticed this. There's copywriters out there. Where They sort of have a weird mystical like wizardry about them. And they end up learning about copywriting, but in order to be a great copywriter, you have to understand how humans think.

56:36 And then if you could if you could be a master copywriter, you're basically a master at learning about what motivates human beings and thus you can teach all about life. But I've come across all these guys that are like old school internet marketers, but also of people who are around even before the internet. And they often have these weird auras around them. that if you find a bunch of their old landing pages, they explain some of the things that you're talking about. And you get on their web pages and you're like I have to give you my money. And there's not even a buy now button. I have to track you down. But I've come across a bunch of these guys. One of them is um Bill Bonner, the guy who started Agora. So Agora Publishing is like the billion dollar a year. Um

57:14 Newsletter business that is um quite shady. But another one is Mark Ford. Do you know who Mark Ford is? No. Who's that? So he has this book called The Ready Fire Aim. On business.

57:25 And he's pretty under the radar guy. I think he's probably in his seventies at this point, but he helped make Agora really popular. There's uh Ebon Pagan. Do you know who Ebon Pagan is? Yeah. W dating. W Evan Pagan was a guy who was one of the first uh internet marketers because he got going in the nineties when the internet was just getting going and he had a an ebook called W Your Dating and he wrote it under a pseudonym called uh David DAngelo. And Evan Pagan is another guy where if you Google Evan Pagan and come across his courses or books on copywriting, you get entranced. And it sort of becomes like a moment where you're like, I used to think this way, then I read this, now my life has just changed. Evan Pagan was one of those guys. A lot of old Russell Brunson stuff is like this. Um, but there's a copywriting world that like you come across these old guys, or they're not old, Russell Brunson's not old. These guys are age. No. I mean like underground. I don't know how to explain it. No, yeah, th it's like almost like they rule the world, but they're not it it it today they're less

58:24 uh relevant and f on the forefront and up in in in the center of attention as they were fifteen years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago, there's a bunch of people like that. Yeah, and what happens and and a lot of people don't realize it is you can just copy exactly what they do. And it still works and you don't have to invent anything. So I'll give you an example. There's this guy named Dan Kennedy, we talked about Alex Hermosy. And a lot of people say this to Alex as if it's an insult. I don't think it's an insult at all, but they'll say, You just ripped off Dan Kennedy. And so I started reading a bunch of it's not an insult at all. It's totally okay to steal from the the greats. But if you read a lot of Dan Kennedy's stuff, first of all, if you Google Dan Kennedy, you're gonna see what he looks like and you're probably

59:03 You you'd probably dismiss them, be like, Oh, what does this person know about business?'Cause he literally looks like a cowboy. But you read their books and their advice is beautiful so long as you come with an open mind. And it's incredibly effective, but it's sort of like um We talked about uh books that where you say phrases like oh it's ban in prison'cause it's too powerful. Yeah. They all have catchphrases like that. I love copyright. It I think there's certain professions where It's almost like um Darwinian, right? So like the only way to survive as a copywriter.

59:32 Let's say that was your your goal and a copyrighter, then we'll kind of extend that to like an adman, right? Um, like the Ogovies of the world. And The only way to survive. is to have these breakthrough ideas

59:44 And be super persuasive with the written word. So it's like a an animal that was grew that was on an island and the animal had to develop this shell if it needed if it was gonna survive. That was the only way to survive in that climate. And so If you want to get great at persuasion, you want to get great great at the written word. You could learn from a bunch of people. You can learn from an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs.

1:00:06 But those guys in order to do what they did, they grew up in a th th they had to have um other disciplines that they were great at. And they could be good or maybe even really good at copywriting. But There's people who That was the only way that they could make it.

1:00:20 And so those people have like sharpened that. And then you see this with a bunch of different things. So you see this with A lot of investors. When we have'm on the podcast we're Wow, like I wanted to ask you about like stocks and like

1:00:32 You know, analysis But ninety five percent of the things you thought you think about and talk about is like mastering your own like your own psychology. And disciplining yourself and like learning like impulse control. And learning how to like be a little you know, to to think for yourself. And be comfortable in your own skin.

1:00:49 And it's like yeah, that's actually what That's the thing it was required in order to be great in the investment world. Combination of like independent thinking and then like self control. And uh playing the long game and patience, right? And then you talk to people who are, you know, maybe comedians And comedians are like wow, you're actually like kind of a truth teller. It's like that's kind of what

1:01:10 comedy is is like basically like seeing things for what it is that nobody's saying out loud, and then we say it out loud and then everybody laughs because everybody knew it. Um, and so you realize like, Well, these comedians are actually like pretty wise and pretty like spot on at spotting like the truth, the underlying truth in society. He's like, Yeah, because if they don't do that, they don't make anyone laugh. And they get boot off the stage and it's horrible. And so the ones who survive are the ones who figure out how to do that one thing at a world class level. And so you could study different disciplines where like The Darwinian you know.

1:01:40 Pressure. The natural selection. force them to become like A plus plus at a certain thing. Who uh who who do you think falls in that category where you learn about them and and they've done the same thing to you? Where you went to them for like

1:01:52 Let's say writing uh And they changed her life. Seinfeld. Seinfeld is the easiest example. So I I wanted this year, I was like, Oh, like Could you like make yourself funnier?

1:02:03 I just sort of a assume that like Yeah, growing up. It's like you either are funny or you're not. And in my house, like my sister's really funny. And so it was always like she's the funny one and she's the great storyteller and I was like the nice kid. And so I always had this probably like

1:02:16 from a young age desire to be more like her. And like today it's so funny. People would be like, From the podcast, I'd be like, Oh yeah, look you're a great storyteller. I'm like, you haven't seen my sister. My sister's amazing at this. I'm just okay. But over time, as I've grown up, I've realized like a lot of these things that seem like you either have it or you don't. Creativity. Humor.

1:02:34 Storytelling. No, these are just skills you can develop. Like you if you just try, you can get way better at it. And so humor was one this this year I went into and I was like Alright, let me just take two weeks and be like Let me just learn what there is to learn. Let me just see if I can make myself funnier. So I went and and studied Seinfeld. So I went for the jokes and then I came out and been like

1:02:52 This man is wise and has some of the like the best Sort of like He has this incredible creative process, like the way he works. Has changed the way I work, like completely, like night and day difference. In what way?

1:03:05 So Seinfeld does this thing in the morning. You you know about this, but like maybe other people don't. Seinfeld for the last forty five years. has a morning routine. Sanfield's morning routine is very simple. He's like, if you want to be a comedian and you wanna write you wanna you know, tell great jokes, you've got to write jokes every day. So he wakes up in the morning, he sits down. With a yellow legal pad, a pen and a coffee. And he has two hours where

1:03:29 Before these pre input pre everything. Nobody no meetings. Nobody can call him. He doesn't read the newspaper. He doesn't check social media, doesn't do anything else. He's like, I'm gonna do two hours of this and then I can do whatever I want for the rest of the day. And he sits down, he does his two hour morning block, his two hour morning routine. He's done that every day for 45 years, to the point where there's a photo.

1:03:46 Where he took the pages from his yellow legal pads over the forty years. And he laid it out on the street, I think in New York. No way. You haven't seen this? No. I'm gonna get it. It literally becomes the yellow brick road. This is awesome. Are you kidding me? This is so cool. So he l to promote his book. So he pro he published a book basically of like all of his like scrap jokes that he didn't put into his standup.

1:04:08 Um, it's called Is Is This Any Is This Anything, I think is the name of the book. But to promote it, he did this yellow brick road of all his yellow pages. And th you know, like for example You know, h how did I work before this, right? I'd wake up, I check Slack, I check my email, I'd then start to think about what I'm gonna do, but then I got kinda hungry, then I go do this, then oh, I had this meeting scheduled at nine. So I'm gonna get to my main thing at eleven. And Just Seinfeld's like keeping it sacred of like, Yeah, what's your main thing? You spend two if you're gonna be creative, you're gonna spend two hours in the morning creating. That's it. Um

1:04:36 Tim Uh Urban from Wait But Why told me the same thing. He goes If all I have to do in life is wake up and spend the first two hours writing. And if I do that, life is amazing. And if I don't do that, my life sucks. He's like, and by the way, it's only two hours. It's not eight hours. It's not ten hours. I don't have to keep grinding all day. Two hours is more than enough if I actually do it. So Seinfeld does that and he talks about writers block.

1:04:57 Where they're like, But Jerry, like what do you do on days where you don't know what to write? Exactly. Uh like what do you do with writer's block? He goes oh You know, it's funny you ask'cause there is no writer's block. And they're like, What do you mean, Jerry? Like

1:05:07 Of course like we have all felt it. There's writers block. She goes no no There's Lazy. There's afraid. There's um having too high of expectations, but there's no writer's block, let's be clear.

1:05:17 And he's like, Here's the security writer's block, you ready? Except your own mediocrity. Don't sit down and think. Today I'm gonna make this great thing. It's gonna be so amazing. I'm the words are gonna flow. I'm gonna make this funny joke because that's what stops you. What you need to do is almost an anti affirmation.

1:05:32 You need to sit down and say, Today I'm gonna sit down, it's gonna be hard to write. The thing I'm gonna come up with is gonna pff Pretty much suck. I'm gonna look at it and I'm gonna hate it. I'm gonna wanna crumble it up and throw it in the trash. It's gonna be that bad. But you know what? I'm gonna put it down on paper anyways. Because every once in a while there'll be a little nugget of something good. And then after I find a little nugget of something good, I might be able to polish it with a ton of work later and make it great. And he's like this sort of like anti affirmation, right? So like I have taken that and completely stolen that as my daily process.

1:06:00 From this guy I went to to learn about like how to make people laugh and I'm like I learned how to work, how to live. Like he talks about. He does transental meditation. They're like, Oh, is that that's really great. Do you love meditation? He goes, No, I just want to write great jokes. He's like But you have to whip the mind, you have to whip the body. He's like, So why do I work out to be a better comedian?

1:06:17 Why do I meditate? To recharge my battery so I can be a better comedian. He's like, All the stuff I do is to be a better comedian He's like He's like, You'll learn pretty quick. If you don't work out You're leaving, you know, some of you on the table from being able to do your best work. If you don't do something like a meditation or trans you know, something to recharge your mental battery.

1:06:33 You're going to do worse work. Like it's just as simple as that, right? Uh, he's got a ton of stuff on that. I've been that's so great. I Jerry, I listened to I listen to a lot of his YouTube videos, his interviews, um, because I it's the same thing where I learn more about life than anything. You know, there's a famous one where he talks about like consultants like and in and comedian uh comedians and making jokes.

1:06:53 So the joke is uh He's getting interviewed by I think like Harvard Business Review. And they go, um, you and Larry David famously wrote Seinfeld together with no writers room, just the two of you guys. You wrote every single season, every episode. And burnout was one of the reasons you stopped the show in the end. Like, you know, you uh was there and he goes, the Harvard Business Review goes.

1:07:16 Was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey Have helped you find a better model and he goes, Who's been taken wait, did they really ask that? Yeah, he goes, Who's McKinsey? And they go, It's a consulting fan. You guys.

1:07:27 Are they funny? He go they go, No. He goes Then I don't need'em. If you're efficient, if you're efficient, you're doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show is successful because I micromanaged it. Every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting, that is my way of life. Did you have this up? Right now. Dude, I have like a dossier of Seinfeld. Like I told I studied this man, like

1:07:50 I went deep on this. That's awesome. Um, have you ever seen him live? Yeah, I've seen Cypher.

1:07:57 Honestly. Wasn't that funny. I was gonna say the same thing don't love his comedy, actually. His his stand up is meh. His writing is the best. But his stand up for some reason is just fine. Yeah. It's like just okay. I've been upset.

1:08:16 touring for fifty years as a comedian. Fifty years. This is a unbelievable Like LeBron James is jealous of Jerry Seinfeld's longevity. There's like fifty years unbelievable longevity as a touring comedian. And He's also I I think was remarkable. He's one of the he's the first

1:08:32 And only billionaire comedian. Mostly because of Seinfeld the show, but also like you know, comedians of cars doing coffee. He sold for like a hundred million dollars. Like he's really touring for a long time. Yeah, Netflix picked up for a hundred million dollars. He's a super he's an outlier.

1:08:46 But the great thing about Seinfeld is if you see him He's not like naturally just oozing charisma and like talent. Like there's some guys that could do amazing impressions. You're like, I could never do that. Right. Or there's other guys that are just like They have just this knack, this gift for gab, but you can just see it like the way they grew up. Like the these guys just so funny. And Seinfeld is like a He looks like an HR manager, right? Like he doesn't look like he's the most naturally talented guy.

1:09:11 And that's kind of why I love it. Like the guy's the most successful comedian. He's because he's just this craftsman. He like squeezed everything out of his natural talent. And I think How often does that really happen? Like how often do people really maximize their potential? Very rare. I remember when I was starting the hustle, Scott Belski like I cold emailed him and he asked him to invest and he didn't want to invest. But then I just like added him to the hustle and I started writing uh like extra good emails.

1:09:37 Uh, and he eventually replied, he's like, This is so good. Can I invest like a very small sum, but I just wanna let you know like the the this is like you're you're fantastic. This is great. And he let me hang out with him. So for the anyone listening, Scott Belski, at this point he's known as like a legendary uh investor. But before he was this amazing investor, he had started Bahance, which which he had sold for I think a hundred and seventy five million dollars. Now he uh he was nearly the CEO of Adobe, which is one of the largest companies in the world. I think now he works at A twenty four, is that right? Like the big shot Hollywood uh

1:10:09 production company. And like chief strategy officer and something else. And I didn't listen to his advice when I when I met with him, and I always regretted that. I didn't listen to his ad his advice. And I didn't understand it until now. He basically was saying the exact opposite of scale, scale, scale. I was like, I need to automate this, I need to hire more people, I need to get away. From

1:10:33 writing this email every day and making it great. I need to add more revenue. I need to get more advertisers. And he was basically like You need to go in a room and just not have anyone around and you just need to write this email every single day for about four or five years. And B uh he used the I'd never heard anyone use the word steward. He was like, You need to be a steward of greatness and a steward of taste for your audience. And I didn't understand what that entirely meant.

1:10:58 But what I thought in my head, I was like, but you're wanting me to act like I'm a small business owner. You're wanting me to act like a craftsman. I was like I'm not trying to be some garage band. I'm trying to be Lady Gaga. Like I'm trying to sell out stadiums. What are you talking about being a craftsman? Do you know what I mean?

1:11:16 I don't understand what you're saying. Why am I gonna say small? I wanna sell out. I don't wanna like that's the whole goal. And it took me years to understand what he meant, which was you can become this like huge successful person and also be a craftsman. You know who honestly does a great job at this and it seems silly, is Dave Portnoy. Dave Portnoy has his had it and I don't even like the comedy anymore, but he's had his hands in it and he's been consistent now for twenty five years and he's ridiculous. He's a ridiculous person. He's sort of obnoxious. But you know what? He's done it. He's done exactly what Scott Belski has said, which is you need to be in the thick of it and you need to be focused purely on creative and you need to be a steward for taste.

1:11:56 And I didn't understand what that meant until I was about thirty two years old. I think he told me this when I was twenty six. And I and I and I was like, Scott, how are you so successful? You don't know anything about business. You're telling me not to like Focus on scaling and all this. Yeah. Gaga, Scott.

1:12:10 Gaga. And but now that I know like some of these people who are actually making the most money are actually still craftsmen. Uh and like and and so like I distinctly remember I'm like I wanna sell out stadiums. I'm trying to sell out. I'm not trying to be a small little like Korean family owned bodega. Like I'm trying to take over the world, baby. You uh you said Dave Portnoy. Uh there's another guy who's like that, Bill Simmons. And uh he's probably you know, he's probably the reason I'm doing a podcast today is because I've back in college in I don't know what what that was, two thousand and seven.

1:12:42 Listening to his To the BS report. You know, I used to like fall asleep listen to the BS report. Like it was like that it was that like and at at the time podcasts were nothing. And he he had been a blogger before that, then he was the ESPN columnist, then he did the podcast, then he did thirty for thirty documentaries. Then he went he gets fired from ESPN because he does the he does the ringer. Why do you get fired?

1:13:04 Um, he was pretty outspoken against Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner. He's like This guy's Like kind of covering shit up and like not He doesn't care. There was like a domestic violence thing. There was like the concussion stuff. And he was basically like he would make jokes, but like the NFL's

1:13:20 ESPN's biggest partner. And so he was g he got suspended a couple of times and then they were just like this guy's too hard to work with. And so they um They killed his project Grantland and they fired him. And so he comes back after licking his wounds a little bit and he comes back with the ringer, which is just the Grantland Grantland again.

1:13:37 Um And he'd been doing this now for like a long time. But he ends up selling to Spotify for two hundred million dollars. And there's a great tweet that was going on uh the other day. So The tweet was basically a video of Simmons and he's Walking through the office.

1:13:52 He's carrying like a chair, like a school chair. And he's carrying a chair and a microphone and he's like um then they're like They're like, Bill, what are you doing? And he's like, a trade had just happened in the NFL, the Micah Parsons trade, just happened. And it's like kind of like a You know, in the grand scheme of things, not like a big story, but like Yeah, it was like the biggest story that week.

1:14:10 And the his company has like fifteen other podcasts. And so there's like this NFL podcast going on. And he's like, I gotta go talk about this. So he's just carrying a chair through the hallway and there's a guy behind him like filming him like, Bill, what are you doing? And uh he just barges in and he like puts down his chair with his microphone and he wants to like talk about it with the guys and they're and somebody tweeted they're like Honestly. Respect. This guy's been doing this for like twenty years.

1:14:32 He's got he's worth like two hundred million dollars. And yet on a like Thursday, he can't wait. He's literally carrying his chair and his microphone and wants to sit with his friends and do his do a podcast about this trade. Like That's kinda goals, you know what I mean? Like that's actually like career goals. And um

1:14:48 That really like I don't know, that that kinda like stuck with me. Like that that is really what you want is like A job that's so fun. And so like so you that it doesn't matter what's the money in the bank, like you really just want to do it. You just want to do the thing. To the point where you're just gonna carry your chair down the hallway and try to find podcast to go do about it, you know? I I thought that was great. Where's he now? So is Grantland still a thing?

1:15:09 Gramlin died with the SPN. He creates the ringer, ringer solar Spotify. And so it's part of Spotify. Um And he's been, you know. Make and bank uh ever since. Why haven't we been able to get him on here? You've talked about him like four or five times as like your number one She's like that girl at the dance I don't want to approach.

1:15:27 Yeah. I'm like Hold on, I just gotta like I'm gonna fix my shirt real quick. I gotta take on my shirt. I gotta go I gotta go get some punch. I'm thirsty. Uh yeah. I gotta do I'll do everything else except for ask him.

1:15:38 Yeah, I mean, he looks pretty awesome. Uh I I I don't know really anything about him. I would I would love to talk to this dude. Uh Uh He seems great and you've talked about him like Yeah. Is he is he?

1:15:50 Yeah. I mean To go from a dude who couldn't even get hired by like A local paper, basically. So he starts blogging early on on the internet. parlays that blog into like getting his own section and being the highest paid sports writer at ESPN.

1:16:05 But the thing is It's not just that he was the highest it's not just that he was successful. He did it his way, like He created an entire style of writing on on like a a publication like ESPN. He basically wrote like a blogger on ESPN. Nobody did that. He wasn't impartial. He was like No, I love

1:16:21 The Red Sox. I love the Patriots. I'm from Boston. What are you talking about? I'm gonna write like a fan. Like I'm a right like a fan and sometimes I'm pissed at what my team is doing, sometimes I'm be excited about it. I'm gonna make a bunch of references to like MTV Road Rules the Challenge. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna do what I'm interested in, even though that makes none of it is like buy the book. And then he does podcasting early on, then he does the documentary series, builds the most successful sports documentary series.

1:16:44 What thirty for thirty? Thirty for thirty. He like it was his brain child. He conceived it. He created it inside of ESPN. Like Nobody believed in it basically and he you know, he kinda fought for it, got it done, and became super successful.

1:16:56 I is Epic, dude. What have you done? And still on the podcast, he um you would never know. So he'll never reference

1:17:05 The fact that like He's basically richer than like a lot of the athletes he covers at this point. He's super well connected to him, but he's tried to like Never really he doesn't let that sort of creep into his content. Also He didn't really rub it into ESPN's face.

1:17:18 Um which he very much could have because they like literally kicked him to the curb and didn't believe in him and told him like Grantland the idea is a failure. Like that that as a money loser doesn't work. And he replicated the same business. and sold it for two hundred million dollars. So you know, like he he he could have done a victory lap and never did. That's awesome. I'm a I'm a

1:17:36 Bill Simmons fan, no. There you go. Should I interview him without you? Yeah, I think you should. So Sean's not your inspiration and he would do anything for you. But there's a couple of these guests were you fangirl, that would be one where I'd be I'd be too much of a fan fangir and uh it really would be counterproductive to the podcast. That would be great. To get you rattled. You're not normally uh someone who gets rattled. Um Alright, that was a good episode. I enjoyed that, but uh that's that's the pot. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to.

1:18:09 I put my law in it like my days off on the road, less travel, never looking back. Alright, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones. There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked it. Maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you can make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, that's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge. And you can get it wherever you get your podcast.

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.