The man who made a billion off blueberries

The man who made a billion off blueberries Speaker 1: Listen up, the old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loop marketing fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search 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. 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-marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod. This guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire. Speaker 2: Love it. In. Speaker 1: In. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days. Speaker 1: Okay, let me give you this one. This is kind of a crazy story. So, do the words John Bragg mean anything to you? Speaker 2: No, they don't. Speaker 1: Didn't mean anything to me either. Shout out to Shane Parrish over at Farnham Street. He did a great podcast with this guy that caught my attention. This guy's story is kind of amazing. So this is basically a farmer billionaire. Speaker 2: Love it. In. Speaker 1: In. There was only two sources for this. Farnham Street and the Van Trump Report had written about this guy. Those are the only things I could find. He's got a biography as well. But all right. So here's this guy's story. I just think there's a bunch of factoids about this guy that I just think you're going to love. You're going to love this guy's whole aura, his vibe. He is the Billy of the Week. Cue the music. Unknown Speaker: A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. Speaker 1: John Bragg, this guy grows up on a family farm, like a sawmill or something like that, and when he's in high school, you know, what do teenagers do? They start to experiment. They start to dabble. Maybe a little bit of, maybe girls, maybe weed. No, no, blueberries. He tries to harvest blueberries for the first time at 13, 14 years old. You know, he starts to, he gets the itch, and then he goes to a local blueberry farmer. He decides, 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 $4,000 each picking blueberries, which was a lot of money at the time because this guy's very old. And he realizes, oh wait, I can pay for college if I just pick blueberries every year. And so he's making, college was like $10,000 or $12,000. He's making $4,000. He realizes, oh, I can do this. My parents otherwise 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 options on the table. Plan A was gonna be to become a teacher, and he was gonna make, I think, like $3,800 or something like that, being a teacher, an extra hundred bucks if he coaches the basketball team or something. And Plan B was, let me go work on the family business, maybe over time, buy out my dad on the sawmill. But he decides to go Plan C. He's like, I think this blueberry thing, 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 alright, but a couple years in he There's a problem in the blueberry industry, which was that one year there was just huge supply glut. So there was way too many blueberries, not enough buyers and prices crashed. And so he's like, shit, you know, could have quit. But he's like, no, no, no, I'm just going to figure out what I should have done differently. He's like, I need basically like a backup plan, a sort of, you know, 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 be where I'm at the mercy of the prices. And so he decides, I think I need to build a packaging and freezing plant for blueberries. Now he's got no money, but he's like, I'm going to 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 going to build this plant and then you can use the plant too. You can freeze and package your stuff too if we ever have oversupply. So they do that. He borrows money from the bank. He gets money from the other farmers. He starts to build this thing. 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 2 million, like a capacity of 2 million, but they only produce 100,000 because 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 like we came in at like 5% of the estimated freezing capacity. This is terrible. I have this empty factory now. I owe a lot of money. And basically, it's like, dude, you got to just let this go, declare bankruptcy, move on with your life. Instead, he calls another guy who he knows, 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 last thing you want to do, but you should do it. And the guy's like, all right, I got you. Onion rings. He's like, onion rings? Okay. He's like, can you send me like a file like about it? So he gets like a little book on how to make onion rings. And he's like, all right, say less. I'm never going to ask you another question. I will figure this out from here. And so 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. Which today controls about 40 to 50 percent of the global supply of blueberries. It's like 70 million pounds of blueberries they're making every year. Speaker 2: Do they still have onion rings, blueberries and onion rings and mozzarella sticks on their website? Speaker 1: Yeah, 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 invents this like blueberry picker that can do the work of 35 like humans doing this. And he's like, oh, amazing. And then what he does is he actually gives it, basically freely shares it with other blueberry farms too. 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 wanna 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 and we can have more blueberries, 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 many years later. Actually, actually, I think he kind of did this around the same time. I shouldn't say many years later. I don't know the exact date on this, but it wasn't like once he is already like huge. It was like somewhere from around the same time. TV was picking up and cable cable TV was picking up. And this guy's from Nova Scotia, population nine thousand. And so they held like an auction. They were like, hey, all right, who wants to buy the 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. And he's losing money the first couple years. And his dad's like, bro, you got to 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 a break-even point or whatever. He ends up over the next couple of decades building the largest private telecom company in the country. And he owns cable TV networks everywhere. He does a bunch of acquisitions, he takes on a bunch of debt, and he ends up buying up others. He goes sort of down the stack. So whereas most TV companies want to do the sexy, fun stuff, they get into original programming and content, and they're like, content is king. He's like, yeah, no, you know what's king? Fiber. I'm going to go own the underlying infrastructure for cable TV. And he ends up building this juggernaut. And so this guy ends up now, he's like, whatever. Like, you know, much older now, in his 80s or something like that. And he's worth a billion dollars. He built the largest fruit farm, basically, in the world. And he's built the largest private telecom company in the country. Isn't this kind of amazing? Speaker 2: This is amazing. As you're telling me this, I've noticed there's a trend. Amongst this era of people, was he doing it right when cable was getting started? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Man, there's a trend. So Ted Turner, who eventually went on to start CNN, he owned a billboard company, which he parlayed into a radio station and then eventually a cable news network, CNN cable news network. Do you know another guy named Jim Pattison? Have you heard of Jim Pattison? Speaker 1: No, who's that? Speaker 2: Dude, Google Jim Pattison. Another Canadian guy. Look at what he looks like. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: I've seen this guy before. He's like one of the richest guys in Canada, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, he's like, he's like one of these guys who is like, he's like an energizer, energizer bunny. Like he like he is like a wind up toy. Like he just can't stop moving. But he I think his story was, he, at a young age, opened up a car dealership. And within three years, he bought like a plastic manufacturer or something very like out of left field. And then another thing and 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 Pattison Group, which he owns the whole thing, I think has one 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 going to butcher it. Speaker 1: He's got a condition. Unknown Speaker: Do you know him? Speaker 1: No. Speaker 2: So he started a grocery store. I think it was called Apple Foods. Speaker 1: 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? Speaker 2: Yeah, you already know everything about him just by looking at him. Speaker 1: One photo. Speaker 2: Yeah, like when he, this guy, when he gives you a handshake, he's pulling you in. 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. Speaker 1: And no chance this guy has one wife. By the way, let me just look this up. I bet you, I'll bet you anything right now. Speaker 2: Here we go. Speaker 1: Let's just... Speaker 2: If you Google his kids, they're beautiful. Speaker 1: First wife, divorce. New wife, Margo. Speaker 2: This guy started Apple grocery store. It's like a 20 store chain in New York City. Like it's tiny. But then he bought a radio station. And then 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... Speaker 1: And then a refining company. Speaker 2: Dude, he owns like an airline. I think he owns like a small private airline. He owns everything. There's this type of entrepreneur where they're kind of cowboys, where they start in one thing and they get into media eventually. And a lot of it happened in the 80s, the late 70s and the early 80s when cable was getting popular. And it was sort of like the first version of a SaaS business. It was recurring revenue, huge TAM, kind of weird and unknown. People weren't sure what to do. And I believe that a lot of the cable news networks They were regulated by the FCC and you had a certain satellite. You'd only own X amount of satellites. There was some type of limiting blocker where only a certain amount of cable companies could even exist. And so if you were able to get in on that, it was almost a near monopoly. Ted Turner came along and he was one of the first guys that petitioned Congress and was like, this is nonsense. We need more competition. And that's when CNN came about. But this whole era... Speaker 1: I like how sometimes when we explain these things, it's kind of like when I explain stuff to my kids. How does the picture come on the TV? Where is this coming from? And I'm like, oh, satellites. But how does it get from a satellite to our TV? It shoots it. It shoots the video. 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. Speaker 2: It doesn't matter, though. Just go with that. Speaker 1: But you're like, there was only so many satellites. You had to buy these letters, but they only had so many letters. Nowhere near the letters, okay? Speaker 2: I do know that it is true. Speaker 1: There's some spectrum available. Speaker 2: Yeah, we know a lot about spectrums. I do know there was a famous hearing where Ted Turner made this passionate speech to politicians to convince them that they have to change the rules to allow small upstarts 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. 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 $17 or $18 million in revenue. I started it with like $300. My current company, Hampton, does over $10 million in revenue. Started it with actually no money, maybe $29 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. And so my old company, The Hustle, they put together five proven business models that you could start right now today with under $1,000. 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. Speaker 1: Let me give you some of his little business isms, his philosophies. And this is, again, some of this is from Shane Parrish's stuff. Speaker 2: Dude, I can just tell this guy, Canadians are in Midwestern people where I'm from. They're the same people, aren't they? Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a species in its own. So here's a great line by him. I have no reverse gear. I just thought that's an amazing line, which is like he's like, yeah, 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. Another thing that I thought was interesting, which was kind of counter to conventional advice. So you know, most people who are in the game of Business Buffet and all the real estate guys, the famous phrase they all say is, you make your money on the buy. Speaker 2: 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 I'm being serious. Speaker 1: It's not like the fine print by the way. Speaker 2: This is like the first thing you learn like I was like reading a Warren Buffett book and I read that quote and I remember thinking like That was literally the exact opposite. Speaker 1: Well, I thought it was doing the John Bragg. So here's John Bragg's philosophy. I Intentionally overpay. Speaker 2: Okay. Unknown Speaker: I'm in. Speaker 1: So he goes, early on, I intentionally overpaid for acquisitions and word spread fast. If you want to sell, sell to John Bragg. You'll get a fair price, quick close, no games, which I love that. I'm going to put that on our mini private equity shop website. Speaker 2: I feel like that advice typically isn't right though. Speaker 1: Well, typically not. So here's 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. This is kind of 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 realm of Buying the TV rights when they're only going to be up once and whoever gets it's going to own it. That's like a time to overpay. If it's a key asset that locks down a certain competitive advantage, 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 said something like, you can't buy a reputation. I was like, I think that actually what you're saying is you can buy a reputation. It's like, oh, but here's the reputation. I will overpay, right? It's like SoftBank in the venture game right now. It's like, oh, you want a bunch of money and then a huge crazy valuation? You go to SoftBank first. And there's actually some merit to that strategy if you can get the things that have huge upside. Speaker 2: So was he an M&A guy? Yeah. Speaker 1: It was a lot of building the empire through M&A. Speaker 2: And what was he buying? Other cable companies or other farms? Both. Speaker 1: Here's another banger of a line. So he has 40 to 50% of the global supply 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, a big stake in. And he goes, here's the exact line. He goes, we don't want to have 100% of the industry. That wouldn't be good politics. Imagine having the choice to have 100% market share. That's not polite. Speaker 2: What a baller. Speaker 1: Here's some Sam porn for you. 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. Speaker 2: I've been there. Speaker 1: Sam buying the ranch. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been there. Speaker 1: 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. You know, everybody else who came into this industry wanted to make a buck. I was this young guy who said, I'm here to play this game for a long, long time. Speaker 2: This guy's awesome. Speaker 1: This guy's awesome, right? Speaker 2: I think he's my uncle. Speaker 1: Then he goes, 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. Unknown Speaker: I like that. Speaker 1: Done. Speaker 2: Did you get all this from Shane's podcast with him? Speaker 1: 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 because I was doing like I discovered this guy this morning. It was like on my list of like things to check out. And as soon as I checked out, I was like, oh, man, this is amazing. I got to I got to go watch this later. So I've actually only like skimmed the transcript and stuff for this. So I might be getting some of the details wrong. Speaker 2: A couple other things. Speaker 1: He's one of these like Buffett types where it's like he's a billionaire, but the vast majority of wealth came like after the age of 70. So it's like, you know, just saying the same way for Buffett, where they just they keep compounding. He had some other things I thought were pretty interesting. Speaker 2: I would have thought he'd be richer. If you own all half the blueberries in the world, wouldn't you be richer than 1.5 billion? Speaker 1: Yeah. Punk. Weak shit. Speaker 2: He better be a huge philanthropist and have given it a lot away because I definitely would have thought he'd be richer, right? Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know. I'm not gonna knock him. All right, so he believes in Buffett a lot. He loves Buffett. 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. So at age 70, he was worth 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 $10 million 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. There was no penalty for losing the money and no bonus for the gains. It was pure education. Isn't that like pretty wild to do? Speaker 2: So he gave, how many managers did he have? Speaker 1: I don't know. Six teams. So 60 million bucks. Speaker 2: He gave them what? Like a stock portfolio? Or he gave them $10 million and told them... Speaker 1: $10 million to go buy businesses. Speaker 2: Oh, within their portfolio? Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 2: Wow. Okay. That's badass. That's crazy. Speaker 1: He said, and this was at age 70, and then he's like, most people stop learning once they become successful, but the outliers never stop being students. Love that. Resonate with me. All right, what else resonated with me? Let me give you one more. Speaker 2: I just googled the Shaan podcast. Shaan went to his office, which is really cool, and he's 84 years old doing a podcast. That's amazing that he's with it and he's sharp and he's Had this pod. Speaker 1: Dude, when I'm 84, I'm going to be in the metaverse. I'm going to be so just like plugged in to what everybody's doing in the future. Speaker 2: I hope. Speaker 1: All right. You want to do one or you want me to go? Speaker 2: Have you read about United Fruit? If we're going to talk about fruits, I haven't read about United Fruit. Speaker 1: Is that the Banana King guy? Speaker 2: Man, that's a great book. I'm in the middle of reading it. And it's the story of United Fruit, which is basically centered around bananas. Speaker 1: So, like, you want to do the quick story? I think we've talked about it before, but it's it's on theme. Speaker 2: It's on trend in the late 1800s. I think bananas were discovered, I think, in Nicaragua or somewhere in Central America, and they brought them to America. Americans were like, yeah, we we want every banana we can get our hands on. We love it. It even got to the point where, like, I think in the 1920s, when immigrants would land at Ellis Island, we gave them a banana and that was like, you're here now. This is this American thing. And it's sort of American because when you get to Hawaii and they give you the lay. Yeah, it was like a banana. And 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 is Samuel Zamuri, he was, I think, a Ukrainian immigrant. And he started out 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 that bananas at different markets. And his whole shtick was he was going to sell ripes, meaning bananas that were already becoming a little bit brown that they previously thought were throwaway 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 60s, he takes over United Fruit. And it's a big... Speaker 1: Well, he starts with $150. And by the time he's 21, he's got $100,000. And this is way back in the day, right? So this is like a lot, that's a lot of money. Speaker 2: And he keeps on going. And it gets to be so... Speaker 1: 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 and selling it. And by the time he reaches his peak, he buys the whole company where he was initially just like taking their discarded trash. Speaker 2: 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 Sam Mills-Murray, he has a lot of admirable qualities. You know, he's this like hardworking immigrant. He's pretty quiet and he's like a stoic guy. But he's kind of a warlord because at one point, Nicaragua, they have 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. So he basically gets a small unit of 10 or 20 people to 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 so that's kind of like the story of Samuel Zimmery. It's pretty badass. Speaker 1: Got that killer instinct. Let's go. Yeah, that's this is it's pretty wild, right? Like imagine a story like that today. Speaker 2: Is there such a thing i can't think of i mean what you want dozen rockets is like pretty like you can like dominating another. Speaker 1: Planet like potentially i mean that's like the republican party this year like going to the point of like. We're actually funding a militia. Speaker 2: I guess Donald Trump is doing this, where he's like, for shits and giggles, I'm going to play a joke and run for president and just kind of starts to work. But yeah, I mean, it's a pretty crazy story. 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, waiting to talk to you about this. Speaker 1: Like a man in Lent or November. Holding it in. Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. If you know, you know. So I saw a Broadway play for the first time ever this weekend. Phenomenal. Speaker 1: Wow. Speaker 2: It's called Oh Mary. It's basically about Mary Todd, who was Lincoln's wife, and it's just like a comedy. It was fantastic. Never really been to a play, honestly, my whole life. Speaker 1: Because you judged it or just happened to not go? What's the deal? Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. It just went on the list of things to do. 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. Speaker 1: Yeah, I just thought it'd be cool. I went and saw one and I was like, oh, that would be kind of a fun, fun thing to work on. Yeah. Speaker 2: 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, I understand the appeal now. Is that right? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I had gone to a bunch when I was a kid, and so I think I liked it from that. I was a theater kid when I grew up, so I liked it. Speaker 2: Now, how is it related to this podcast? Well, for one, if you Google Omeri Revenue, You can see there's a website called broadwayworld.com where they estimate the revenue of each show. I guess they look at like if they're selling out and the average ticket price online. And this thing, Oh Mary, I think it's been live for June of 24, it came out and it's been making a million dollars a week. So it's doing quite well. And it started off with about $4 million in funding to get going. And it all reminded me of this podcast that we did about two and a half years ago. You didn't make it, but we had this guy named Michael Harris. Did you ever look into who Michael Harris was? Speaker 1: What was it? Death Row? Which record label was he the guy? Speaker 2: So the short of it is some people call him Harry-O because his name is Michael Harris. They call him Harry-O like Harry, OG, gangster. So Harry was famous because in his early 20s, He was basically a drug kingpin, and he made a lot of money selling cocaine. And at one point in the podcast with him, I said, yeah, I was trying to be nice. I was like, you know, instead of saying you are a drug dealer, I said, I read an article saying that The article said that you were selling $1,000,000 a day in cocaine and he goes, I think that article said $2,000,000 a day. Speaker 1: He's like, I told that journalist it was $2,000,000. I was like, yes, sir. Speaker 2: And eventually at the age of like 32, I think he gets sentenced to life in prison, one for attempted murder, one for drug conspiracy, which basically is like the RICO kingpin law. And he had a life sentence. And recently, I think like 10 years ago, Trump commuted his sentence, and that's how he got out of prison. And when he was 32 years old, he founded Death Row Records with Dr. Dre and Suge Knight while he was serving a life sentence in San Quentin. And that's like how Death Row got started. And one of the reasons why it's called Death Row is because he was... Speaker 1: Wait, they co-founded it with him while he was in prison? And what did they... What did they want from... What was he able to offer them while he was in prison for life? Speaker 2: So, his wife was on the outside and she somehow had funds to fund Death Road Records. 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 didn't know anything about it, but he made this comment to me where when he was 29, I think, he was the first ever black producer of a Broadway musical or Broadway show. And he kind of told the story, but basically somehow he got in cahoots. You know, he was he was considered, like, well known for being like a drug guy. Speaker 1: And I hope you said cahoots to him. Speaker 2: Right after I said, OK, OK. Speaker 1: How do you end the podcast? Which button ends this podcast? Speaker 2: I was like, holy moly. Speaker 1: Harry O, you dog. Speaker 2: Holy moly, Harry. So, somehow he got in the loop with this, but he funded Denzel Washington, an early Denzel Washington, his first ever play. Michael Harris, Harry O, was the investor that funded this show with a million dollars. I think this was in 93 or 92, when Denzel, he was just getting going. And he starts telling this story. And while I was at this play, I was like, Holy crap, this guy got his way into being the first ever producer of Broadway while I was there. I'm like, oh my god, he was so much cooler than I even realized. Speaker 1: If I invested in Denzel before he became Denzel, that's like, you know how Jason Calacanis is like, I was saying he's the fourth investor at Uber. I would never shut up about it. Speaker 2: Google Michael Harris, Denzel Washington. You'll see a photo of them together. And Michael Harris looks like a well-to-do guy. He's wearing a suit. Turns out he was only, I think, 29 or 28 in these photos. And he was a drug kingpin. Kind of amazing, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's incredible. When he was 26 or something? Was he 26? I think he was pretty young. Speaker 2: Very young. And allegedly had made something like $100 million selling drugs. Pretty crazy. And when I was like sitting there in this play, I was like, obviously, what do you and I do when we do everything? We go to the play and you type in like, oh, merry revenue on Google. Speaker 1: 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? Speaker 2: And this is how I remembered Michael Harris saying that, where it all like clicked together. I was like, oh, my God. Speaker 1: Do you know how much revenue these shows generate? Speaker 2: I'm looking at, it's astounding. It's astounding. Speaker 1: The number one, I'm just going to give you the top five. Top five highest grossing Broadway musicals of all time. You have number one, Lion King, grossed over two billion in just the ticket sales. Wicked, 1.7 billion. Phantom of the Opera, 1.3. Hamilton, which is newer, already crossed a billion. Speaker 2: Insane, right? Speaker 1: And of course, our guys. They're from South Park. Speaker 2: Are they number one? Speaker 1: They're number five. Book of Mormon, number five, $850 million on their side. Unknown Speaker: That could be us, dude. Speaker 1: We just need to be talented and hardworking. That's all we're missing. Speaker 2: They are so talented. When I was at the show, I was like, it's just they're oozing with talent. One of the guys, Abe Lincoln, the character was played by what's the guy from Silicon Valley? Kunal. Is that his name? Speaker 1: Oh, he's in the play. Speaker 2: Yeah, he's in the play. And it's like it was like famous actors and actresses were like in the plays. Speaker 1: He's like a jacked Indian Abe Lincoln. What do you mean? What do you mean he played Abe Lincoln? Speaker 2: It sounds crazy. And honestly, it is crazy. The guy who played Mary Todd was a was a guy. So like, it's all types of crazy. Yeah, there's a it's a it's a whole thing. But I just had to like nerd out with you about this. Speaker 1: So I looked into this pretty hardcore. So it's definitely a outlier hits business, just like most angel investors. Yeah, it's angel investing, because 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, I forgot what it's called, like the theater, the opera house, whatever. There's like a bunch of there's like three or four different theaters for this. And I was looking at them because the theaters make money either way because the shows have to pay rent. They got to be like, hey, we want to do 60 days on stage. Like, great. 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. I was looking at how much it costs to produce the shows because I had just seen the one about Lehman Brothers, which I recommend, by the way. It's like a it's too long. First of all, it's way too long. Speaker 2: The one that I went to, we only went to it because it was 90 minutes. I can't sit there for more than 90 minutes. Speaker 1: Less is more, guys. Less is more here in the theater. It was great. It was business entertainment, which is what I considered to be my genre. I wasn't even interested in learning about the Lehman Brothers. 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 definitely interested in that. If somebody actually knows how to do these things, I would love to to talk to you. Email me. Maybe we can make something, make something. Speaker 2: We were a story in mind, but we had Tim Ferriss on the pod and like the top comment on YouTube was like, rich guys finally discover board games. And like and like that's all I pay attention to the rich guys part. Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, hell yeah. Speaker 2: Thank you. No, this one's going to be like the bros discover plays. Speaker 1: I'm like, Sam, they were singing in the middle of that. You're talking one second, then they're singing. It's incredible. Speaker 2: It's all part of the story. Listen up. Speaker 1: The old playbook is slowing you down. AI broke the funnel. Loop marketing fixes it. It's a new era for marketers. AI is capturing search 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. 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-marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod. All right, I got one more cool business story for you. I'm watching a lot of sports lately. Everything's kicking out. Football season just kicked off. Tennis was awesome. By the way, do you follow tennis? Speaker 2: A little bit. I went last year and I kind of watched a little bit on TV. The Russian gal, she's an athlete, man. She's a freak. What's her name? Speaker 1: Sabalenka, I think. Speaker 2: She looks like a Terminator. Speaker 1: So, I follow... 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. It's like a great UFC fight. Like there's some sports where, you know, the median game is like really good. I put like, you know, NFL in that category. But then there's some sports where just 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. But the peak, the biggest personality is when it's all on the line and it's just two guys going in there and they're trying to take each other's head off. Like, it's hard for a basketball game to match that. Okay, so tennis is kind of up there in that sense. So there's the new wave of tennis players. So this guy Alcaraz and this guy Sinner. Speaker 2: Did that happen? Did the men's final happen? Speaker 1: It just happened, yeah. And so I really wanted Sinner to win because I just like went down the rabbit hole of this guy's YouTube highlights and he's unreal. And the other guy is also unreal, but he's he's unreal when it's in the sense of like, you know, a guy who just like does all the right things. It's like he eats right. He works out right. Like he just does it. He just like prepares really hard. He's very talented. He's maximizing his potential. It's not like there's not a lot of like flaws to like attach with there. You know, there's not a lot of like it's like, oh, so you work hard and do all the right things. Great. Yeah, that's fantastic. In fact, they showed the warm up right before because I think Trump showed up at the U.S. Open. So it was delayed like half an hour or an hour or something like that. And so the guys were just in their locker room, like supposed to be warming up. And Alcaraz is like, 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. Speaker 2: Smoking cigs. Speaker 1: Yeah. So I was like, I kind of like this other guy. Anyways, they go out there, Sinner loses and he just keeps losing to Alcaraz. He's ranked number one because he beats everybody else. But Alcoraz has beat him, I don't know, 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 that 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'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. 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 want to make changes or not. I'm definitely going to work on this. 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 going to play this guy. I got to go out of my comfort zone. So here's what I'm going to do. I need to start playing more unpredictably. I might even lose some matches, but I'm going to have to do it. I'm going to have to make some changes. I'm going to 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 day, that's my main goal. 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. I got to go back down for a bit and I got to find a new trail. And that is so hard to do in life. It is so hard to go back to the bottom and reinvent yourself. Speaker 2: He's like, I'm going to I'm going to learn how to play tennis, but I'm really learning how to play the game of life. It's like one of those type of moments. Speaker 1: Totally. And to be like, I'm going to probably lose some more matches because I'm going to have to learn this. I'm going to have to experiment with this new style. And that's going to suck, but I'm going to do it. And like, whatever you're doing in life, that analogy probably holds for you right now. Whether it's you as a parent, it's you on the book that you're writing, it's you at your job, it's you in your business, whatever it is, I guarantee you there's an element of like, if I wanna 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 I recognize the moment, I need to be willing to go back down the mountain for a little bit and then come back up a new way. Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of this guy named Meb Gerfluski? If you Googled him, that's a hard name. That's a hard last name to Google. But if you Google Marathon Meb, M-E-B, you might recognize his face. Speaker 1: Marathon Meb? Speaker 2: M-E-B. You see Meb? Speaker 1: I don't recognize this guy. He's 50? Yeah. Speaker 2: So I think in 2004, he was the gold medalist in the Olympics 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 because 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 spoke at a bunch of Obama events and whatever. He's a big deal. He's great. His brother listens to MFM, 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 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. They shut it down? 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 he runs a management company who he originally Howie was managing his brother Meb. Now he manages other runners because 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, 40 runners or something. And a lot of his athletes were running at this race. And so I got to be his assistant, basically, and he took me and 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 46 seconds for the mile, which is crazy. And the guy who won... Speaker 1: What's your mile time? Speaker 2: Dude, back in high school, a minute slower. Four minutes and 47 seconds. Speaker 1: Okay, Ted Bundy. Now, what's your milestone now? That was not my question. Speaker 2: Seven minutes. Not good. I mean, seven minutes. Like, very, like, recreationally, like, average. Speaker 1: So wait, did you run it or you just hung out with Hallie? Speaker 2: Hell no, I didn't run it. I was watching. I was watching. I was just sitting on the sidelines watching. And we got to watch these guys run. And they look like gazelles. They look like animals. It's like crazy. And I was asking him, I was like, what separates so like, because when I was watching the race, the winner, and the guy who got third, they're really close. Like, it doesn't seem very far when you see them. But like, it's like a second is only It's not that much, but it is a lot when you're running. And I was like, what separates Negus, the guy who won, what separates him from the guy who got last? Because they 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, what separates the guys that get first versus last in these big races is when they step on the lines, they're killers. He wants to kill you and he acts like a nice guy, but when they step there, they think, I am here to win. I'm built to win. I am not trying to finish second. I'm 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. And I thought that was really fascinating. And I'm always finding it fascinating, particularly in sports, particularly in these individual sports, tennis, swimming. Track and field, cycling, I think we had Lance on and like we talked 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. 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. 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 on a screen, no coding required. By the way, I use Bubble on a ton of different apps, including Hampton. And if you want help building something complex on Bubble, you have to bring in Zerocode. They're the top Bubble agency out there and literally the biggest plugin creator for the platform. They can build anything, custom portals, SaaS products, and they do it about 10 times faster and cheaper than traditional development. Zerocode 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 zerocode.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. Speaker 1: Have you heard this phrase? You probably heard it because you're like into running, but I don't. Don't run. Don't do it. It's like motorcycles. I just don't get on that. So 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 don't know her name. You probably do. But the point is, he was talking about this phrase called the pain cave. Speaker 2: Yeah, we go to the pain cave. Speaker 1: You go to the pain cave. Yeah. And I was like, look, not into running. But I'll just take that phrase out. That was a cool phrase. He's like, so the pain cave describes like when you're in these like ultra long races, 100 mile race or whatever, and it's like mile 60 or 70, you hit this just like extreme level of like physical, mental, spiritual exhaustion and pain. And you go to the pain cave. 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 can probably describe it better than I can, but my understanding was, you accept that there's going to be this stretch where you're going to be in pain, you go to the pain cave, you know you're there, you become comfortable, you become, not comfortable, but you become acclimated to the pain cave. And you're able to stay there where others want to quit and you even want to quit, others would quit. And then you push through and you end up getting to the second, you get your second win, you get out of there and you get to the end. Did I butcher the pain cave or did I describe it right? Speaker 2: No, no, no. And a lot of athletes... Speaker 1: You visited? Speaker 2: I've been on vacation a couple of times. No, 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's horrible. It's not a fun experience and you get to a certain point and it's crazy to do a sport or an activity where even if you are winning, you go through hell. So we had Brennan Schaub on the pod, who is a former UFC fighter, and he said that one time he was fighting on a card and the guy who was fighting above him, Crow Cop, who was the main guy, Afterwards, Brennan saw CrowCop like on a stretcher and CrowCop had just won the championship, but CrowCop 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 CrowCop was like, give him a thumbs up. And Brennan was like, 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 are willing to go through the pain cave, because in a lot of sports, I think it's so fascinating. And honestly, I think this way about business or anything really in life, that when you win 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 mindset of these winners who can just eat so much 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, 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 going to fall apart all the time. Speaker 1: Yeah, I find that these phrases like pain cave or whatever, there's a lot of power in just having like a label to put on the thing so that when you're feeling it, you don't feel like this is a bad thing, that you don't panic and you don't feel like it's forever. You realize it's like a temporary phenomenon. And so I know that one of the things that people brought up to me is that this analogy that's been very useful. And it's like if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you know, intellectually, there's going to be these ups and downs. If I told you that, nobody would be surprised at that idea. Yet when it's happening, you're like, oh, you get 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, you got in line for the roller coaster. What did you think was going to happen? You stood in line. You waited. You chose this first. You knew this is the nature of roller coasters and that there are no ups without downs and no downs without ups. This has to be, it's a necessary condition of doing this activity. 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 hopeful metaphor for people is just remembering like you got in line for the rollercoaster, baby, like there was going to be ups and downs. Don't be surprised when they come. And 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 anytime there's an extreme high or an extreme low, I go immediately and I put it in that channel. And I put my exec team in there as well. And the beautiful thing about it is, 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, yeah, obviously, if it was a low, it's like, obviously, we survived, it was fine. And even if it was a high, it was like, It doesn't have that same pull. And so it keeps you from in this moment going too high and too low because you could just scroll back and see all the other moments that in the heat of the moment you thought were such a, you know, such an extreme and now are like, whatever, you know, just random, random things in the past. Speaker 2: How often are you adding stuff to that? Speaker 1: All right. So last one was four months ago and it was, oh, cool. Trump just tariffed all of our goods 150 percent. So like imagine a thing used to cost us $10. Now we pay the $10, but then we pay an extra $15. That same item cost us $25. 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. Business makes the money, thing out of our control, like got it. And then there was another one, and then there's a high two months before that when this celebrity with six million followers is posting about our brand. And it's like, oh, that's awesome. But now that I look at it, I'm like, who cares? I don't care. My life didn't change for either one of those two things. My life didn't change. We got through the low, and I already forgot about the high. You know, another one. Rihanna's manager emailed us asking for product. Like, you know, Rihanna wants her shit. That's cool. That's exciting. Speaker 2: Wait, hold on. Was Rihanna asking for free stuff? Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. They always ask for free stuff. Speaker 2: Really? Speaker 1: Yeah. Rich people don't pay for things. Speaker 2: That's insane to me. Speaker 1: You thought rich people buy things? They request things and you gladly give it to them. Speaker 2: Have you DM'd? I think I've done it maybe twice. Have you DM'd people asking for free stuff? Speaker 1: Asking for free stuff. No, I've never DM'd anyone. I think I've been like, yo, this is a great product. If anybody wants to send me one, I'm happy to take it. I think that's the lowest I've stooped. I don't think, maybe I have. I can't remember ever DMing asking for free stuff. In fact, usually we go the other way, which is if it's a friend's product or somebody we know's product, we want to be their first customer and we want to purchase it to show, because it feels good and seems like the right thing to do. Another one, Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve this last year, the Mexican president blocked all imports. So like, hey, that's cool. Our warehouse is in Mexico and on Christmas Eve, all imports are blocked with no notice and there's no other thing you could do. Cool this shit at the port. Speaker 2: Do you have a coup staging team? Speaker 1: This is just in one business. This is just in the e-com 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. That means every single month you're getting hit with a high and a low in one of the businesses. Speaker 2: I think it was cool. You said something actually that was quite good, which is it feels nice to label certain emotions because it makes it feel better. I went through a period. It's sort of what's that? We always reference that meme where like midway. Yeah, 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. Now I'm like, no, I actually do like reading about like other success stories and I love me a good quote nowadays. Yeah. Like I 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, 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 all the time. I pretty much read lots of, or it's actually my YouTube page, it's only motivational shit. Speaker 1: Here's the trick, so I've rebranded it. There's liking motivation. That's a pretty low class thing to do. Okay. Speaker 2: That's, that's, you know, very low status. Speaker 1: Oh, I need motivation. I'm so, so weak. I mean, it's like, I need a blood transfusion. It's basically what you're saying. You don't need motivation. You don't like motivation. You like wisdom. Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh my God. Speaker 1: High class thing to like, right there. I helped you out. Speaker 2: I listen to tons of wisdom. It gets me fired up. My favorite wisdom channel. I'm a wisdom speaker. Yeah, there's this YouTube channel called Motivation For You. Best, the best wisdom. Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. I'll give you another little label. So I was reading this book, 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 really amazing. What's it called? I'm not going to tell anybody, but it's my secret gem. And so in it, though, he talks about it's a book about How to have better ideas. So he's like this 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. And 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 Ford producing Model Ts 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, this is just a great quote. He goes, the brain, much like the body, has a second wind. And because he's talking about like, there's going to be this point, like pain cave, there's a point in the process where you kind of fatigue out. And he's like, I need you to hang in there for like, give it, there's going to be another, you have a little like 10, 15% left. You're just going to give yourself a chance for the brain to have a second wind, much like the body. And literally like 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 want to open up Twitter or I want to go like go eat some food or do something. And I just, the brain, the brain has a second wind. Let me just give it a second here. And then I pushed through for like another 15 minutes and it's actually like been like very, very productive. This little once one little simple idea. Speaker 2: Can I make a guess as to who wrote that? And ignore this if it gives away too much. It was by a copywriter if I had to guess. Is that right? Speaker 1: It was by an ad man. Speaker 2: Yes. Okay. Speaker 1: Copyrights. Speaker 2: It's crazy. Copywriters like there's this weird underground world. I don't know. I don't know if you 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. And 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 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 Bill Bonner, the guy who started Agora. So Agora Publishing is like the billion dollar a year. It's a newsletter business that is quite shady. But another one is Mark Ford. Do you know who Mark Ford is? Speaker 1: Who's that? Speaker 2: So he has this book called Ready Fire Aim on business and he's pretty under the radar guy. I think he's probably in his 70s at this point, but he helped make Agora really popular. There's Eben Pagan. Do you know who Eben Pagan is? Speaker 1: Yeah, W Dating. Speaker 2: Eben Pagan was a guy who was one of the first internet marketers because he got going in the 90s when the internet was just getting going, and he had an e-book called W Dating, and he wrote it under a pseudonym called David DeAngelo. And Eben Pagan is another guy where if you Google Eben 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. But there's a copywriting world that like you come across these old guys or they're not old. Russell Brunson's not old. Speaker 1: These guys are age. Speaker 2: No. Yeah. I mean, like underground. I don't know how to explain it. Speaker 1: No. Yeah. It's like almost like they rule the world, but they're not today. They're less. And today, we're going to talk about some of the most relevant and on the forefront and up in the center of attention as they were 15 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. There's a bunch of people like that. Speaker 2: Yeah. And what happens 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 do invent anything. So I'll give you an example. There's this guy named Dan Kennedy. We talked about Alex Hermosi. 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 greats. But if you read a lot of Dan Kennedy stuff, first of all, if you Google Dan Kennedy, you're going to see what he looks like. And you're probably, you'd probably dismiss him. You're like, oh, what does this person know about business? Because 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 we talked about books that where you say phrases like, oh, it's banned in prison because it's too powerful. Yeah, they all have catchphrases like that. Speaker 1: I love copyright. I think there's certain professions where it's almost like Darwinian. Right. So like the only way to survive as a copywriter, let's say that was your goal and a copywriter, then we'll kind of extend that to like an ad man. Right. Like the Ogilvy's of the world. And the only way to survive is to have these breakthrough ideas and be super persuasive with the written word. So it's like an animal that was on an island and the animal had to develop this shell if it was going to survive. That was the only way to survive in that climate. And so if you want to get greater persuasion, you want to get great at the written word, You could learn from a bunch of people. You can learn from an Elon Musk or Steve Jobs, but those guys, in order to do what they did, they grew up in a, they had to have 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. And so those people like sharpen that. And you see this with a bunch of different things. So you see this with a lot of investors. When we have them on the podcast, we're like, wow, I wanted to ask you about stocks and analysis, but 95% of the things you think about and talk about is mastering your own psychology and disciplining yourself and learning impulse control and learning how to think for yourself and be comfortable in your own skin. 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 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, well, yeah, like that's kind of what comedy is. It's 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. And so you realize like, oh, these comedians are actually like pretty wise and pretty like spot on and spotting like the truth, the underlying truth inside. He's like, yeah, because if they don't do that, they don't make anyone laugh. And they get booed 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 pressure, the natural selection forced them to become like A++ at a certain thing. Speaker 2: Who do you think falls in that category where you learn about them and they've done the same thing to you? Where you went to them for like, let's say, writing and they changed your life. Speaker 1: Seinfeld, Seinfeld is the easiest example. So I wanted this year, I was like, oh, like, could you like make yourself funnier? I just sort of assumed that like, you know, growing up, it's like you either are funny or you're not. And in my house, like my sister is 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 from a young age desire to be more like her. And like today is so funny. People would be like from the podcast, like, oh, yeah, you're a great storyteller. I'm like, you haven't seen my sister. My sister is amazing at this. I'm just OK. 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, storytelling, like, no, these are just skills you can develop. Like, if you just try, you can get way better at it. And so humor was one. This year, I went into and I was like, all right, 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 studied Seinfeld. So I went for the jokes and then I came out being like, this man is wise and has some of 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. Speaker 2: In what way? Speaker 1: So Seinfeld does this thing in the morning. You know about this, but like maybe other people don't. Seinfeld for the last 45 years has a morning routine. Seinfeld's morning routine is very simple. He's like, if you want to be a comedian and you want to write, you want to 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 before he's pre-input, pre-everything. 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 where he took the pages from his yellow legal pads over the 40 years and he laid it out on the street, I think in New York. Speaker 2: No way. Speaker 1: You haven't seen this? Speaker 2: No, I'm going to Google it. Speaker 1: It literally becomes the yellow brick road. Speaker 2: This is awesome. Are you kidding me? This is so cool. Speaker 1: So to promote his book, he published a book basically of all of his scrap jokes that he didn't put into a stand-up. It's called 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. For example, how did I work before this? I'd wake up. I'd check Slack. I'd check my email. I'd then start to think about what I'm going to do, but then I got kind of hungry. Then I go do this. Then, oh, I had this meeting scheduled at 9, so I'm going to get to my main thing at 11. Just Seinfeld's like keeping it sacred of like, yo, what's your main thing? If you're gonna be creative, you're gonna spend two hours in the morning creating. That's it. Tim Urban from Wait But Why told me the same thing. He goes, 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 10 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 writer's block, where they're like, but Jerry, like, what do you do on days where you don't know what to write? He's like, like, what do you do with writer's block? He goes, oh, you know, it's funny you ask, because there is no writer's block. And they're like, what do you mean, Jerry? Of course, we have all felt it. There's writer's block. He goes, no, no, no. There's lazy. There's afraid. There's having too high of expectations. But there's no writer's block. Let's be clear. And he's like, here's the cure to writer's block. You ready? Accept your own mediocrity. Don't sit down and think, today I'm going to make this great thing. It's going to be so amazing. The words are going to flow. I'm going to make this funny joke. Because that's what stops you. What you need to do is almost an anti-affirmation. You need to sit down and say, today I'm going to sit down. It's going to be hard to write. The thing I'm going to come up with is going to pretty much suck. I'm going to look at it and I'm going to hate it. I'm going to want to crumble it up and throw it in the trash. It's going to be that bad. But you know what? I'm going to 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. From this guy I went to to learn about how to make people laugh and I'm like, that's awesome. I learned how to work, how to live. He talks about, he does transcendental meditation. They're like, ooh, 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. Why do I meditate? To recharge my battery so I can be a better comedian. He's like, all this stuff I do is to be a better comedian. He's like, you'll learn pretty quick. If you don't work out, you're leaving some of you on the table from being able to do your best work. If you don't do something like a meditation or something to recharge your mental battery, you're going to do worse work. It's just as simple as that. He's got a ton of stuff on that. Speaker 2: That's so great. Jerry, I listened to a lot of his YouTube videos, his interviews, because it's the same thing where I learn more about life than anything. There's a famous one where he talks about consultants and comedians and making jokes. Speaker 1: It's the best. McKenzie. Speaker 2: What's he say about that? Speaker 1: He's getting interviewed by I think like Harvard Business Review and they go, you and Larry David famously wrote Seinfeld together with no writer's 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. The Harvard Business Review goes, was there a more sustainable way to do it? Could McKinsey have helped you find a better model? And he goes, who's McKinsey? Speaker 2: Wait, did they really ask that? Speaker 1: Yeah. He goes, who's McKinsey? And they go, it's a consulting firm. He goes, are they funny? They go, no. He goes, then I don't need them. 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. Speaker 2: Did you have this up right now? Speaker 1: Dude, I have like a dossier of Seinfeld. I studied this man. I went deep on this. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Have you ever seen him live? Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen Seinfeld. Honestly, it wasn't that funny. Speaker 2: I was going to say the same thing. I was going to say the same thing. Speaker 1: Love the guy. Don't love his comedy, actually. Speaker 2: His stand-up is, eh. His writing is the best, but his stand-up, for some reason, is just fine. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just okay. Speaker 2: I've been obsessed. Speaker 1: It's in part why I really love this guy, right? Because he's been touring for 50 years as a comedian. 50 years. This is unbelievable. Like LeBron James is jealous of Jerry Seinfeld's longevity. There's like 50 years of unbelievable longevity as a touring comedian. And he's also, I think it was remarkable, he's one of the, he's the first and only billionaire comedian, mostly because of Seinfeld the show, but also like, you know, comedians and cars doing coffee. He sold for like $100 million. Like he's been touring for a long time. Yeah, Netflix picked it up for $100 million. He's a super, he's an outlier. 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 they 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. You just see it like the way they grew up. 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. 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. Speaker 2: I remember when I was starting The Hustle, Scott Belsky, like I cold emailed him and 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 like extra good emails. And he eventually replied. He's like, this is so good. Can I invest like a very small sum? But I just want to let you know, like, this is like you're fantastic. This is great. And he let me hang out with him. So for anyone listening, Scott Belsky, at this point, he's known as like a legendary investor. But before he was this amazing investor, he had started Behance, which he had sold for, I think, $175 million. Now, he was nearly the CEO of Adobe, which is one of the largest companies in the world. I think now he works at A24. Is that right? Like the big shot Hollywood production company? Speaker 1: He's the chief strategy officer and something else. Speaker 2: And I didn't listen to his advice when I met with him. And I always regretted that I didn't listen to 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 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 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. 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? I don't understand what you're saying. Why am I going to say small? I want to sell out. That's the whole goal. And it took me years to understand what he meant, which was you can become this huge, successful person and also be a craftsman. You know who honestly does a great job at this and it seems silly? It's Dave Portnoy. Dave Portnoy has 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 25 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 Belsky 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. And I didn't understand what that meant until I was about 32 years old. I think he told me this when I was 26. 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. Speaker 1: Gaga, Scott. Gaga. Speaker 2: But now that I know some of these people who are actually making the most money are actually still craftsmen. I distinctly remember, I'm like, I want to sell out stadiums. I'm trying to sell out. I'm not trying to be a small little Korean family-owned bodega. I'm trying to take over the world, baby. Speaker 1: You said Dave Portnoy. There's another guy who's like that, Bill Simmons. He's probably the reason I'm doing a podcast today. Back in college in, I don't know what, what that was, 2007, listening to his, to the BS report, you know, I used to like fall asleep listening to the BS report. Like it was like that, it was that like, and at the time podcasts were nothing. And he, he had been a blogger before that. Then he was an ESPN columnist. Then he did the podcast. Then he did 30 for 30 documentaries. Then he went, he gets fired from ESPN because he does the, he does the ringer. Speaker 2: Why do you get fired? Speaker 1: 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 like he doesn't care. Speaker 2: It could be contained. Speaker 1: Domestic violence thing. There's like the concussion stuff. And he was basically like he would make jokes, but like the NFL's ESPN's biggest partner. And so he was 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. He comes back with The Ringer, which is just the Grantland again. And he'd been doing this now for like a long time, but he ends up selling to Spotify for $200 million. And there's a great tweet that was going on the other day. So the tweet was basically a video of Simmons and he's walking through the office. He's carrying like a chair, like a school chair, and he's carrying a chair and a microphone. And he's like, and they're like, they're like, Bill, what are you doing? He's like, a trade had just happened in the NFL. The Mike Parsons trade just happened. And it's like kind of like, you know, in the grand scheme of things, not like a big story, but like, you know, it was like the biggest story that week. And his company has like 15 other podcasts. And so there's like this NFL podcast going on. And he's like, I got to 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 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 somebody tweeted, they're like, honestly, respect. This guy's been doing this for like 20 years. He's worth like $200 million. And yet on a Thursday, he can't wait. He's literally carrying his chair and his microphone and wants to sit with his friends and do a podcast about this trade. That's kind of goals, you know what I mean? That's actually career goals. And that really, I don't know, that kind of stuck with me. That is really what you want, is a job that's so fun. And so you, it doesn't matter what's the money in the bank, you really just want to do it. You just want to do the thing to the point where you're just going to carry your chair down the hallway and try to find a podcast to go do about it. I thought that was great. Speaker 2: Where's he now? So is Grantland still a thing? Speaker 1: Grantland died with ESPN. He creates The Ringer. Ringer sold to Spotify. And so it's part of Spotify. And he's been, you know, making bank ever since. Speaker 2: 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. Speaker 1: He's like that girl at the dance I don't want to approach. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I'm like, hold on. I just got to like, I'm gonna fix my shirt real quick. I gotta take off my shirt. I gotta go. I gotta go get some punch. I'm thirsty. Yeah, I'll do everything else except for asking him. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, he looks pretty awesome. I don't know really anything about him. I would love to talk to this dude. He seems great. And you've talked about him like 6 or 7 times. Is he? Speaker 1: 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. 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 I'm writing on 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 the Red Sox. I love the Patriots. I'm from Boston. What are you talking about? I'm going to write like a fan. I'm going to write like a fan, and sometimes I'll be pissed at what my team is doing. Sometimes I'll be excited about it. I'm going to make a bunch of references to MTV Road Rules, The Challenge. I'm going to do what I'm interested in, even though none of it is by the book. And then he does podcasting early on. Then he does the documentary series, builds the most successful sports documentary series. What, 30 for 30? 30 for 30. It was his brainchild. He conceived it. He created it inside of ESPN. Nobody believed in it, basically, and he kind of fought for it, got it done. It became super successful. He's epic, dude. What has he done? And still on the podcast, he, you would never know. So he'll never reference 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 in ESPN's face, 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's a money loser doesn't work. And he replicated the same business And sold it for $200 million. So, you know, like he could have done a victory lap and never did. Speaker 2: That's awesome. I'm a I'm a Bill Simmons fan now. Speaker 1: There you go. Speaker 2: Should I interview him without you? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you should. Speaker 2: I would love that actually. So Shaan's not here today, but he said you're his inspiration and he would do anything for you. Speaker 1: There's been a couple of these guests where you fangirl, that would be one where I'd be too much of a fangirl and it really would be counterproductive to the podcast. Speaker 2: That would be great to get you rattled. You're not normally someone who gets rattled. All right. That was a good episode. I enjoyed that. But that's the pot. Speaker 1: All right, 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 like them. 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 could 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 podcasts.