Confidence Classic: Unlock an Unstoppable Mindset & Marriage with Sarah Blakely & Jesse Itzler

26:30And she literally was like, excuse me? I'm like, I know it's a little weird, but can you just follow me to the bathroom? And I'm going to actually show you what my product can do. I'm going to go in the stall. And she was like, oh, OK. And she walked down the hall and I went in the stall and I put it on under my white pants and I came out. So I showed her before and then I showed her with the product on and she just sat there and she goes, I get it. It's brilliant. And I'm going to try it in seven stores. And I was like, that deserves a round of applause. I love that story. Thank you.

27:05so you guys talk a lot about humor and embarrassing yourself poking fun at yourself in business and in life and and have a lot of fun with that and we mentioned specifically on instagram can you talk a little bit about what that looks like

27:22i just think we both you know don't take ourselves super seriously and humor works humor is fun. I think one thing we've both had in our entrepreneurial journey is we've had fun. And I think a lot of people forget how fun it can be. And, you know, and we work on making it fun. We try to do fun things, incorporate fun things into our household, with our kids, with our cultures, at our companies. And it's an important part of the process. I mean, I would say to add to that, I recognize that the two biggest fears that we all have as human beings are basically the fear of public speaking and the fear of being embarrassed.

28:04And so I want that to lose its power over me. So I will intentionally embarrass myself or I will intentionally find scenarios where I'm not good at something. And then I go through it and it usually ends up making me laugh. Or if something ridiculous happens to me, I immediately want to share it with people because then I start to find that it loses its power over me. And then you also find that when these things happen, if you can make somebody else laugh or smile, then it wasn't all in vain. And that's where real human vulnerability and connection happens, especially even with your customers.

28:42So I learned that from selling fax machines. I mean, anytime I tried to act perfect or put on the perfect pitch, I got kicked out time and time again. You know, if I walked in and was like, look, I'm, you know, I'm nervous. It's hard for me to walk through your door. I'm sorry. I know there's no soliciting sign. I mean, I would get farther with that, but just calling out the humanness and the real of what we're all dealing with and not, not being afraid of it. So we do that at Spanx too. We have oops meetings at Spanx, where we have the whole company get together and we stand up and we share what we failed at or an oops or a mistake that we made and everybody claps and it's just like diffuses it that's such a great culture i i believe we actually may have a video or two that we can share i happen to be a huge fan of this one bird video if you could cue this video up the instagram stories lovely yeah oh great okay

30:07I see him. I see him looking at me. My husband has been running every day on this island and says a bird attacks him. So I'm on the walk with him where his jaw got this because I don't believe him. Well, honey, where? How bad can it be? Come on. I'm not going. How are you going to get past this walking spot? Nothing's attacking me.

30:34He's fine. I see him and he's fine. See, the bird's there. He's not going to bother you, Jess. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

30:54That bird, that bird. No, Heather, that bird is not raised properly. That bird was ridiculed as a kid. I have to tell you, I'm so happy that you shared that video. I had shown it to my son after I'd gone to interview you and I said, you know, Jesse's such a great guy and I was showing it to my son. He said, Mom, I thought he was a really strong kind of guy until right now. I ran the same route every day and I would come home and Sarah would say, how was the run? I was like, the run was great, but I got attacked by a bird every time. And she's like, it's impossible. I said, no, you got to come with me.

31:29And she walked by, the bird didn't care. I walked by and the bird went bonkers. it was very personal obviously for the bird with jesse i don't know i maybe they thought your hair was a nest honey i don't know

31:56sarah you actually spent some time doing stand-up comedy were you petrified to do that because now it seems natural i feel like you could just grab a mic and walk around do it i was so petrified i i i did it when i was selling fax machines door to door and i um just i have this thing where i don't if something terrifies me or if i think i would never do that and and the answer is because i'm scared it kind of becomes something i really want to try to do and that was one of those things and um i just did open mic mostly around i did it around the country for two years while I was a trainer for the company that I worked for.

32:33But it was terrifying. I mean, I was so nervous. And I wasn't that good. So it sounds like the hardest job in the world. It's the hardest. Well, it's I mean, it's taking the number one fear in America, which is public speaking to the next level, because you can be in front of an audience and be bombing and not really know, you know, like, the whole back section could be asleep or on their phone, and you still ramble on. But if you're doing standup comedy, I mean, you get validation or you get crickets every 15 seconds. So it's like the most immediate, like you're failing, you're not failing, you're failing, you're not failing.

33:07And the only way to test it is in front of an audience. So you have to be so willing to bomb in front of a group of people. So please laugh at our jokes. Yeah, exactly. Or to learn what's funny or not funny. So I, um, yeah, it was, it was, but you know what? I didn't know it at the time. This combination, see, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I'm a terrible test taker. I'm not good in, like, I have trouble with reading comprehension. So I'm sure I have some sort of undiagnosed learning disability. But anyway, so I did debate all through high school and college. And then I get to the LSAT and I bombed it, not once, but twice.

33:42So it derailed my whole vision of being a lawyer. And that was really depressing at the time. And then I naturally then went to Disney World and tried out to be goofy. And you have to be, you have to be five, eight in order to be goofy. And I'm only five, six. So I'm the height of a chipmunk. So like, this was rock bottom for me. I mean, my family, everyone's like, what's happening? I said, I'm too short to be goofy and I don't want to be a chipmunk. And so I just started selling fax machines door to door because it's really, I mean, you needed a pulse to be hired there. and um so anyway but the stand-up comedy i did but life has a weird way of giving you these experiences because when i started spanks the combination of the amount of rejection i had had was perfect to start a company because i was told no every day for two years the idea is no good no thank you we don't want to help you we think this is stupid whatever and it didn't really phase me and then the writing comedy for two years while i was doing that helped me do all the writing for Spanx in the marketing.

34:46And Spanx didn't advertise for 16 years. We became a household name and a household brand around the world without ever advertising. And I believe we did so much of that through humor and through the connection that we had with our customer and storytelling. Jesse mentioned it, lead with story. Your customers are so much more interested in why than they will ever be interested in what? What you're selling, why you're selling it, why you're doing it, who are you in the world, what matters, what's your why? That is what people really respond to. So if you can do it and make somebody laugh or smile, it's so much better.

35:25I mean, you then you have a chance of them telling five other people, which is what happened with Spanx. You know, it became a word of mouth brand. Jesse, did you have that same experience that Sarah had getting into stand-up comedy, being afraid of it when you became a rapper? Was it that same, you know, you were petrified at it? Or did you gravitate towards it? Well, the first, right when I got signed to my record label, Delicious Vinyl, they had two huge acts at the time. One was a guy named Tone Lokes. Some of you might not remember Tone Loke. Yep, wild thing, funky, cool, Medina. The other was a guy named Young MC who won a Grammy for his song called Bust a Move.

35:57And I was one of the next artists signed to the label. So before my album even came out, I got a call from the owner. Wait, Jesse was best known for two songs? Shake it like a white girl and college girls are easy. Please Google it. Please Google it. So anyway, so I get a call. Which I had a lot of fun telling my dad. I was like, dad, dad, I think I met the one. He's like, that's nice, honey. What does he do? I'm like, he's a rapper. Best known for shake it like a white girl and college girls are easy. People buy into stories. This is all part of the plan. anyway before my album came out i got a call from the owner of the record company who said that they're having this huge concert in atlanta where we live now at the georgia dome and they were busting in 36 000 inner city kids from all over the state of georgia for this concert that they coined the increase the peace concert because they were going to have black artists and white artists come together in this community bonding event and the day before the concert vanilla ice canceled and they needed a white rapper so they volunteered me to be the white act so i get to the venue and as soon as i get there i meet i recognize immediately like the place is unruly there's fist fights going on they're putting the house lights on and police are everywhere and the kids are booing every single act that came on stage they booed them off stage so the first guy up was like ll cool j in his prime and they boo ll cool j off the stage i'm sitting over here in the green room about to go on next to sing my song called shake it like a white girl so i called my mother and i said mom i got a really big problem man they're booing ll and she was like sweetie just be yourself they're gonna love you and i get up on stage and the nc's like you know all the way from california give it up for my man jesse james which is my stage name do not google it and as i'm going on stage the record company gave me some t-shirts like promotional t-shirts so i grab them and as i come on stage i'm like i'm looking at the kids in the front row and they're pissed off that i'm even invited to the venue but i have these t-shirts so i'm like does this section over here want some free t-shirts and the kids go crazy i threw them out i'm like this section over here to my right you want some t-shirts they went nuts i threw them out i'm like middle section you want some t-shirts back there they went bonkers i threw them out i said thank you very much salt and pepper's up next i got the fuck out of there man

38:24that's never let him boo you never let him boo you it's like the first rule i got in business no i'm not doing stand-up how animated is this man oh my gosh i can't take it okay so sarah after you had made it you made a very shocking decision in my opinion to really put yourself out there and go on Richard Branson's reality TV show. Why did you make that decision? You know, I read his book in college and I really thought he seemed like such an interesting guy that I would like to know. And so that was the start of it. And when he declared that he was doing his own version of The Apprentice, his own reality show, I just thought this was a great opportunity to meet him.

39:16And he started Virgin overseas in London. He's just a really colorful, fascinating, adventurous guy. But he, yeah, so Spanx was four years old at the time. And my lawyers literally begged me not to do it. They're like, why would you ever do a reality show? You're the face of this brand. And you're putting your reputation over to Fox. And you have no idea what they're going to, how they're going to edit you or what they're going to do. And I just, I just had confidence that Richard, from what I'd read about him, wouldn't, wouldn't be a part of something that would, wouldn't edit me the way that I am.

39:51But I got a 27 page contract before I did this. And it was the most insane contract. It literally said, we can burn you. We can submerge you underwater. We can drop you in political unrest. I mean, it was like insane. So my dad is a lawyer and I emailed it to my dad and I said, dad, Adam, thinking about doing this reality show, can you help me edit the contract? And all he wrote back was no sane person would sign this love dad. And I signed it. And I went. Which is a great influence on our kids. Yeah, we have not let the kids see the video footage. But it was two months of the most intense stuff.

40:29What they didn't tell me, but I should have figured out and put the two and two together from the contract, was that if you lost the business challenge, each business challenge took place in a different city around the world. So instead of every challenge being in New York City, one was in Hong Kong, one was in Africa, one was in Tokyo. So it was wild. We were traveling all around the world. But if you didn't win the business challenge, instead of going to a boardroom and just being fired, you had to do a world record-breaking, death-defying stunt with Richard. And two days into filming, I literally was in Atlanta in the Starbucks line like the day before.

41:03And then the next day I'm in England and they woke me up at three in the morning and handed me a helmet. And I said, I'm an entrepreneur. Why do I need a helmet? And I had to scale the side of a hot air balloon at 10 ,000 feet in the air and have tea on top of the hot air balloon with Richard. And you're afraid of heights. And I'm so afraid of heights. Like I cry on planes. I cry during takeoff. I don't like heights. Yeah. So that was crazy. And that was the first day of filming. But Jesse can't even watch it. Jesse's watched like half of the first episode. The stunts got so ridiculous. It was like, Sarah, climb the scale of the top of the building and jump in this glass of water.

41:43And then when you're in the war, we're going to throw you in with the sharks. And then you swim around and come up. I was like, what? This is crazy. So you guys weren't married back then? No. He didn't know me then. But yeah, so. Was it worth it now when you look back? Are you glad that you did that? I'm so glad I did it. I mean, I think that I don't think I would have done the challenges if I was a mother at the time, but I wasn't. I was single and definitely not. Yeah. But yes, I'm so happy. I mean, Richard's actually a great friend. I'm actually going to Switzerland this Friday with Richard and about 35 entrepreneurs from around the world.

42:20And we're doing a physical challenge through the Swiss Alps to raise money for education. And I'm not like my husband. And I'm not this physical, you know, challenge person, but I had had too much tequila when Richard asked me if I wanted to go. And I said yes. And so now I'm going. I hate it when that happens. I'm slightly terrified. But we're going to swim, bike, and hike through Switzerland. And it starts with a glacier lake swim in a full body wetsuit. Well, just in case you guys can't picture this or haven't seen this show, we brought you a clip. Oh, you have a clip? Which clip is it? Is it a balloon?

42:59Next challenge is that we're going to go up into the top of the balloon, something I've never done. It's not going to be easy at all. On the top of the balloon, we're going to have a tea party and have a discussion.

43:12Being hoisted out on the ladder, suspended at 10 ,000 feet on the side of a hot air balloon is terrifying. I am so scared.

43:38Cheers.

43:46That is impressive. I'm in a full sweat. I don't want to. Did you just watch it? I'd rather run for 20 hours. That was so intense. There were so many things about that, but it took me 48 minutes to climb. It was a dangling rope ladder, so there was nothing anchoring it. So I spent the first 25 minutes of the climb just flailing around in the air. And then the last 20 minutes, I kept saying, just get to the balloon, get to the balloon. But once I got to the balloon, the balloon was hot and the rope was very taut against the balloon. So I had nowhere to put my fingers anymore around the rungs of the ladder.

44:20So I'd use my fingertips. And then once I did the little tea thing and was like, woo, that was great. I started bawling because I realized I had to climb down. Oh my gosh. I was like, wait, how do we get down? So we had to go back down the ladder. It sounds horrific. Yeah, no, but thank God you're here. Listen, I'm here and what an experience. So, Jessie, you have an online community, Build Your Life Resume community, which is really amazing. Check it out if you guys haven't seen it. All right, we got some peeps here. Awesome. So some of the feedback, Jesse, that really pops out at me, the things that people like, the takeaway is the brownie.

44:57The you know, what is your unique brownie? Can you share what that means and how you develop that? It's just a reference to a story when I was in college. I took I was a crossroads my senior year of college. I was either going to the music business, which I loved, or I was going to sell a product called Aunt Franny's Brownies. I had a roommate in college that had an Aunt Franny. And every month she sent us a shipment of brownies. And I don't know what she put in the brownies. but they made everybody happy. Like, I can market these. Like, this is going to work. So for my advertising class senior year, we had to create a fictitious brand from scratch.

45:30Soup to nuts, like, you know, Jingle, which I was good at, Billboard, Slogan, packaging, everything. So I said, I'll use this advertising class as my R &D department. And if they like my Aunt Franny's brownies presentation, I'll just roll it out and I'll sell brownies. So the way that the final exam was set up, there were 100 kids in the classroom. It was small. And everybody had to hand in their campaign, but five people were going to get picked at random to present a 30-minute state of the union of the business they were going into, the industry they were going into, in front of the class. So, like, I'm a senior in college.

46:02There's a 5 % chance that I wanted to get picked. Like, nobody prepared for the oral presentation. He didn't want to get picked. And sitting to my right in the classroom was a guy named Ronnie Cohn. Ronnie Cohn was a professional jackass. No, Ronnie Cohn bullied half of the class for four years of college. so when the professor said we're going to do this the democratic way everyone write down your name and i'll put take off my hat and i'll pick out the name when he came to me i took 25 pieces of paper and i wrote ronnie cone's name down i stuffed him in the hat and when he picked out the name this is a true story sure enough the first thing that came out was jesse itzer the jackass did the same thing he's such an asshole so i went up there and i pitched aunt franny's brownies in 30 seconds into my presentation.

46:50And by the way, the tuition in American University is$40 ,000 a year. That's where I went. So for four years of tuition,$160 ,000 of my parents' money. This is literally the only thing I remember. The professor stopped me for$160 ,000. He stopped me in the middle of my presentation, 30 seconds in. He said, son, I want to know what is your point of differentiation? And I was like, what does that even mean? He said, what makes your brownie different than all the other brownies on the market. And I was like, well, they're moist and delicious. They could be gluten-free. They're home-baked, blah, blah, blah, blah.

47:26And he was like, no. He said, son, there's 1 ,000 brownies that come out every year. And substitute them for marketer, for restaurateur, for advertising, for lawyer, for whatever you do. There's 1 ,000 of you that come out. And if you want to make it, your brownie, whatever it is, has to be different than all the other brownies. Sit down. And he made me sit down. And I realized at that moment, And like, it was a real powerful moment for me because I asked myself at that moment, like, and since then, as an entrepreneur, I've always asked myself, like, how am I different? You know, what makes my product stand out?

47:57How can I treat my customers differently than everybody else? Zara mentioned it early, but like, if you rip up the playbook that everybody in the industry is using and you say like, well, how would I do it if I never was taught how to do it? That's where innovation comes from. So I always ask myself in an authentic way, you know if you're quirky be quirky if you're this be this but what makes you different i just remember not to belabor this point but i remember when we started marquee jet which is a private jet company that i started with my my partner we had no aviation experience we had no airplanes we didn't know a lot of rich people and we started this company that and not a great formula for a private but we ended up building a company that did five billion dollars in sales and we sold it to Warren Buffett's NetJets.

48:44And I remember sitting with our sales team and I would go in and I would listen to pitches and they would pitch the way Kenny and I, my partner and I were pitching. And I'd be like, what are you, you can't, what are you doing? Like you're a single mom, tell, be who you are, you know, and be unique for you and be different for what you are. You can't, you're not the co-founder. So it's always been a mantra of mine to just kind of like, what makes you uniquely different? And that was a question Sarah asks all the time to her team and to her employees, you know. She always asks her employees, if no one taught you how to do your job, how would you do it?

49:17Yeah, because we're on autopilot as human beings. I mean, think about it. Almost every single thing that we do, someone taught us how to do it or we observed how it was done. And so I like the space of closing your eyes and saying, if no one showed you how to do this, how would you do it? Like, would you be doing it differently?

49:39And oftentimes you will. and the answer or the vision comes to you, and then that's a real nugget for yourself. Yeah. I would just put an asterisk next to that because, you know, I just ran this race, and I'm a big believer in becoming the expert in the space you're going into. So before I approached this race, I called everyone that I could find, anyone I could find that did this race and asked them a lot of questions. How many calories do you have to take? How many ounces of fluids do you have to take every hour? How much sodium do you need every hour? And in a very, very short amount of time i became what i believe in my own head was an expert and i would come in every station and say to my pit crew i'd be like i had one goo half a bottle of rock team which was this drink that i was drinking i had 200 calories 70 no i need 350 milligrams of soda i was very aware of it so in certain circumstances you want to become the expert and follow the advice but in others you want to stand out for what you know what what you want please do not get mad at me but unfortunately we have to move to the lightning round of questions and we're about ready to wrap up and even though no one wants these two to leave okay what's happening in your life right now i'm going to switzerland on friday which sounds very fabulous challenge that sounds very exciting okay how do you feel when you're in a room with richard branson microsoft giving pledge how do i feel when i'm in the giving pledge room um super humbled and you know like kind of like how did I get in this room, pinch me kind of feeling.

51:09Sarah's agreed to give away half of her wealth to charity. Amazing.

51:21What would your career be if you didn't start Sphinx? I mean, I'm a frustrated beautician. I might have my own salon or I was someone who did everyone's hair for prom and I always like doing makeovers and things like that. Oh, that sounds fun. Theme song for your life.

51:42Your speed ramp, sweetie. Oh, gosh. Theme song for my life. Either one are you going to get to. Mine is... Baby Got Back. Yes! Excellent marketing. Excellent marketing. I'm in the butt business, okay? Wow, that's good. That's good. Oh, there's a song called Here I Come. It's a reggae song. That's one of my mantras. Like, here I come. So it's my own personal thing. Okay, favorite party trick?

52:15I can make people say no. I have this crazy thing. I could do it with you after, Heather. Have you ever heard it before? No.

52:24All right, that was good. Weird trait about you. Weird what? A weird trait about either one of you. I mean, this is so weird, but I can vibrate my eyes. What? What does that even mean? What did you say? I can vibrate my eyes. You learn something new all the time. We've met for 10 years. I've never seen you vibrate your eyes. I can vibrate my eyes. And the weird thing is, is Charlie just looked up at me and vibrated his eyes the other day. Our little boy. So apparently it's genetic. I've only had fruit until 12 o 'clock noon for 29 years now, unwaveringly. Fruit till noon, brother. And I didn't like that smoothie that you gave me.

53:06It's pretty nasty. Listen. Okay. What's your biggest pet peeve? Pet peeve? Oh. I know what yours is. Oh, this is like the newlywed game. You know, what do you think mine is? Well, I mean, you're probably about to answer something different, but running water. Absolutely. Absolutely. Don't get me started on running water. Yeah. Did anyone notice the clock is now going the opposite direction? What? I'm a little confused. Okay. My pet peeve is when the windshield wipers are going more than they need to. That's a fair one. Believe me, I get the, I mean, we'll be driving and Sarah will be like, shut the window, shut the wipers off.

53:44Or lower the wipers. I'm like. It's upsetting me. Based on the wind, raise the wipers, lower the wipers. Okay, here's a good one, Sarah. Shut the wipers off. Get rid of the wipers. Who is your celebrity crush? Well, growing up, my celebrity crush was Gene Wilder. And look who I married!

54:11I found my real life Gene. I'm not kidding. Well, guess what? My celebrity crush was Wonder Woman. Guess who I married? I love that! I love that! That was awesome. Please join me in thanking these two amazing human beings. Thank you. Thank you.

54:46Thank you.

54:53I'm on this journey with me.