The Secret Founders Of +$1,000,000,000 Brands

30:42Or like when they're talking about stealing the underwear they're like steal underwear then profit yeah like well what what comes in the middle exactly and it worked uh and actually that actually is uh that actually is how most startups work by the way i think that's you know it seems like you're making fun of them but honestly that's that's actually more true than the other way so um so they go they're like okay we can they realize they could buy the rights to the book think and grow rich one of their favorite books because it's like it's such an old book that like the like the copyright or whatever had laughs or some shit like that they could basically buy the rights to it for a hundred thousand dollars so they scraped savings and they're like we're gonna buy this they buy it for a hundred grand in the next three years they make 10 million dollars in sales off that so like really awesome for them but in the grand scheme of things it turned out to be like kind of like just a base hit compared to what they then go on to do but what what year did they buy the book in the 80s yeah it was uh like early it was kind of like i think early to mid 80s something like that um so like 300 or 100 grand was like 300 grand so it's like not a small bet for your first time go at it one thing leads to another in the infomercial that they create they get frank tarkenton the nfl quarterback they're like oh let's get anybody they saw that had mentioned they love the book think and grow rich they're like hey come be a part of this infomercial and then if you want the whole infomercial is on youtube you can go watch it in fact i want to do a breakdown, a masterclass breakdown just on this infomercial, but, um, you can watch the thing.

32:09And what they do is they don't tell you about the product at the beginning. They're like, you just hear Frank talking to being like, you know, I always used to feel blah, blah, blah, but now I'm blah, blah, blah. And then somebody else comes in and they're like, you know, I was struggling, blah, blah, blah. And then now I'm, and they don't tell you what's the product that gave them that transformation. Like, this is the genius of marketing is you sell this benefit, this transformation you want people banging down your door saying what's the pill what's the product that gives you that right like this is the ozempic thing how the hell are you losing all this weight and it's like oh i take this thing okay you know let me have it let me have the magic pill and so at the end of the video they say it's thinking or rich they do 10 million dollars in sales over the three years by the way this video on youtube has like 900 views uh like nobody is studying this thing it's crazy to me that a video like this would have so few views.

32:59And they tell the story around the book that the richest people in the world, you know, Carnegie, the Rothschilds, they wanted this guy to write this. And so Carnegie commissions, what's his name, Napoleon Hill, to go study the most successful people in the world and find out their secret. And he did, right? And so that's how they sell this book. Beautiful. In the infomercial, this is an awesome infomercial. They have one guy come on who's a 24-year-old wonderkin. This guy he's just getting, he's on the up and up. Tony Robbins comes on a guy named Anthony Robbins comes on and talks about how much he loves the book unpaid by the way.

33:35They were like, Hey, will you do this? I heard you love this book. He's like, I'll do it. Does an unpaid spot. And they're so blown away by his charisma on camera that they're like, we got to be in the Tony Robbins business next. So they go to Tony and they're like, Hey, I love your book. We want to do the same thing. We didn't think we were rich, but with your book, he's like, okay. So They're like, we'll brand it. We'll figure out the infomercial, blah, blah, blah. They do it. They create a program in 1988, the year I was born, called Personal Power. And it becomes the best-selling self-help program of all time.

34:08It does$20 million in year one. And it just goes on to just... How old is... I'm looking at this. I'm looking at this. Tony Robbins has the original infomercial on his YouTube page for his personal power. How old is he here? He's like 25 years older than that. That's crazy, man. He's got a huge job. Yeah, he had a growth, a pituitary growth problem, which is why all of his hands, his teeth, his jaw are also oversized. He's a huge guy. If you've ever seen him in person. I want a pituitary growth problem. He looks great. And he did it. I think it was causing him to secrete 10 times more HGH than he was supposed to.

34:46And then they removed it at the right time before he became an actual nine foot ogre. So he got the benefits of that thing. It's an amazing story. He looks awesome, man. His jawline, he looks like the ultimate Chad. He looks awesome. He's got charisma of a nice guy, but the looks of a Chad, that's a killer duo. You know, I thought that might be your takeaway from all the things I just said, so I'm glad you picked up on the important bit. So they do, by 1990, now they're three years in, they're doing 36 million a year. They almost go bankrupt because the Gulf War starts in 91, and all television attention goes to that.

35:24so the infomercial business just sucks and they have to basically fire everybody just to stay alive during that year because they were infomercials just not converting the war was taking everybody's attention so then they go on and they're like okay here's our model and I've watched there's again the research for this was so fun there's interviews with this guy if you want to google it is Vandebunt this is the guy who joined really early he's been the CEO now for like I don't know 15 years really want to meet this guy I want to have him on the pod He's there's no interviews with these guys really out there.

35:56They don't go podcasts or anything like that. But this guy, Vandebunt went on, did a talk at some school, I think at USC, and they chopped up his talk into one minute clips. And I must have binged like 45 one minute clips last night of this guy. I love this guy. He's got such a good attitude and was saying things. But he's like, he's like, look, here's our process. Real simple. Like, we find the market need. Like, how do you find it? He's like, well, if you see one person with good skin and one person with bad skin, trust me, there's a market need. Like you see one person with brown teeth, another person with white teeth.

36:30That's going to be a big market need. And I can just sell it to you by showing before and after. And so that's the first thing is like, then we find the products and we try to license or own them. Then we tie them up to a developer or a celebrity or a story because nobody wants to buy from an ivory tower that says we have the solution. No, they want to buy from a person who says, I figured this out. I spent my life working on this and I figured this out. And he's like, we, we marry the market need with the marketing technique. And so the market first marketing technique they did was that infomercial technique that drove them for a long time.

37:01And now they've shifted to more like internet marketing, um, since then. And like to do the, like, uh, the television, just the, the depths that they went to. So they were so early in this, they're shooting these, um, these things for like, you know, all their brands, like they created, uh, proactive, the acne brand with Justin Bieber as one of the celebrities and like these doctors as the celebrities. They created Principal Secret. They got this actress, Victoria Principal. And they were like, okay, we think this is good, but we don't know exactly how to sell this product. So you know what they did?

37:35They put her on QVC. They were like, well, let's overpay to be on QVC. Is it going to break even? Probably not. But at QVC, if you've ever seen how a QVC thing goes, you can go backstage because during QVC, people are calling in to buy. And he's like, basically on a 10-second interval, you can see what gets people to buy. So they did this almost as a study to test the content. So they have her talking for an hour, and they can see what are the things she's saying that's causing the sales board to light up. And they took a product that really wasn't working. They went and reshot the infomercial with that intel of what lines and what talking points were driving the most interest.

38:13They reshot the infomercial, and now it's a$2 billion revenue-generating product. that they created out of that. It's pretty awesome. They created Proactive. They created a Pilates brand, a brand with Cindy Crawford. They did all this stuff. So they are 100 % privately held now. No external investors, just Guthy and Ranker. They've been doing this for 30-something years, and they do a couple billion in revenue profitably. And I was like, how is it possible? How did they scale with no outside revenue? And then here's the funny thing. There's actually a story of like, you know, this is a funny story.

38:44So they get this. Along the way, they actually did take investment so it's 100 % owned now but at one point in time they gave up 33 % of the business or something to this guy Ron Perlman who himself is a prolific guy he owns TV networks he owns Revlon he owns Marvel or he owned Marvel at the time yeah I think he's one of the guys who he's a he's one of the richest men in America I believe I think he's like worth like 40 or 50 like in that range billion and he helped uh i think his buyout of revlon was the largest leverage buyout at the time and he like kind of pioneered like the the leverage buyout uh i read his biography a few years ago has about like 4 billion but maybe it's gone up since then um oh i guess well for previously worth for a while it was huge yeah why did we go why did it go down so much maybe because revlon but i think he i don't even remember what revlon did i think it was like makeups but it was like a conglomerate like it owned like all this type of stuff but he uh he bought it for many many many billions and he kind of pioneered the the leverage buyout which eventually like the american population like it was like one of those things in the 80s where it was like uh like uh just absolute greed and like there's like you know like barbarians at the gate type of shit ron perlman um five marriages yeah there's a price to be paid the ai that's studying right now that might be like i guess getting married five times causes you to be a billionaire no no no it's correlation not causation you know you know how rich a guy is he's got five marriages so um okay so they they sell it they sell him the stake he gives him 25 million dollars they're like beautiful and he owns these tv networks like oh great we get dirt cheap airtime and we get 25 million dollars to invest they use that to grow like crazy pay off these pay celebrities to like be the endorsers like Justin Bieber and all the stuff to do that.

40:36I think they had Sidney Crawford. They had like a makeup thing with Sidney Crawford. I think they have one with Jennifer Lopez. They had a thing with JLo. Yeah, exactly. Eventually, Murdoch buys Ron Perlman's TV networks or whatever. And then basically they're like, oh, we get this stake, this 37 % stake in these Guthy Riker things. And it just got lost in the Murdoch empire over time. They went back and they're like, can we just buy this back? And they got it back for some tiny amount. They were able to buy back and own 100 % of it. And then I think now, recently, finally, I think Goldman bought a minority stake in the business, valuing it at$3 billion.

41:23And here's how you know they're really rich. A, the CEO, who you said, Van Bunt. Van de Bunt, yeah. he just bought a$25 million house. Whenever I hear about these people, I'm like, let's see how rich they really are. You can always find out through their real estate holdings. He just bought a$25 million house. And then Bill Guthrie, if you Google him, he doesn't come up because of this business. He comes up because Prince Harry, I guess. Yeah, he gave them his house to live in for a minute. Yeah, they lived in his estate. It's not a house, it's an estate when they were homeless for a few minutes.

41:57They lived in his estate. Yeah. And then also, he owned a home that one of the Kylie Jenner bought. So it all comes back to the Kardashians. Yeah, they're everywhere. At these guys' peak, they owned 35 ,000 toll-free numbers. Their phone bill was$150 million a year. That's insane. He's like, yeah, we did that. They're like, did you need that? He's like, we did it for attribution. He's like, we needed to know what converts better. The way we did that was every time we would try a new variation of our content, we would give it a new number. So we could just attribute which number is getting the most calls versus the spend.

42:34And that's how we did our performance marketing in the telephone days. I thought that was pretty dope. But you're also, you didn't even mention their most successful product that everyone who's listening, who's at least 30 years old will know this product. Which one? Proactive. They did Proactive. I did. Did you say Proactive? Yeah, that's the one they did with Justin Bieber, yeah. Well, I think you didn't put enough emphasis. I needed a pause. Yeah, they did Proactive, which made like a billion plus i i bought proactive i mean everyone bought pro did you use it no i didn't use it but uh i watched a bunch of those infomercials their infomercials are very entertaining like you could just watch it as a show um and actually it was pretty interesting watching uh listening to their method so he's like um he's like you know uh he's he always says the same thing he goes if you just come to me saying x i can't i can't change the channel fast tonight.

43:24You can just tell that that's like the guiding principle is like you don't want them to change the channel. And it's like everything trickles down from that one principle. So he's like, it's called the slippery slope, baby. You got to make a pot on that slippery slope. So he's like, these guys come in and they start pitching me a cyber safety product and they've been doing it for like seven years. It's you know, the highest it ever grosses a million dollars a year. And he's like, okay, so what's the product? He's like cyber safety. You know, like we help make your computers. Computers are the new thing.

43:53Um, we make your computer safer so you don't get hacked and you don't have a virus on your computer. He's like, oh man, I'm, if I'm watching TV relaxing at night, the last thing I want to do is get stressed about my problem. Get stressed about a problem. I'm not already stressed about, uh, which is like, oh, now my computer is going to get a virus. I'm going to lose. He's like, I couldn't change the channel fast up. He's like, but before they walked out of the meeting, he goes, Hey, I got a question for you. You know, we have this thing called need, need, greed, vanity. That's what we try to tap into.

44:19He goes, when you fix the computers to make them safer, does that also have any other benefits? Like, does it make it faster? And they're like, oh, yeah, for sure. Because, you know, no viruses, your computer goes faster. He goes, hmm. All right, come back next week and pitch me the fast thing. They come back and then they launch this product called Double My Speed. And that business that had never done more than a million dollars in seven years, all of a sudden does$75 million a year at the time he was giving this interview, which is a while back, for Double My Speed. He's like, you know, I just, he's like, I just, he goes, there's too many smart people.

44:51And they're like, how did you do it? Did you do like internet advertising for this computer product? He's like, no, we did radio ads. And it was just a radio infomercial. He's like, you know, I, he's like, there's too many smart people online. He's like, I don't want to compete in a knife fight unless I have a gun. And he's like, so we went to the radio because really no smart people were advertising on the radio and we could just get a bunch of inventory for cheap and we could just create content that was better than the current stuff on radio. And I was like, man, this guy's awesome. They were like, how are they doing now with infomercials not being as relevant?

45:22So he talked a little bit about it, but I don't know. There's not that much info out there. But he goes, he's so he's they were like, how did you make this a success? You know, you they're like vent this guy, whatever his name is, Vandabunt. Vandabunt's his last name. And they're like, you joined at what revenue? He's like, it was 12 million a year. He's like, what is it now? He's like, like 1.7 billion. They're like, oh, amazing. You hear that? The whole audience is like, wow, that's amazing. and he's like, yeah, when you say it like that it sounds crazy, he's like, but you don't see that far, he's like, when you're at 12 he's like, what's that phrase like, you can't see beyond the wall that's in front of you, he's like, when you're at 12 all you're thinking about is 25 and you just, there's some wall between you and 25, and then you break through that wall and then 25 wants to get to 60 and like, there's another wall to get to 60 he's like, you just keep doing that, we just did that over and over and over again, until you figure out, like, you know, the right thing and he's like, he's like for six years when we were doing the infomercial thing, we were so early to that channel.

46:20We were just the best at that channel. He's like, honestly, we didn't learn that much during that time. He's like, all the learning came in these like, he says this funny joke. He's like, there was some year where like, infomercial started to tank. The internet started getting more popular. He's like, we had 30 million people that were on a reorder program. Meaning he's like, our business model is, we get you interested in a product. You call up our phone, we pick up, and we tell you that that product's gonna be great for you. and that we may have some other products that are great for you. And actually, you know what?

46:49If you do this right now, we'll keep sending you this product for the rest of your life. He's like, that's like the business model. And he's like, it felt like one day, all 30 million people on our reorder program called each other and were like, you know what? Let's cancel this shit. And he's like, when the world was caving in, he's like, then we had to get smart again and figure out like, oh, we haven't even had to fight to win in so long. Let's be smart and let's figure this out. And I just think these guys, These guys have built an amazing business and nobody really talks about them, at least in our circles.

47:20Well, they don't talk about it because, A, it's not sexy. I mean, the money part is sexy because when I... You make this sound so cool, but in reality, this probably looks like workaholics. You remember that TV show, Workaholics? They're just sitting around making phone calls. That's probably what The Office looks like. We're just a bunch of morons sitting in this shitty cubicle wearing a badly fitting tie and suit, like just answering these calls. I mean, that's like not that fun to do like on a day-to-day basis, I imagine. It's really fun when it's crushing it though. They also don't get talked about because they've been around forever.

47:57It looks like the company was launched in 88 and before that they were doing different stuff. So it's been around for 40 years now. Right. But yeah, I love these guys. I want to know what they're doing with digital because I remember like, you remember P90X? Yeah, the workout program. I love P90X. That's another company. It's called something Beach. What's it called? Beachbody. So they're just like Guthrie Raker, but they own like P90X style companies and they owned a bunch of them. And I remember them. Well, you know what they did? They pivoted. Yeah, because the internet was like coming around and they're like, we have to keep up.

48:29And so now they have like a, it's almost like a Netflix style business, isn't it? It's an MLM. So basically they changed the sales model from this direct response infomercial model to MLM. So now they have Beachbody trainers and Beachbody associates that will sell people to join Beachbody, right? So they get people to post on social media that they've, not only have they gotten in shape, they now work for themselves. They are independent and they're making more money than they were ever working before. And if you're interested in kind of hearing how you turned your life around, like slide into the DMs.

49:05And then they basically sell you that like, you too should start selling Beachbody programs to people around you and you can make a lot of money and be fit. Dude, that's the worst. that that totally like because i remember when i was in australia uh when i was living there i didn't have a gym we i did p90x i did like i i did it i thought it was awesome but when you go the mlm route it makes me hate you yeah what's the name tony tony horton uh tony tony was ripped tony horton was ripped i even like side characters but it was like you know whatever he'd be like the chef the chef is here the the russian blah blah blah those guys that's a great program I wonder what he looks like now is he still yeah yeah he's still jacked I think he has some yeah he looks great some disease he got some disease and then kind of bounced back or something well he still looks amazing if you google Tony Horton he's 65 years old now he looks great uh so it worked um but anyway I'm a big I like these I like studying these companies I also like studying because a lot of people in the tech startup world are like well this shit doesn't work anymore and I'm like, wrong.

50:06It 100 % does. Maybe it looks a little different. Well, dude, this is what every DEC e-com business is doing, right? Like, that's what they're... The first business I featured, which was, you know, the Greed family doing this with the Kardashians, creating a shaper brand of the Kardashians. This is no different. You know, the cosmetics brand with Kylie Jenner, there's no different than what Guthy Rinker's been doing. They just used Instagram and Instagram celebrities instead of Hollywood celebrities and TV. It's the same model, same thing. So this one's a great, you win. This one's definitely the most interesting one.

50:41It's incredibly fascinating. One thing that I was trying to research that I couldn't find, and I think there's a bunch of people in our world working on this, is everything that we've discussed, it's mostly consumer products. What I'm curious is why this hasn't worked for like a more of a B2B product. So in a weird way, we aren't this, but HubSpot is trying to do it. You're like a fish being like, what is water? It's like, yeah, we are this for HubSpot. You know that? Yeah, but we're not the founders of the company. You know, we're not like, we own, we maybe have - We're the Kylie Jenner in this case, right?

51:16They basically - Yeah, but Kylie Jenner owns 50 % of that shit. You know, I own - That's why we got to renegotiate, baby. 0.1%. Yeah. And so I don't own that much of HubSpot. But I remember they, what was the company that did this with, what was the Rackspace? They did it with a guy. What was his? Robert Scoble. They were early with that, but I don't know if it worked out wonderfully or what happened to that. But there's not, I know there's a few other companies. So there's assembly brands. I worked with this guy Hunter. So we launched this thing called Viral Cuts where I own part of the company and it's like a agency that clips podcast clips, but it's going to be small.

51:52It's not going to be a multi-billion dollar company like this. I wonder why Shepard is a good business. It's like, it's a business that fits our audience, right? Every entrepreneur needs to hire people. If you can hire talented people overseas for 10 times less, like this It's like a no brainer product. So Shepard was already working and then they bring me on. And now I own a piece of that company. Enough of us. You are the Sidney Crawford. I am. That's what I've been telling them. And I was, they looked at me a little funny when I said it, but I, you know, this is what I bet. And, uh, you know, since we joined, uh, you know, first it was Nick Huber was doing it with him.

52:23No, you're more like the Chloe. You're the Chloe, man. You're the Chloe. Oh, that was good. A plus. about it. But it's the same thing. Bring on kind of like a influencer to promote a B2B product and revenue. We all time high last month, all time high this month. Right. Like it just keeps happening now every single month by doing that. And so it's a I think it is happening more in the B2B space. And that's why it's happening more, but it's not nearly as common. And I think it will be or should be. It's a big opportunity for sure. The thing that the thing is interesting. So Austin Reef tweeted this out over the weekend.

53:00I don't know if you saw him say this. He said, Every, I think he said DTC though. I think he said every like e-commerce company is gonna have a content creator that's more highly paid than many of the executives. So he says, over the next five years, every DTC business will have full-time content creators on staff. The best will be comped more than the execs and drive more value than anyone else in the business. The math is gonna make sense to hire, build, and invest in creators who can become a part of your company narrative versus spinning off one-off influencer campaigns. the key difference between a creator and a social media manager a social media manager just creates a post content a creator is the content and of course the best companies will be founded by creators like happy dad feastables prime etc when people hear creator they think of mr beast and logo paul i'm not referring to famous creators just people who create content full time and um this is something that we're seeing with our uh d2c business but in general i think this is i think you just need to take out the word d2c right dharmesh had the same insight he goes every software company is going to have its own media company.

54:01Why? Because creating your own media is going to bring inbound leads, and it's going to be a more efficient channel than doing outbound paid ads. And Darmesh is sort of like that with HubSpot. Actually, our most popular episodes are Darmesh. So he's pretty much doing that for his own company. Yeah, exactly. Okay, you want to do... Do you have more or do you want me to do one? You want to do one more? or let's do Scott Storch. Yeah, okay. I wasn't sure if that was in the same category, but I want to talk about. So here's another version of the guy behind the scenes, the engine that makes the thing work.

54:38We did it with business with DTC products. Well, how about music? So this guy's going viral recently for a bunch of TikToks because he's got an amazing story. This guy, Scott Storch, he is a producer sober now. And he's like, he's like out of the keys, like left the cave. He's a producer. He's a songwriter. He's famous for a couple of things. he produced some of the biggest hits, like, you know, Still Dre, you know, the little piano keys at the beginning of Still Dre. That's Scott Storch was sitting on a piano, did it, and Dr. Dre was in a kitchen eating a sandwich, poked his head and he goes, that's it.

55:13That's how Still Dre, the track happened. I love those stories. I love those stories. He did Candy Shop. He did Naughty Girl. He did a bunch of songs with everybody you can imagine. Beyonce, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown, all of them. he's amassed a fortune of about a hundred million dollars doing this as a producer behind the scenes that you didn't know about that was just killing it and he's also famous for blowing all hundred million because he got he got addicted to two things spending and cocaine and um and he was basically just partying too much blowing through all his money and now he reset so he you know he went to rehab got clean declared bankruptcy basically and came back um you know and now is trying to rebuild again.

55:57And so this guy's story I thought was pretty crazy. What do you know about this? Yeah. Yeah. So we did a bunch of interviews lately where he was like, I was spending two, three, four, five million dollars a month. He was like, I had houses that I forgot about. He said we had this one house and he goes, I had a five thousand dollars worth of like glass figurines that I had a party. So you were collecting like cars or shoes. He goes, I collected everything that could be collected. He goes, I didn't even care about. I had a million dollars of crystal figurines he's like they i had a party and they fell over we just like sweeped them up in the dust he goes i had a 500 000 um he was a 500 000 crystal bottle of perfume and the guy was like do you even wear it he goes nah some drunk girl at a party knocked it over and broke it and he's like he had a four million dollar pinky ring

56:51if you think you're bald and you don't have a four million dollar yellow diamond pinky ring uh like you need to step down because scott storage has has it done he is a character in grand theft auto because he's so prolific as a guy in miami who's like you know in in the scene there's this one uh story uh from 2013 where he says he spent something like a hundred million dollars one one says 30 million dollars once is 100 million dollars in six months uh he's like cocaine houses and cars yeah uh he just went hard yeah so like i love stories like this by the way i like it because hopefully this will have a happy ending but i just love people that fly close to the sun he's also a genius because he dropped out of ninth grade you know that so he dropped out of ninth grade and you know how he made his original like how he broke onto the scene no he was the keyboard guy for the roots so he's in ninth grade he drops out teaches himself how to play the piano um and he's like yeah they're like you didn't take any courses he's like no i mean i could afford a class he's like i actually enrolled in one class but i couldn't afford to get to it so i was like ah i guess i'm just not gonna like you know just i'll just try to sit here he's like i would i would have a a tape player and i would put it on the piano and i would hear it he's like then with one finger i'd be like trying to recreate what i just heard he's like and i just did that until I could learn how to play the keyboards like by ear he's like so then he discovers the roots before they were big he joins them and he's the only you know he's the white boy in the roots and they're just going and playing like literally on like corners and like he's like playing in the corner he'd go you know they'd go down to New York and they would play for a day and they'd come back to Philly and he would just do that all the time the roots start getting popular they get signed but then he leaves the roots and they're like why do you want to leave the roots he's like man, I heard that's that white boy from the roots one too many times.

58:41And he's like, they don't even know my name. He's like, I'm going to go create my own music. So he's like, I'm gonna create my own music. Through the roots, he had met Dr. Dre. So he goes and hangs out with Dr. Dre and Dre's like, yo, this guy's got talent. And so he makes some songs with Dr. Dre. And Dr. Dre at this time is the biggest producer in the world. He's the most high in demand guy. so Scott Storch makes his $100 million fortune as he says off the eating crumbs at the end of the table so basically Dre would get a project and he's like really picky he's like I'm not going to do just anything he's like so he would just take all of Dr.

59:15Dre's reject projects and do them himself and made$100 million doing that dude how good is Dr. Dre by the way the fact that like when Eminem came around you know he raps about it he's like you walked in with a yellow jumpsuit and you're a white guy and everyone's like, dude, you can't play with this guy. White rappers, that's ridiculous. If you Google Scott Storch, my wife's from Long Island, so I've got a bunch of Long Island people. This guy looks like there's the Long Island medium and then there's Scott Storch in terms of the way that they look in terms of stereotypes. He looks like the most Long Island guy ever wearing Ed Hardy t-shirts and true religion jeans.

59:51Dr. Dre sees past that and sees talent. That's pretty amazing. Exactly. He even says that. He's like, Dre's number one skill. He's like, he's very technically talented, but his skill is he can hear ten things and he'll tell you which one is hot. And he's like, we'll play the same thing five different times. And he's like, number four is the one that sounds the best. And he's like, Dre just has that ear for what's good. And what's hot, what's next, and what's different, what's unique, what's singular, what's going to stand out. He's like, I never had that to that extent. He's like, but I was able to get good enough where I could still make hundreds of hits.

1:00:25He would get paid a hundred grand to do a single track and he would do 10 a week and when and you know in his prime that's what he was doing that's how he was making his money so he's like dude i'm just rolling in money here and then he stopped working he's like i'm just gonna party now he's like the problem was like i was spending like i was still making money but i stopped working three years ago and i was just spending money like crazy and um yeah this guy's so here's some quotes i'd like to read you Okay. On blowing a hundred million dollars quote, it happens. When you talk about blowing a hundred million, I know cats that blew double that.

1:01:03That's the second response. It can happen to anyone, which I don't think it could happen to anyone. And then he says, he says, you know, I grew up a poor kid and then all of a sudden I have infinite money. I have no, I have infinite options. And I just didn't know how to say no um so then he uh they were asking about like you know how do you make a hit song he just goes like you know in the in the real estate game it's location location location and the music game it's melody melody melody he goes it's melody melody melody if you can make a memorable melody that's a that's what it takes to make a hit song and that's what i focused on being able to do um so yeah this guy scott storage is a prolific character well he he'll be back i I mean, I feel like if you have that skill, you can make it work.

1:01:50You can make it work for a while, right? I mean, it's very similar to marketing. It's like if you understand what motivates people and gets them to act, whether it's dancing or buying something, you'll come back. Have you ever met these guys? There'll be guys like, oh, man, I got a hold of all these old rookie cards for this baseball player who's about to die. We should go and buy all of them for$50 ,000 and hold on to them for three weeks and then resell them. I just got this old like, you know, supply of like DVD players. It's only 50 grand. Like they're always into schemes. Like I always meet these guys like love these schemes.

1:02:24Every once in a while, it works out. And this is like a guy, Scott Stewart, who's like, you'll meet this guy. You're like, dude, you're an idiot. No way that's gonna work. Like quit trying to scam me. This is one of those guys who's made it work. You know, another guy who did it that way was the Dollar Shave Club guy. You know, it actually Dollar Shave Club came to be a thing because he like solid discount on like a container of like cheap razors. And he's like, let's just buy these. Oh, wow. Yeah. He's like, let's just get this cheap razors and just figure out how to sell them. I don't know how we're going to do it.

1:02:53I think his father-in-law like had a deal on like 50 ,000 razors. And he's like, screw it. Let's just do it. I've met a bunch of these people like this. For some reason, it's always a Long Island thing, by the way. And Scott Storch is a for everyone out there who's just scheming on these types of like weird, weird things. This is your hero. you know I'm talking about you ever meet these guys and they always have some weird hustle going down I was one of those guys counting cars I'm trying to win the monopoly game at McDonald's we're entering contests we realize that most people don't enter contests if there's any work so like my buddy Dan was amazing at this I actually wrote him off and then later learned this guy's a genius he freshman year this guy lives three doors down from me and we're like yo we're gonna go get food and then like we're like who are you waiting for where's dan and we like go to his don't we're going to his room we're like dan let's go man we're supposed to we're hungry he's like oh hold on um the deadline for this contest is in like 30 minutes i gotta i i'm out and i'm like what contest why are you gonna take a contest and uh like duke is full of like kids who play by the book and dan never really played by the book he was like he had his own little book that he was playing in.

1:04:08And so, you know, he's like, oh, this is Stride gum. Is it Stride gum will give you free gum for life if you can make a commercial for like a 20 second commercial that's like cool for Stride gum. So he took a little like flip cam, like it wasn't even smartphones back then. He took one of those flip cams and he basically like filmed this commercial of himself in his dorm room being like, whatever, Stride gum, the best goddamn gum in the world. He's like doing this commercial. He submits it. He's probably one of three people that actually like read the fine print submitted and did the work to submit a commercial with that that filled in all the things and guess what stride gum for everybody for the rest of college right we had free stride gum for really he won did another one he's like um wait what type of package did the gum come in what's gum forever like they just order infinite amount basically um like you could just keep ordering by some some limits um they needed another one for this sandwich shop called spicy pickle they're like hey we're renaming our mascot and of course dan's over there trying to rename the mascot i'm like dan you do you even like this restaurant he's like no but you i want to win and i'm like you know he's like the definition of like play stupid games win stupid prizes but he has so much goddamn fun doing it that you're like ah i kind of wish i was doing this like dan and so he renamed so the mascot currently for spicy pickle is a pickle who's a spy called spy the letter c pickle and he's got a business card and he's a spy that will help you out and that's Dan.

1:05:34Dan created that character and then we go to like the ceremony at a spicy pickle headquarters and there are like 20 people in a circle cheering, clapping for him and they hand him a big check that says like three sandwiches and he wins and so he just kept doing these things and Dan's from Jersey and I feel like he just always had this thing which was like I'm gonna play these like I'm gonna find these random edges and I'm gonna win. Like I'm gonna just find these little arbitrages and I'm going to constantly exploit them. Dude, we should do an episode on this because have you read about the guy who did it with snack pack, like pudding cups?

1:06:11Like you remember, you know, like pudding. Okay, so they ran this contest that says like, I forget exactly how the contest worked, but you could like, if you pulled off the tops of the pudding and like lick it, it like said like you won this much in free airline miles. And there was like some contests around it. But this guy did the math where I'm just, I just had to Google it now to remember. exactly but he only had to buy i think 3500 dollars worth of pudding which is like a significant amount in terms of like how much space it would take up in your room and he like had all this pudding and he peeled all the packs and he was able to redeem it for 1.2 million miles airline miles and he like gamed the contest and there's like we at the hustle we used to do this of people like gaming these contests there's like a bunch of people there's this community of people who go and find these contests and they're like, all right, where did they make the mistake where if you follow this exactly, you could actually milk it hardcore to the extreme.

1:07:06And there was a guy who did this with pudding. So it was basically, you get 1 ,000 miles for every 10 labels. Because the whole thing was like, for some reason, this pudding is supposed to be healthy. And so they said, if you eat a lot of it, it's good for you. And we're going to reward you by giving you 1 ,000 miles for every 10 labels. and so there was two dollars a piece he figured out that he could buy them in bulk and he's like here's this arbitrage where it's profitable and he did that where he got 1.2 million miles for 3100 wow there's a netflix show about this uh about about a different version of this some guy trying to do this with a i think he had to buy cans of pepsi or something like that coke or something to do airline there's some show i haven't i haven't watched it yet but i saw it uh show up on on uh on netflix yeah then there's the mcdonald's one there's a mcdonald's one too where they where Or they like...

1:07:55But that was just a scam. They just... They scammed it. Yes. But it is fascinating. I do like reading about those. They're always fun stories. We should... One of these days, we'll do an episode of all these people who have just gamed the system. We used to do that, the Hustle, all the time where we would give... I forget what it was. It was like one email subscriber to us was worth$10. And if you referred like 10 people, we would send you a t-shirt, which was a profitable thing for us. And if you Google the Hustle affiliate contest, all of these moms have... There was mostly like a stay-at-home mom website.

1:08:24and it's called like coupon dash or like some of all these websites where it's just people who enter contests and they're like, Hey, look, here's another one. You can win a free pair of socks if you refer 50 people. And it was like referral like rings. And we would get all of these people doing this and we would catch this and we're like, why is like this like a 38 year old woman named Cindy winning all of our prizes? We've never heard of her. She's won all this stuff. What's going on? and you like can figure out that they list your contest on these websites and they game it like crazy. It's a pretty wild thing.

1:08:56So we had to create like a double opt-in system because they just figured out they're like, you see them talking about like, look, you don't even need to opt in your email. So you can just write like Sean plus one at AOL.com Sean plus two at AOL.com and you just win. And so that's when we had to change it. But like I, that's how I learned a little bit about this underground world of like sweepstakes. They call it. Yeah. Yeah. Sweepstake hackers. Amazing. All right. Should we wrap it there or do you want to do any more of these? We'll wrap it there. So I think the order of greatness, the least interesting one, I think it was either mine or the hot couple.

1:09:33The second. The perfect couple. We have to put the perfect couple down there because they've been winning at everything their whole life. Yeah, it'll go perfect. In our world, you lose. And then Robert. Yeah. The perfect couple is the worst. This actually is true. Finally, they have something bad on their resume. really does feature sort of like ugly winners. Yeah. Sort of like more ugly and like, you know, slightly shady you are. The higher you seem to rank on My First Million. I don't know if that's intentional or unintentional, but it definitely happens. Yeah. So the hot people, they're your last.

1:10:10And then we'll go Robert Earl. And then the one above that is Scott Storch is going to go number two, Guthrie Rinker, number one. The juiciest. But Scott Storch is interesting too. But Guthrie Rinker, I think there's more to learn. So that's it. That's the pod.

1:10:30I 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 off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:10:49All right, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of, and then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:11:17It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

1:11:42For more information, check out Mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.