611: From Homeless to Multi-Billionaire - His Success Habits | John Paul DeJoria

24:53Give them a piece of the action. Always go back to the hairdresser. And when it comes to people, there's a statistic that we read online that apparently John Paul Mitchell Systems, your employee staff turnover is incredibly low. It's reported less than 100 people over decades have left your company. What are the core components when it comes to building a really incredible company culture? You know, you've got a policy around giving free lunch, you know, but what is really driving this unprecedented loyalty? Well, I would say that I've worked for people before that maybe weren't the nicest people.

25:35I've been in a situation before I had a dollar for lunch. you can't buy very much for that. So I thought, you know, if I'm lucky enough to make it, by gosh, I'm just trying to treat people the way I'd want to be treated. And the first thing I was able to do was give my small staff free lunch. Everybody got free lunch because there were all the times when, you know, I didn't have a lunch or for a dollar, I couldn't get very much whatsoever. I've been there before. So it's kind of like doing to others as you would have others doing to you. That was kind of philosophy. And the better we did, then I could get into, hey, here's bonuses.

26:04Here's some profit sharing. Hey, we can do a health insurance for you. And always bearing in mind, what can we do as a team to make a hairdresser's world better and to raise their prestige? Because we're all about loving hairdressers. And when you love what you do and the people you do it with, it's a lot easier. Yeah, I agree. Look, I think when it comes to life, you spend a third of your life working. And one of the things you want to work out is who do you want to work with? who are the people and if you can build a an incredible environment around people you personally as the founder want to work with you've got you like that's that's one core component of life you've got sorted yeah and i knocked out a lot of middle management in other words if a person could do the job why should i need somebody watching them so i would say the majority of what somebody would have has middle management i didn't have to help i just made sure the people that I hired were people that could do more than one thing.

27:02So for six months, we couldn't hire anybody. It was just me almost doing everything other than Paul doing the shows himself. And Jane brought his girlfriend. They did the shows. And I did packing the boxes. I mean, you name it, I did it, sending out the invoice. I did it all. After six months, I was able to hire Shirley Wong, wonderful lady. But she had 10 jobs. I mean, she was the resectionist, the secretary, the biller, the packer. She did 10 different things. It was amazing because that's what we needed. So it allowed me to be more involved in sales and direction of the company, as well as ordering various products.

27:37And then it was another year after that, which would be a year and a half in business. But before we hired our second employee, who Mr. Safford turned out to be not only our second employee, but he was a salesperson, a traveling person, and an educational person all in one. So I learned that many, many, many years before that you can do more than just one thing. So I have to do almost everything when we started the business. So it was very easy to turn several things over to a person if they were qualified to handle it. And the majority of the time I was right, they were able to qualify and handle it.

28:09Occasionally you go wrong, but most of the time I was right. And you are right. I think in my opinion is, oh God, we've been around for 45 years now. And I don't think it could be any more than just a hundred or two that have left the company either retired or went on to do something else or moved or something. Not, not very many, considering we're in 130 countries, have a lot of people that work for us. Yeah. It's, it's really interesting. It's a, and it's, it's, it's something that you should be incredibly proud of, uh, because that there are a lot of companies out there that don't treat their stuff well, that there's a lot of companies, there's a lot of companies out there that, uh, you know, they're not a great place to work.

28:48I've worked, I've worked at many other places and I've worked at some crappy companies too and I know what it feels like. Got to be kind. Number one priority in life is just be kind to one another. Be kind. So I'd love to switch gears and talk about Patron. You did something crazy and you got into a totally different business. And when you launched Patron in the tequila space, tequilas were usually$5 a bottle, But you launched Patron in 1989 and you priced it at a premium price of$37.95. How did you convince retailers and bartenders to really embrace this ultra premium pricing and create the need for the sipping tequila category?

29:40There were several ways we did it, and I will explain to you, maybe give you a couple of examples, okay? There's many ways we did it. First of all, nobody would take us. We went to every distributor. They said, are you kidding? $37.95. It might be really good stuff, and it is good, but no one's going to pay. That is just too much. Nobody would take us. We finally convinced a wine distributor. All they distributed was wine to take us. We could convince them to do it. And we did it. We said, look, we could give you Spago's restaurant if you'll take us. Spago's was the number one restaurant that Wolfgang Puck ran.

30:14This is 1989. And then, I mean, 1989. And Martin, my partner that I started the company with, he went ahead and got Baja Cantina. So we told this wine distributor, we'll get you those two accounts. They said, if you get those two accounts, we'll distribute for you. Well, we already had them. So we knew we had them. So we gave it to them. But what happened after one year, they were only selling very, very few. not even a thousand cases like that's nothing. So we dropped them immediately. And then we went with a bigger distributor that, you know, had more, shall we say teeth in the industry and more distribution and alcohol.

30:48So at first no one would take it. So what are some of the ways we did it? One of the ways we did it was other than Spago's and places I knew, I would walk into a bar. And in those days you could do it. I don't know if you could still do it or not. And I would asked the bartender, I would say, I'd like to buy you a shot of tequila. And I think it was like $3. It was really cheap. So he wouldn't, I give him$3, right? I said, I want you to taste this, give me an empty glass. And I go from my briefcase and I parse it and I'll taste this. He goes, wow, that is, that's some kind of a tequila, right?

31:18But it's really mellow. I said, exactly. That's the future of tequila. That's Patron. You want to treat yourself here with Patron because it's the very, very best. So it took a while to get it going, but there's many other the ways that we did that underground type of marketing where we would get 3 ,000 people at one time, tell them about the product, serve it to them, you know, let them taste it. And then eventually it kind of caught on. I'll never forget once I got a call from one of my distributors with Paul Mitchell from Chicago. And he said, JP, I found some of the Patron Tequilas. One liquor store has a whole bunch of it.

31:52And they're selling it for$25 a bottle. I said, they pay more than $25 a bottle for it. How in the world can they do that? He says, I asked the guy, he says, well, nobody knows about it. Just sitting here, no one's picking it up. No one knows about it. Just want to get rid of it. I said, you have no idea. That'll never, ever happen again, I guarantee. And of course, it never did because surely thereafter, the volume started picking up and up and up and up. And before you knew it, Patron was a household word and known as the company that brought ultra premium tequila to the United States and the rest of the Western world.

32:25that's uh that's a really good story and you've got another one that i want to ask you around jim beam so major distributor they predicted patron would be lucky to sell 20 000 cases per year that's correct and that was because of the premium high price of patron what did you guys do to eventually sell over 4 million cases a year. Well, it wasn't what we did to scale to it. It's just how we managed it to get that big. And what happened was when, and it was a good distributor, a very big name in the whiskey business. And they came to us in a very nice way and said, guys, based on what the industry is doing now, based on the history of tequila, and based on what you have right now, guys, you'll never sell probably more than 20 ,000 cases a year.

33:14It's the best tequila ever, but it's way too expensive for people to buy. And of course, we dropped them and took on another distributor who took it up to many more cases a year. And then we dropped them, took over ourselves and built the company. Now, it wasn't a decision. Well, let's go build into a hundred or a million, two, three million cases, whatever. Let's build that. It was a matter of what we're doing is really good now. Now, how do we refine it? And I had a fabulous CEO and a fabulous staff. And Ed Brown, my CEO, brilliant man. And we worked together and he came up with the idea of let's just make the star of everything, the bottle.

33:51And that's what we did. So if there was ever an ad, the bottle was the star. In other words, it wasn't a good looking girl, a good looking couple, a good looking guy, a man on a horse. It was just the bottle we made at the start. And then when I did a series of television programs, which I did because of Paul Mitchell, I get on quite a few TV stations, the news. I could talk all about our brand new product, our brand new Patron and how good it is. And then we got some great distributors to agree with us. And then we started really building it. And when we finally got into the 1990s, it really started growing quite rapidly.

34:28Yeah. And when you were getting feedback from other big distributors like Jim Beam, who have been in this space, and this is a whole new space to you, to drop the price, where did the conviction come from that you needed to maintain the price and that premium feel? Well, it costs, first of all, so much to make the product. For us to make a profit, we had to charge that much money, okay? But we knew what we had was the very best. We would be in the reorder business. All we've got to do is let enough people taste it. And when they taste it, they'll want to treat it. We fear at least half of them would want to treat themselves to the best sequelae there was.

35:10In fact, I could give you a little story about that. Mr. Miller, my stockbroker at one time with Goldman Sachs, called me on the phone and said, JP, you're not going to believe this. I was driving through this little Mexican town and I stopped there, I mean, a little town, and I stopped there at a Mexican restaurant and I went to get something to eat and drink. He said, this was in Texas, by the way, not Mexico, Mexican restaurant in Texas. He says, and it was just a little funky one. And I said, well, I'll order margarita. I wasn't about to order Patron because the place could not handle the quilo like that.

35:42It was probably a$2 bottle, whatever. I said, I'd like to order a margarita, please. And he says, the waitress said, how about this? For$3 more, I could give you the best tequila you could ever imagine. You could treat yourself. I could put that in there. I said, well, of course, that's great. What is it? She said, Patron. So even a funky little inexpensive restaurant had, and she used those words. Why don't you treat yourself today here for$3 more, you can have the very best tequila there was. And we carried that message to other people, plus to quite a few other things too. But that's all about it in the book too.

36:15And you could read about that also. There's quite a few things that we did. So why did you even decide to get into the tequila business? Back in 1989, early part of actually late 18, 1988, 89 beginning, my friend of mine was building a house with me for my family on the West Coast. I thought it'd be like a family retreat. I was building it. I needed some stone, stone columns. So he brought me this fellow named Martin. He said, this is a friend of mine, Martin. He just went bankrupt in the hospitality business. And he needs somebody to really work with them. He's really great at designing things, wants to start a company where you will buy pavers and you'll sell them to restaurants or model homes for architects and furniture and things like that in Mexico.

37:03and he just needs someone to be the bank for him and give him a helping hand. So I said, sure, I'll be the bank. I gave him a helping hand. This was 1988. At the end of the year, we were doing okay, but not really that great. And we were starting to build this holiday house for the family. So I said, Martin, when you go down to Mexico again, why don't you find out, because we were just drinking regular tequila then, why don't you find out what the Mexican aristocrats drank? It's got to be better than what we're drinking. You know, lick the salt and, you know, have your shot and put the lime after so you don't get that harsh taste in the back of your throat.

37:37So he said, OK. So he came back in just a couple of plain bottles and it was pretty smooth. But he said, JP, I met a guy named Francisco Alcarez who could make it smoother, he said. And he found this old distillery that can make it that way that was making tequila similar to that. So we went ahead and said, OK, ordered a thousand bottles, I mean, a thousand cases, 12 ,000 bottles. we said, well, let's give that a start. And if we're, and I was doing good at Paul Mitchell, really good there. So if nobody wanted to buy it, well, for the next 10 years, if you had a birthday or any kind of a celebration, you got a bottle of tequila.

38:10I mean, I figured it was that good, that high of a quality we could do that. And that's kind of how we did. And again, I didn't, not knowing anything about the business, we came back and we went to distributors. I did it. My partner did it and nobody wanted to carry it. Nobody wanted to carry it until we got that wine company. Yeah, got you. And that talks about in the book also. We learn the industry quick, first by the vocabulary, and then how people went about delivering the vocabulary. That was very important. So assume that people knew you were already in the business. Another example I could give you is, I have no email.

38:43I do not do the computer. I only make telephone calls, texting, and WhatsApp. That is it and no more. But yet I have an AI company. Now, how does a guy that's not on a computer or anything else have an AI company that's starting to grow really, really fast? And it's called Van Did It. V-A-N did it. Like Van, he's the guy that did it. I didn't do it. Van Did It. Van Did It, okay? Which in Latin means to sell. Started this company. But how could I do that one? I got the top engineers, people like Gary Stevens and others, the top people in that field. They knew what the hell they were doing and had great ideas on what to an AI company they presented to me.

39:21they knew what it took technically. I knew the business end and the promotional end. It was a great combination. So it goes back to this. If there's something you're doing and someone could do it better than you can, especially a hundred times better, it doesn't mean you shouldn't go in that business. It means that you should know enough about it to bring the top experts in to do what you cannot do. And then learn along the way, don't try and do everything. I learned that back in 1989. Actually, it was the year I started Patron. I finally turned my warehouse over to a fellow named Luke Jacob Ellis.

39:55I was running everything. And a friend of mine, Mr. John Capra said, JP, I know this guy, Luke, he could reorganize your warehouse. You're trying to do everything and control everything, JP. This guy will help you out. And I was one not to let loose of anything. So I brought him on board. Greatest thing I ever did. He eventually became my CEO of the company. and then my daughter followed him. But just a really great guy and he was able to handle that warehouse and a whole bunch of things I was unable to do really well because I didn't know how to do it really well. So part of it also is learn along the way to delegate and get good people, get people better than you are.

40:31A lot of people, especially that are working for someone else say, well, I'm going to get someone better than I am to work for me. I'll lose my job. They'll take my job over. No, that's not true. If I ever have anybody that'll hire somebody that's better than they are for that job. That's who I want as a manager because that's what I would do. Like, I don't know much about AI, but I sure as all have them surrounded by people that are. And another AI organization that I'm kind of involved with right now that has no equipment in that field. And we think it's going to go a long way and it's USAI, but you'll hear more about that in the future.

41:02So a few things I'd love to unpack there. First and foremost, you've done very well with picking the right people around you. What are you looking for? What are you looking for? How do you know that that person's the real deal? You would get so many people, you've been on Shark Tank. So many people would be asking you for money, want to do business with you now. How do you know who to trust? And if somebody's the real deal, how do you work that out? Well, that's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question because that's the toughest thing. I've been burnt before in my life. Even when I made it, I invested in things that, well, people weren't really what I thought they were.

41:40So what I do is, number one, I not only look at a resume, but the person wrote that resume. I didn't write it. No one else wrote it. They wrote their own resume. So, of course, they're going to flatter themselves. So when I talk to somebody, I look at them and I listen to where their heart is coming from, not just their words. I go for what energy do I feel from this person? Do I feel a good energy from them? And then, of course, I make sure it's a technical field that they're more than skilled in that field. And I check that out. I do due diligence to check that out. If it's not investing in something, I have my own home office that does all the due diligence for me.

42:16But it's very, very, very difficult to know sometimes if someone's telling the truth or not and if they're going to be honest with you or not. Because I've been ripped off a couple of times too where people did things they shouldn't have done. But you learn. It's part of business. I think you learn along the way. But don't trust what everybody says and don't ever not check on your business or check on your books because people will take advantage. You've also shared before around this idea of forgiveness and letting go. In life, in life, no matter what you do, you're always going to be bogged down in life with things on your shoulders until you get rid of them.

42:56What do you get rid of and how do you get rid of? If you have in your mind at all, any jealousy or jealous about anybody doing something, You hate somebody from the past because they did you wrong. You hate yourself because you passed up an opportunity like, oh, my God, if only I did that. Anything that's regret, jealousy or hate or anger, anything like that, get it off your shoulders. How do you get off your shoulders? If you think about anybody that you don't like, you think about anything you've done in the past that you wish you would have done it differently. You cannot change yesterday's newspapers.

43:32You can't do it already happened, right? So what you do is you say to yourself, hey, Mike, I forgive you for punching me in the stomach when I was in grammar school. You know, Elaine, I forgive you for not showing up for our date and all of a sudden telling people you don't want to go out with me in the first place. You know, I mean, you can go all the way down the line. Jerry, I forgive you for stealing money from me. To yourself, you can just say, I forgive you. I forgive you. If it comes in your mind again, just say, hey, that's the old me hanging on to that stuff. The longer you hang on to, you think about it, it builds it even bigger.

44:04When it comes to yourself, you got to forgive yourself first. There is no way you're going to change anything you did in the past. So forgive yourself. Hey, everything I did in the past, I did. I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to wish I did it differently because there's not a thing I could do about it. Get all that off your shoulders and you go forward. If you don't get off your shoulders, you're going to find yourself in a situation where you're jealous of somebody or somebody says something and you're really angry at them for saying it or you dislike somebody because they didn't like you or things like that.

44:32When you get it all off your shoulders and those things pop up again, it's forgiven immediately. It's a wonderful thing to go forward with and just let everything go. Yeah. You're actually, to be honest, more spiritual than I thought. And when I say that, I mean, even like from research, you've talked about kind of meditation and letting things go and being present. Where does that come from? I think it's just from going along life and all of a sudden finding yourself, especially my start of Paul Mitchell, waking up in the middle of the night, just worried about I can't pay the bills the next day.

45:16I graduated several months later to, okay, I don't want to think about this anymore. So I'm going to take a piece of paper and I'm going to write on that piece of paper everything I'm thinking about that's going to worry me. And then I'm going to put it on my bathroom mirror. I'm going to tape it there. I can see it in the morning. So psychologically, when I go to bed, I don't have to think about it. It's on the mirror. I'll just look in the morning. And that really helped me go to sleep. And then when I went to the mirror the next day, those things that kept me awake weren't that important. And I would just cross them off.

45:46They weren't as bad as I thought they were. And then after a while, little by little by little, I tried to get it down to fewer moving parts. And some along the way, I don't know where, but some along the way, someone had said to me or I read or something like that about you got to get things off your shoulders, especially hate, where you hate yourself or doing something or not doing something or hate somebody else. It'll make life easier. So I took them all the way out eventually to the past, present, and automatically in the future. I found myself not being upset by it at all. There's nothing I was jealous about in the future.

46:22There was nothing that I didn't like. If something happened, I didn't like it. Within a matter of minutes, maybe sometimes hours, it was gone. It wasn't there anymore. That's a great way to live life. And I know for many, many people, they would look at someone like yourself that is super successful and think how wonderful life must be. What would you say to them? Go grab the book, Success Unshared is Failure, because it's all about all kinds of no's in there and how to overcome the no's at the same time, how to end up having a pretty good life and being involved with quite a few people. There's quite a few stories in there of the hows, whens, and where's.

47:05So I would say, read the book here. Just read this book here. It took me almost three years to write this book with three of the best writers in the world. It's my autobiography. But I did just change to make sure that the reader would be able to do what I was talking about. That's why it took me almost three years to write a book. I think if I was smart, I'd write it a year. But I kept on reading. And I read the whole book over six different times before I thought it was, OK, people can now understand and be able to apply it in their own lives, whether it's their personal life or their business life.

47:36And since you have a lot of people are going into startups, like into the, it's called the digital technological community. That is a wide open community. My God, is that a wide open community? If you want to get an idea of things to do in that community, go online and type in Ben did it. That's the AI company we started. See what they did is totally thinking out of the box, but using computer skills. And we created a platform. That's the word. It's a platform that's kind of like an AI platform, but more of a platform that the engineers developed their geniuses over a few years and quite a few million dollars I invested in that.

48:11However, I could probably do it again, but I have to convince somebody that's a top engineer to do it with me for little to no money because I would have had no money at the time. Yeah. I find it really crazy that you manage billions of dollars without a computer. Like most people would be kind of dumbfounded by that. Like when did you decide that this was what you were going to do? What started it was in the seventh grade at Washington Irving Junior High School. Now, seventh grade for me is like the 1950s, early 50s. I was born during World War II. Okay, a little older than you guys. Anyways, and here's what happened.

48:53We had to learn and memorize the multiplication table from one times one all the way up to 12 times 12, all the way up every we could ever do it and memorize it by heart. So when people started talking to me about figures, in most cases, I would just add zeros on or deduct zeros and come up with a solution in my mind. I didn't need it. And then when I found myself, let's say, getting into this world, never got into emailing, but getting into this world and seeing people around me, I see people on the telephone for hours just texting away or on the computers texting away and not calling people on the phone or writing them letters.

49:32And I thought, well, you know what? I'm a personal person. If you write me a letter, I'm going to write you right back on that letter. The answer is someone mail it to you, or I'm going to pick up the phone and call you immediately. So I could keep that involved that way and not get stuck on the computer all the time. In fact, I didn't even see what a computer was like until way after we started the company and never had one. But then again, remember, that's the 1980s. Computers are just coming around at that time, I think. They were big ones. They were little ones like they have today. So as a matter of, I could do what I did without it.

50:06And then when we got into a little bigger size, shall we say, then I had accountants that had computers, calculators, everything you could ever imagine. They did it before I would do everything by hand and it worked. Yeah. It's just crazy to me. I would rather do things. Well, you all talk to right now because I'm doing a podcast with you. But other than that, I'll address people on the telephone or I'll dictate a letter or I'll have my secretary send out an email. I don't touch it, but it gives me time to think. That's a big deal. Time to think and not be a robot. In fact, recently I talked to 3 ,500 young people about today's world is you have your telephone and you talk to it or you text to it and you send it to someone else's telephone and they see it and then they look at it and then they answer it.

50:53But while they're looking at it, usually there's something underneath on that same subject that went along with wherever they sent you. people are so good at marketing, you all of a sudden get interested and you start going through that. All of a sudden you're on the computer forever. And I see that happening a lot. There's just no way people should do that. But to all the young people out there, I say this, make sure your telephone, your computer is off, off. Not when you go to bed, but at least a couple hours before you go to bed. Are you, are you going to think? You can't think on your own if you're depending on your computer to give you an answer or your telephone to give you an answer.

51:28You're not thinking on your own. You are communicating. Also, it hurts a lot of people. Most young people don't know how to communicate. They could type words out and say whatever they want because they don't have to face a person in their eyes. When you're in front of somebody and you face them, it's a lot different because now you have their energy going. Their energy is there. So it's something as basic as try not to use your phone if you don't have to. Have it off at least a couple hours a day and start talking to people. If you want to practice, go in an elevator and look at the wall, not above the door at what floor you're on.

52:02Turn around and look at everybody. But the way to communicate with people, if you look them in the eye and you feel uncomfortable doing that, look in between the eyes or at their eyebrows. It looks like you're looking right in the eye. This way you get through that, shall we say, hesitation of looking someone in the eye. Because you're actually, they think you're looking them in the eye, but they're not. This is just a little way to start it out. Now people get used to it. Also, they get used to being more friendly because on that text or that computer, they could say whatever they want and it goes across.

52:33If it's something that is wrong and it gets out to more people and you find out it was wrong, are you going to connect it and correct it at the same time? Do you connect that with the person you send it to and say, hey, could you send this to anybody else? Please correct them. Tell them I was wrong. No, you don't do that. The wrong information gets out. When you're in front of somebody and somebody's in front of you and you're talking, it's much harder to get out something wrong because they'll bust you on it. So you mentioned something that you brought me back to something that one of my mentors taught me, um, who, uh, very, very, very successful guy.

53:05He talked to me about how underrated it is to spend time to think how, how, how do you spend? Like, are you allocating time? Do you, I, I, I'm curious, like how many time, like how many hours per day, per week would you spend thinking? I can't quantify it other than I don't have to spend time on a computer, don't have to spend on a telephone. When I need time, I take time. And if I really want to take time, and I do this a couple of times a year, I'll disappear for three days and just hang out with myself and make lists of what's good in my life, what's not good in my life, what I like, what I don't like, who may be good in my life, who may not be good in my life.

53:44What can I do and improve my own self and make it better for myself and others. And I'll actually take time to do that in my life and just get away and do it. Love it. All right. Last question. We have to work towards wrapping up. I could speak to you all day, JP. Talk to me around your memoir, Success Unshared is Failure. Why did you decide to put that together? I wanted to put it together because so often people say, JP, tell your story. It helps out so many young people. And I do. I talk to colleges. I mean, I taught to government agencies, but it was, JP, you got to get it out and you got to show this with more people.

54:21The way to do this is to write a book. So I started trying to write a book about 10 years ago, didn't do very well at it. Three years ago about, I got really serious and really got into it. And that's why the whole purpose was to be able to write something that I could deliver to millions of people, maybe hopefully a billion people on the planet that will pass it on and read it and learn how to be kind, how to build a business on kindness, how to build it on trust, and how to build businesses that you know nothing about whatsoever and shortcuts to do it. And maybe some of the reasons why I got into some of the other newer businesses I'm in right now and what the end result is of that.

54:58Another thing I'd like to leave with all your listeners or your viewing audience is this. You don't have to retire. I will probably live to be a minimum of 125 years old, minimum, probably quite a bit older than that, I'll never retire because you're always as old as your mind leads you to believe. And with all the new things going on in modern medicine, and I'm part of some of those things now that I've invested in and work in right now, I know that the majority of everybody out there is going to go way over 100 years old with no problems at all. And I also know that in a very short period of time, what we know is cancer isn't going to be existing anymore.

55:33There's just some great things going on right now. So I've got a good life to look forward to, and I want to share it. And if you have a lot and you don't share it, it's failure. A good example is the giving pledge, which I'm a member of, okay? The giving pledge is a pledge that says this. I made a lot of money. Most of us are billionaires, right? We made all this money. But we'd like to pledge that when we die, we'll be able to share some of that with people. Or while we're alive, we could do it. Now, a lot of people wait till they die. They build big temples. They build something with their name on it.

56:05Some people do what their life still. But quite a few of us do what we're alive. Like in my case, everything from building, helping build communities for a few thousand homeless people to feeding the homeless, to helping children, to take care of orphans, a variety of things I've already started doing while I'm alive. It's basically a pledge. I want to make the world better because it's been good to me. And that's what it is. The world's been good to me. And I feel that if life is good to you, if you don't share your success, it's a total failure because you've only done for yourself more than what you could do for you and your family.

56:40In fact, I'd like to quote something. There was a guy named Huey Long in 1932, I believe it was, in the state of Louisiana, the United States that was running for governor. And he said something really profound. And what he said was, even though, by the way, this guy was a liar, boy, could he lie. He was the best bullshitter in the world. But he said something that really stuck out in my mind. I wasn't alive in 1932. I was born after that. But the history of that came to me. I never forgot it. He got on the radio because that's what they had in those days, radios. And he said, now, Mr. Rockefeller up there in New York City.

57:16I can't talk like a Louisiana guy, but I'm going to try. Okay. Mr. Rockefeller up there in New York City. I want you to have a giant barbecue. Have so much barbecue that your children, your children's children, your children's children's children and a bunch frozen leftover for the next 50 years for them. But take the leftovers and send it to us four people down here in Louisiana, please. And that's what I'm going to do for you folks. I'm on my life. I'm going to get some of that. In other words, unbelievable. It's true. In other words, if you have everything and you can share it to make the world a better place to live, you don't feel that good.

57:49If you're already hoarding it, you're already worrying about, well, I got to make more. I got to make more. I got to make more. Now you can't give to everybody. That's for sure. I get hit up a lot. That's why I have a home office and people handling those things for me. So I don't have to go through that anymore. I could have time to think. But that's what it is. You feel good. Whenever you do something in life to do something for somebody else and ask absolutely nothing in return, it's the best high you'll ever get. And there was nothing we smoked in the 1960s compared to the high you get when you do something for somebody else.

58:19And you just feel like, I did it. I wanted nothing in return. I just did it. and you thank yourself and you're kind to yourself. There you go. Yeah, look, I agree. The secret to living is giving. So look, thank you again, JP. If anyone wants to check out his memoir, Success Unshared is Failure, it'll be available for pre-sale. I've got here, it's set to release April 6, 2026. It'll probably come out before that I know already we're getting pre-orders on Amazon. So if you go to Amazon or one of those, you could pre-order it, which I would suggest they do because once it's printed up, it'll start flying out the door.

59:00Incredible. Well, look, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you. Peace, love and happiness. If you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Emma Greed on how solving a problem she was so passionate about led to the creation of Skims and Good American. And so I do think it's so much of it starts with like addressing things that bother you, that you find, you know, you've got to create a solution for because, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to be passionate enough and sometimes crazy enough to go round and round and round to actually solve a problem.