00:00
And I can tell you right now that I was legit 100 % scared.

00:25
We’re back. Welcome back to Wild Business Growth. This is your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur who’s turning wild ideas into wild growth. And I am Max Branstetter of MaxPodcasting. This is episode 361 and today’s guest is Stephen Koepfer, or Steve for short. Sambo Steve is a stunt performer, a filmmaker, a lifelong martial artist. You can see his work in the John Wick series and Ray Donovan.

00:53
and some Walking Dead stuff, and he’s worked with all sorts of cool people. And in this episode, we talk how stunts are actually performed on the big screen and on your favorite streaming devices. How his passion for Samba, a specific style of martial arts has made his businesses and his on-screen dreams come true. And even some art therapy. It is Sambo Steve.

01:21
Enjoy the show.

01:29
Alrighty, we are here with Steve Kepfer. Some call him professionally, Steven Kepfer. Now he’s gonna kick me off of my show. We’ll call you the stunt guy for short. You’ve either seen you on screen or seen your work on screen in some form. And maybe you’ve been beaten up by, no, I’m just kidding. Steve, thank you so much for joining. How you doing today? Hey, great man. I’m so glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. Well, thank you for making the time and.

01:58
This connection was created by podcast movement in New York about a month ago at the time of this recording. So shout out podcast movements. I think the best thing about conferences like that is you never know like what random conversation, who you’ll meet or who you’ll turn into. So in our case, we were literally standing at like a cocktail table, just kind of waiting in between keynote sessions or something. Yeah. you reach out your hand, we introduce each other. And I could tell by looking at you, I was like, this guy worked on John Wick two and three.

02:28
Uh, he’s been on a bunch of stuff. He’s been a stunt guy for, Jonathan Banks, one of my favorite guys. Uh, so no, no, I was just blown away by your background. And then I, as I say, friendly stock to you over lunch, checked out your IMDB. And of course, first thing that comes up is a picture of you and, uh, Keanu. So pretty cool. Thanks for saying, Hey, in the first place, I do have to ask how in the world does somebody become a stunt guy? Well, that’s the question, right? Nobody, there’s no direct route.

02:56
for us. Everybody’s got some other way into the business. I mean, I can say for me, there was always since childhood interest in film, in filmmaking and making Super 8 movies when I was a kid. But even as a youth, went to filmmaking summer camp. All my other friends went to regular summer camp and I went to filmmaking camp.

03:21
But I always envisioned myself back then at least a special effects guy or like a behind the scenes guy. Like if you looked at my bedroom library back then, was like all how they made Star Wars, how they made Raiders of the Lost Ark, how they made, you know, American War Oath in London, like all the special effects stuff. That was all me, like building models and blowing them up, you know, or slapping latex all over my face and trying to make prosthetics and…

03:47
So that was sort of my youth, you know, but if you ask my parents, I was always the performer, you know, like I didn’t see myself as the performer. I saw myself as the sort of this, like everything I’ve ever done in life has been some sort of creative pursuit, whether it’s music or art. You know, I went to high school, a magnet school for art. played in bands my whole life and you know, so it’s always been some sort of creative something. But you ask my parents, I’m the one who was dancing around doing shows at the family holidays and you know,

04:15
putting on the Grease soundtrack and doing Grease lightning on a couch for everybody. You know, like that was me. I was definitely a bit of a media whore, you know, so all these years later, here I am in stunts. But to more seriously, to your question, it’s everybody has a skill that gets us in the door. You know, maybe you’re a pro skateboarder, maybe you’re a skydiver, maybe you’re a race car driver, maybe, you know, in my case, you’re a martial artist, maybe, you know, you have something that gets you in the door.

04:44
And someone who helps you get in the door, because it very much is about standing on the shoulders of others and people taking a gamble on you. Because we don’t have managers and agents and acting schools and we don’t have all those things, you know, so it’s really about being able to do what you can say, do what you say you can do and somebody trusting you. And then, so once you get in, you get your first job, then, then the real challenge comes like, you know, the first challenge is getting in the union. That’s hard enough. And then.

05:14
Once you’re in and you get a job, then it’s about continuing to work. So I got in for my early jobs, let’s say, were like for Sambo, my martial art, which was tied into the John Wick franchise. But how many Sambo based movies are there really? then it’s like, okay, well, how do I keep working? So then you start expanding your knowledge and education and learning how to drive, learning how to shoot and edit and learning how to…

05:42
stay calm under fire, literally, like when you’re on fire or learning how to fall properly or you just have to keep learning and hopefully you’ll keep building that network of stunt coordinators who trust you. Hopefully you get to work. It’s a tough, I think it’s even tougher than acting to get into, honestly, because acting there’s obviously for every, let’s say for every production, there’s 50 actors and like maybe, you know, just a handful of stunt people.

06:12
You know, so there’s a lot of demand and not a lot of supply. So. And you’re the one of the crazy guys who’s willing to do that. Uh, basically a thousand ways to die, uh, but keep living of lighting yourself on fire and falling over and, pulling people over and all that. But, uh, you mentioned when you were really little of like creating those scenes with your, which I had to, I had to look up when I was doing research, what would you call it? A super eight camera?

06:41
Yeah, super. I’ve seen the image before. Yeah, it’s kind of like the almost had like the handle on it, a handheld thing. And do you remember, was there a particular scene that you made when you were a kid or like a model that you used when you were a kid that that was just like, whoa, we did this one, me and my friend Mike Sarna, maybe he’ll listen to this one when we post it. I think he’s the first one that listens every week. Of course, he’s an uber fan, but he lives down in Nashville now. He ended up becoming a becoming a airline mechanic.

07:11
But anyway, long story short, he and I used to make movies together. This is my family had a house in Connecticut, like it was my grandparents’ house. And so would go up there for the summers in between school years. And so we would make movies. We made this one World War II movie. I remember we built a model aircraft carrier, probably yo big, like maybe a foot and a half long or something. And it had the tiny little airplanes on it and everything.

07:39
His father was a photographer. mean, his father was an amateur photographer. His father was actually a engineer for the Navy. You know, a lot of Navy folks lived over there near Groton, Connecticut, where we were. So he actually worked on the Trident subs and stuff like that. But point being, he was an amateur photographer and he had flash powder there. Like, so the old school, remember like before you had flash bulbs, they would have a little thing you put powder and it would go poof, you know, it’s like whatever. So we made, we rigged up this effect.

08:07
where we took one of the little mini airplanes from the aircraft carrier, glued a hook onto it and put some fishing line, like from up here down to this big boulder that was in our backyard. And on the boulder we had where we fastened the pick point for the other end of the fishing line. We made a pile of flash powder. And then on the little airplane, we put a bunch of testers model glue, which as you know, was flammable. Maybe you know is very flammable.

08:36
And we, so we set this thing on fire and slid it down the wire and it landed, it landed in the, um, in the flash powder and boom exploded. Now, of course we’re kids. We don’t test anything. We just do it. Right. So I’m like right up close with the camera and the thing blows up in my face. You know, was like, was, it was an amazing shot, all for the shot. Everything goes for the shot. Right. So.

09:00
I remember looking at it like the explosion was so fast and massive. was like only three frames, three or four frames on the film. I didn’t get burned thankfully, but that was fun. And then we cut to like me in like, we would go to like the local thrift store and buy like as close as army Navy store, buy like uniforms and stuff. We put me in like a pilot’s uniform and just smeared like charcoal.

09:26
you know, like charcoal, Kensington charcoal all over my face and just made me look like I just was in an explosion. So we cut from that explosion to me laying on the ground, like getting up and like, and we, you know, there’s no VFX filters. So we would buy like smoke bombs and off camera just have smoke bombs shooting smoke off, you know, into the frame. So I would look like I’m coming out of smoke and, and then we would, of course, part of that film was the loading up the model. Cause my house was on a lake, right? So we would

09:55
build this model aircraft carrier, load it up with M80s and float it out into the thing, the lake and just blow it up. Boom! You know, it was like, yeah, we’d have so much fun doing stuff like that, dude. How old were you approximately when this was going on? Oh gosh, like nine or 10 maybe. Wow. Something like that. That’s like young and dumb. they had like a child…

10:21
Oscars or child Emmys for just kids and that kids imagination of uh, yeah Or maybe it would be the Nick you’d be getting slimed on Nickelodeon So all that stuff, but it’s funny I ended up in stunts because stunts people think is a daredevil type life, but it’s actually completely the opposite There’s a ton of planning and risk mitigation that takes place. But for sure my life was bullet-pointed by

10:47
stupid things that should have killed me or really maimed me or hurt me along the way, you know?

10:55
Yeah. So I mean, that’s a huge area I’ve been wondering about. It’s like, as a stunt guy or someone in the stunt world, you’re doing so much. There’s so much like technical expertise behind it and tactics behind it. And we’ll get into a little bit. Obviously you have like your incredible martial arts background as well. But a lot of this stuff, it feels like so much. It’s like the vast majority of the iceberg is under the surface. And then the tiny tip is, you know, what

11:24
This was just not sound right. It makes its way onto, you know, screen and people actually see. For starters, for somebody like me who, childhood film creations were only slightly less creative than what you just said. Can you just share like, what are kind of the big players in a typical stunt in a movie, for example, like what are the main people involved in creating this and then actually making it happen?

11:52
Well, honestly, every single crew member is, you know, so there’s no, there’s no one. I mean, obviously there’s the stunt coordinator, right? Who is in charge of the coordination of the basically stunt coordinators, the department head. Sometimes if it’s a big production, you’re much more that administrative person than a boots on the ground person. Although you might, you know, it very much depends on the size of the film. Like I’ve never, I now don’t even know if I want to stunt coordinate a big Hollywood.

12:22
You know, like the Fall Guy or something like that, you know? Yeah. I had the reps from the Fall Guy waiting to talk to you after this interview. Oh, there you just terrible timing of yours, but go on. Oh, man. Bummer. So the yeah, I like I like I personally I like I’ve stunt coordinated some features, but they’ve all been independent films where it’s not entirely an action movie, but there’s action sequences in the movie. So you’re really working with the.

12:48
the director and the re you know, the director to tell the story they want to tell. So in the end, it’s really the director. Everything comes back to the director. But in terms of the accomplishment of a particular gag is what we call the stunts. A particular gag is let’s say this horror movie that I just worked on where we had to it involved mainly rigging and where we had to levitate someone, you know, the main actor off the ground for about, you know, eight to 10 feet or something like that. They’re on wires.

13:17
And then there’s a prosthetic monster’s arm, like think of an octopus tentacle coming up and wrapping around him and he’s stabbing at it. And then the arm drops him and then he gets dragged away by the, tentacle from this creature. You know, so that scene alone, it took place in a hedge maze. Like think of the Shining. That scene alone, you have to, you’re starting with how it was written, right? So that’s, that’s where everything starts. How it was written.

13:46
What does the director want to show? How does he plan on shooting it with the direct photography? Because just how something is written doesn’t mean you’ll see it on screen, right? It might say, a man gets killed by a monster, but that could happen off screen. So part of it is in the early prep phases is in your pre-production meetings, talking with the director and the cinematographer like, okay, so how do you plan on shooting this? What do you want seen? What do you not want seen? That will dictate lots of

14:16
safety concerns, you know, or how we’re going to address different actions that we want done. So once you kind of have that all laid out, then like, for example, on the day, I have to bring in riggers, you know, to riggers to do the wire to assist me with the wire stuff. We have to work with a crane and then that involves the, the key grip or the crane operator, like, and then we have, of course, training the actors.

14:43
We have the medic involved. have, yeah, there’s just, it’s every bit of crew, the special effects makeup people are involved. So it’s no, no one thing happens on a film set independently of every other department. So it truly is a collaborative process. And so sort of for each aspect, you’ll have people who are focusing on a little more or a little less of part of that action that that’s going to be put on in front of the camera, but it really is. Everybody is contributing. Everybody has to buy into this.

15:11
Everybody has to be on the same page. What story we’re telling, how we’re going to tell it and bringing this to life. So it really is about a team. It’s a team effort. Who decides that whether the actual, you know, like a list actor is going to do the stunts themselves versus have a stunt double for a particular scene? We do as a team. I mean, I’ll make my suggestions. So for example, let’s say in this case, right?

15:41
they had only specific cranes available, right? So then you have to do a research, you have to do your math. You know, this is where the math comes in. So everybody in school, don’t cheat on your math. You have to do your math like, okay, what’s the load limit? What’s the maximum breaking point of this crane? How much weight can it handle? You know, you’re always at least estimating, at least if you’re doing a dynamic movement of a person on wires, you’re at least estimating like,

16:09
The load would be three times like maybe what the person weighs, right? So let’s say you have, let’s say you have two people off frame pulling the wire and then you have 180 pound actor on the wire. So now you’re talking like three adult males, just static of, you know, you’re talking like maybe 600 pounds, but then multiply that by three because you’re going to be moving it in a dynamic, moving the person dynamic way. So you have to go into looking to what is the load limit of the crane.

16:39
What is the maximum breaking point of the gear that you’re using? You know, all these things. So once you figure out what you can do based on the equipment you have, and then this is where the discussion to your question comes in. Well, listen, if you want to fly the guy, we’re not going to do it with the actor. You’re going to have to bring in a double. If you want to fly the guy 20 feet over a hedge and land over here, you know, that’s, that’s a stunt double. If you just want to levitate him.

17:08
we can do that with the actor. know, so a lot of it becomes this dance of budget. You know, what can you afford? Like we can pretty much always do what you want if you have the budget, but almost always, especially in independent films, it’s like, well, we don’t have the budget. Okay. So if you don’t have the budget to hire three stunt doubles, then we’re going to have to change the actions to make it safe for the actors. So it’s, it’s always a negotiation. Like how much money you have.

17:38
and how you want to tell the story and do you actually need that thing to tell the story that you want to tell? Like, do we need to fly him to tell the same story? Like, you shouldn’t be doing cool for the sake of cool because doing cool and risky for the sake of cool just makes things more risky. So it’s really about doing exactly what you need to tell the story you want to tell in the safest way possible. Yeah, because I feel like over time you get some actors like notably like

18:08
Tom Cruise, Jackie Chan, like guys that are known for like doing a lot of their own stunts that some of the movies come out and you’re like, I swear they, they had this idea for this outlandish crazy stunt and they wanted to make a movie like just to make that happen. are movies like WIC, you know, that are action porn. That’s the whole point, you know, and then like, and then Tom Cruise has the money and the budget to spend a year training for something, you know, so, and

18:35
You know, there are stunt doubles that test everything before he ever does anything. You know what I mean? So it’s like, uh, but it’s his money, it’s his production and he’s got the time to do it. But your average, you know, modified low budget film with maybe a $700,000 or a million dollar budget doesn’t have a year for you to, to train somebody and skydiving or, know, like whatever, uh, you’re lucky if you get a decent amount of rehearsal. So a lot of it.

19:03
Is also like one of the frustrating things for me is when I get hit up by a director, sometimes I’m hit up after they’ve already cast the movie. And then you ask them, well, okay. So this, this actor has is playing a character that has to do X, Y, Did you audition them for their physical ability? Oh, well, they said they could do X, Y, Z. I’m like, oh, but did you actually ask them to do it? Because the actors are notoriously liars. They’re notoriously, they notoriously lie.

19:31
You know, they took a workshop in something and they’ll put it on their resume as a skill. Like, no, that’s not a skill. That is just a workshop that you took. Maybe they’re just really good at acting. Yeah, maybe that’s a great. You did a great job acting that crack skull on the concrete because you said, you know how to do a, you know, a 540 twist in the air and land properly. But the point is, is if you’re going to.

19:55
Wadish, if you’re gonna cast an actor and you want them, you know in the beginning you want them to do their own stuff, you should be keeping that factor in mind when you cast people, which doesn’t always happen. Speaking of things not always happening, so John Wick is something that I think when it first came out people were probably excited about it and then as sequels and sequels came out it just feels like something that’s just grown and grown and there’s kind of more more lore to it and I think that

20:22
Your use of action porn was the first time action porn has been used on a phrase on this podcast. So we’ll give you some sort of award for that. There we go. But you don’t want to visualize what the the trophy will look like. But I think there’s something about that movie franchise that just is so fun and so well liked. Can you share maybe a story from the set or just something from your time there? if like what makes that franchise a little bit different or a little bit more fun? Well, I mean, I think

20:52
The first John Wick, which is still my favorite, was a game changer in terms of the action genre. You know, you have these movies throughout the timeline of action films that are sort of game changers, like, you know, like The Matrix was, and then John Wick was for a certain practical kind of fight sequence. You had like movies like Ang Bak was sort of one, or, you know, there’s all different ones like that will affect.

21:21
The Collateral was one, know, Collateral with Tom Cruise, speaking of Tom Cruise, was one in terms of like proper tactical gun work. Like that was one of the first really good tactically sound, realistic looking movies that showed gun work. What was, I think what was unique about WIC when I saw it too for the first time, because I didn’t work on the first one, although nobody knew the first one was, you know, it was just an indie film.

21:47
It wasn’t like a big studio thing. like when it came out, nobody was expecting that. I knew about it because they had come 87 11 guys, the, know, they’re the guys that, know, Chad Stalski and David Leach who direct co-directed it. And then, uh, the action team from 87 11 there, when they came to New York to shoot it, they actually stopped by my gym looking for Russian bad guys, you know, looking for people to cast. Hey, do you have anybody that might be a good Russian bad guy? So I knew it was.

22:15
in production, like who knew? Like I sent my friend Vlad Kulikov to casting. actually got cast. He was in the first one. He’s the guy that gets sniped by Willem Dafoe when he’s putting the plastic bag over Wick’s head in the abandoned church there, I think. By the way, that’s an incredible line to put on your resume of like successfully looked for Russian bad guys. That’s it, man. So I felt good. mean, and again, I wasn’t even in the union yet.

22:43
You know what I mean? It was just like, oh, I have some Russian friends. I’ll send them over to audition. But Vlad got picked, which was cool. So, but to your point, like there was really what was cool about the fight choreography from a fan perspective, someone who comes from a, you know, someone who teaches grappling arts and judo and Sambo and has been involved in the fight scene for a long time. To see that movie, they struck the perfect balance between practical

23:12
and fantastical, know, like so practical moves that were strung together in a fantastical way. You know what I mean? So like there was not a move in there that individually was not legit. But when you put them all together, like no fight ever happens like that. No fight ever, you know, goes down like Wick would be dead a hundred thousand times by now. You know what I mean? But if you look at each piece, like people like me were like, oh my God, that’s this throw and that’s that throw and that’s this submission and that’s.

23:42
Like you could really feel it because, then the other, the other thing that they did differently and that’s coming sort of a reaction, I guess, to the Jason Bourne era of fast cuts, shaky camera, like all this kind of stuff is the 8711 guys went back to showing wide angle where you can see the whole action without cuts, no cutting. So that’s why you had Keanu training for like six months beforehand and Halle Berry training for like six months beforehand because.

24:12
If you want to work on a wick series, you’re going to have to actually be able to do it. You don’t have to do your own quote unquote stunts. Like Halle Berry’s not getting hit by a car, but Halle Berry is definitely doing her own fighting. Like Keanu actually has said in an interview in the past, like I do my own action. I don’t do my own stunts. Like that’s not me falling off the roof. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, you know, that’s Jackson Speedell or, you know, one of his other stunt doubles when it comes to the fighting and the driving. Cause he does a vast lion’s share of his own.

24:42
driving, that’s Keanu. But he’s also very specific to say he doesn’t do stunts. He just does really good action. The other one that jumped out to me that you’ve done is a stunt double is really, really cool. Working with Jonathan Banks. like, I’m a huge, like everyone, I’m a huge Breaking Bad fan, a huge Better Call Saul fan. also somewhere along the way, I went to IU, we’re a big IU family and we found out Jonathan Banks, the IU guy as well. it’s like extra love. But I still think Mike Urban Trial is one of the best characters ever.

25:11
Love his character. Yeah. What stuck out to you about working with him? First of all, like you, I was a big fan already. And so when I got cast to double him in The Beast in Me on Netflix, it’s not a stunt action, not a stunt heavy show, by the way, but it had a few a few things I worked on, like two episodes. But I was super excited to work with him.

25:35
But you do this, you work in this business long enough. Like you definitely learn that you have your fanboy side and then you have your professional working side. And most of the time, like 99.9 % of the time, once you work with somebody, you just realize they’re working stiff like you. They’re there to do a job. You know, they’re human. They make mistakes. They have their quirks and X, Y, Z. like it’s rare that I get too fanboyish. Like I remember the, my very first

26:04
just as a bit of a detour, but to this point, my very first union stunt job was on the blacklist and I got to work with Brent Spiner, right? So I’m a huge Star Trek fan. So I was like, Oh my God, I get to work with data. You know what I mean? And I was like one of his thugs. Like he was the bad guy of the week and I was one of his mercenaries. But again, he just turned out to be the most down to earth, like dude, like no ego, just another guy on set trying to get a job done. After a while, you just realize like,

26:33
that most of the time you’ll hear, not always, but I’ve almost never had a bad experience with somebody with an actor that I was doubling, like maybe once, meaning once they were like an asshole, but most of the time they’re not. Sometimes they’re not social, which is fine, like, I’m at work, I’m not here to pal around with you. And so I think a lot of the reps that you hear about, so and so, this actor’s difficult, or I think a lot of those reps come from people who just wanted more.

27:01
than what’s professionally acceptable at a job. So it’s like, I heard that about Lee of Shriver. I heard like before, cause I doubled Eddie Morrison on Ray Donovan, right? So I heard like, oh, Lee of Shriver’s whatever. I heard some bad stuff about him. And then when I got to work with him, it was like totally the opposite. It was like not like that at all. He was totally fine and cool. And I loved working with him. But again, he wasn’t like,

27:28
You know, in between takes, like talking with you and you know, he was just doing his job, you know, and said, that’s it. And, that’s, so I think a lot of those negative reps come from people just wanting more than they’re obliged to, to get. But to your question about Jonathan Banks, he was great. And just a little cool thing that I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this on any shows before, but one of my mentors, doc, do HAME, stunt coordinator, veteran stunt coordinator and stunt performer was Jonathan Banks is long time.

27:58
stunt double on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and, you know, for a lot of things. And I got to know Doc because he was the stunt coordinator on Ray Donovan and we’ve just stayed friends. When I got the job, I texted him, Hey, I stole your job, man. I’m doubling Jonathan Banks, man. He was like, Oh, tell him I said hi. So that was kind of cool. Cause we had a little, I had a little olive branch or a little something to, when I met him to say, Hey, I’m, you know, Doc is one of my mentors and it’s so cool that I’m getting to work with you. And that kind of made.

28:28
it a little nicer too on set. It broke the ice a little. Yeah. I was just about to say you had your icebreaker. Yeah, exactly. Because you know, TV, like it’s not like a movie. Like sometimes a lot of the times on television, you’re coming in for an episode and you’re gone. You’re not working like the whole length of the production. Like I did on Ray Donovan because I worked, I was his double and there’s a lot of fight scenes and I worked for the whole season, you know, so I got to spend more time with Eddie. But

28:57
With Jonathan, it was literally like two days, but he was super cool, super chill, enjoyable to work with, you still at his, let’s just say, advanced experiential level of life, still ready to go and rough and tumble himself if he can, you know what I mean? And like at one point he came over because we were doing what’s called camera rehearsal. So camera rehearsals where you’re up the shot, but

29:24
It’s just for the camera department, for everybody to make sure everything is lined up. You you get your blocking right, you get everything right. So I’m doing the fall. There’s, there was a tight shot on him before he has a stroke and he falls and he’s in this wine cellar in this scene and he falls into a bunch of wine bottles and stuff. So, but when you’re doing a tight shot or mid shot, like out of frame is a big pad, you know, so you can fall into the pad. So he comes over and this is super nice of him actually, really nice of him. This goes to show what a pro he is.

29:53
He comes over to me, he goes, you get paid anyway, right? If you’re, and I’m like, yep. He goes, okay, let me do it. He goes, get out of here. Let me do it. Cause we only get paid residuals. This is something people don’t know, but we only get paid residuals if we’re on camera. If we do everything rehearsed, we go through, we do everything off camera. Let’s say supporting the stunt performer or only doing the blocking rehearsals or only doing.

30:21
like something where helping train the main actor, because a lot of our jobs as a double is to help train the main actor that we’re doubling. But if we’re not in the final cut of the episode, we don’t get residuals. Wow. So the fact that he actually took time to see if I was going to be getting paid was awesome. Yeah. And then once he found out, like, yeah, you’re going to be getting paid because I’m going to be on camera. But he’s like, all right, let me do this. I can do this.

30:49
So it was awesome. was great. And I enjoyed chatting with him and hanging out with him for a couple of days. It was really cool. Yeah, that’s super thoughtful. think between him and Schreiber, I would imagine it just makes your voice drop down a couple more octaves because those guys have the strongest, lowest voices I’ve ever heard. Dude, the scene in Ray Donovan where I was also doubling, I also doubled Zach Grenier, who played the mayor, the New York City mayor in Ray Donovan. I doubled both of them on that season, right?

31:19
There’s a scene where Ray Donovan punches the mayor in the throat. They’re in this like, like a spa. Ray Donovan is trying to threaten the mayor and you know, like whatever this whole storyline where he’s, he’s the fixer, you know, he’s trying to fix things. So he, there’s a scene where he punches the mayor in the throat and then the mayor falls down towards camera. It’s a low angle looking up and it’s over. It’s like from behind the mayor up to Ray Donovan looking up at him from sort of the floor, a low angle from the floor.

31:48
So if you watch that, was me. And I can tell you right now that I was legit 100 % scared. I was like, this guy will rip my head off. The energy that Liev Schreiber projected as Ray Donovan in that moment was truly frightening. I didn’t have to act scared. was legit, the nerves were really legit tingling. That’s the best. He’s the real deal. He was really great at it.

32:18
Speaking of the real deal, mean, the through line that made these opportunities on screen possible for you in the first place is your knowledge and expertise in terms of I just created a word in terms of martial arts. And I think, I mean, I’m someone who I guess just call me a layman when it comes to martial arts. Like I know kind of the names of some of the top ones, but Sambo I actually wasn’t familiar with until we met and I looked more into it. so

32:47
Right for anybody, know, it’s probably just me who doesn’t know but for anybody for anybody who’s not familiar like that type of martial arts or whatever you want to call it What makes Samba different not to belabor the John wick point but they knew from John wick one that wick was gonna be a Samba guy so and they really did a great job of presenting the flavor of Samba I always tell people now like before I used to say when people would say like oh what’s Samba? I’d be like, well, it’s like judo, but you can also do some wrestling stuff

33:17
but you can also punch and kick and you can also do these other things. It’s like a mix of that kind of stuff. But for the lay person, it’s a grappling based style, very much like judo. And we train in a, in a jacket, very much like judo, but it originated in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century. It was formalized as a sport in the Soviet Union in 1938, been around a while and the roots of it do extend to judo.

33:42
and Japanese jujitsu and other indigenous wrestling styles from the Soviet republics, like Georgian wrestling and different wrestling styles from that world. Like every culture has its wrestling style, just like Japan has sumo and Korea has shirom. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen shirom, but it’s like sort of like, it looks like Korean sumo. And then Uzbekistan has a style called koresh. China has shuaijiao, you know, but every culture has a…

34:11
By the way, you could totally be making up all these names and I’d be like, 100 % fake. Don’t fact check this. This guy’s not even a stunt guy. Every culture has a style where a sport where it’s one guy’s trying to throw the other guy to the ground. You know, I mean, that is across cultures. And Switzerland has one called Schwingen where they actually wrestle in sawdust pits. There’s catch wrestling, which was the original sort of Olympic wrestling before they took out submissions.

34:39
So, I mean, you go, right, wrestling was all the way back to the original Olympics. mean, so as long as humans have been around, wrestling has been around. And so, and Sambo is basically a wrestling style that was created in the former Soviet Union. Still exists. Now it’s a big international sport and all that kind of stuff. Why’d you zero in on that as, mean, it’s now a huge part of career compared to other alternatives. Like a lot of stuff in my life. I walked through a door that opened to me.

35:08
And honestly, this kind of goes back to your, topic, you know, uh, we haven’t talked business yet, but I will say this is a business podcast. is the problem with sometimes all of guests on and an area that’s so foreign yet so far fascinating to me that I have so many questions about their craft that I forget to dive into their entrepreneurship part, which is kind of funny for an entrepreneurship podcast, but go on. Yeah. Right. But this ties into the entrepreneurship part, which is everybody. We all have, uh, these doors that open to us in life and.

35:38
We can choose to walk through them or not. And oftentimes walking through them is really risky because you’re probably stepping out of a safe space or a comfortable place or whatever, but you’re never going to succeed if you don’t do that. know, so Sambo for me legit was just timing. I was not happy where I was training at the time. This is like in the late nineties, somebody said, Oh, there’s this Russian guy teaching Sambo over, over here. I was like, Oh, let me go check it out. And I was sold.

36:07
I wasn’t sold on Sambo. was sold on him, my coach, you know, it was the way he taught the way he did everything. Like if he was a judo guy, I’d probably be judo Steve right now, not Sambo Steve, you know what mean? But he was a Sambo guy. then, so then after training with him, I really learned to love Sambo because of him. But then years later, after I took over the gym, he went back home to Russia. I took over the gym for him. And at that time it was, I was still working.

36:34
full time at Maimonides Medical Center. I was a child life specialist and art therapist in pediatric ICU and oncology and ER sometimes. But I worked there. so when Alex went back to Russia, I was running the gym at night just as a sort of, you know, I had my day job and then I had the gym at night. By 2005, the gym

36:59
or I should say not the gym because it wasn’t my gym yet, but I was renting space from somebody else. I was teaching, you know, five days a week. It was as big as it was going to get under that sort of parameter of a part-time side gig. And at the same time, after 10 years of working in oncology, was pretty, I was kind of burnt out. So, you know how they say like, if you know you’re getting, if you’re aware of your burnout, you’ve been burnt out for a while. So I had to make a decision.

37:28
Which do I want to do? Like the martial art career, their martial art business is not going to grow any more than where it’s at now if I don’t give up this other thing. So I took the leap, man. I took the leap of faith. came into, sadly, you know, like, and I’ll say this regarding entrepreneurship. Sadly, I think in this country, you have to start with capital. You know, it’s not like the American dream anymore. Like, it’s not the 1950s. Like you have to have some money in the bank.

37:56
And so unfortunately I had my father and another relative of mine had passed in 2004. So I inherited some cash, not enough to like quit my jobs, but enough to float me for a little bit. So I just decided to quit the medical center and try to make a go at this martial arts thing and start my own gym. And so when, when I did the business plan, I was like, okay, well I

38:25
I have about, I could float for about three years on this money. So if I’m not breaking even after a year, I’m going to shut it down. But after a year I was breaking even and then little by little, here we are 24 years later, you know, still doing it and still building other businesses that all kind of like a tree. If you, if you’re successful with one thing and then you expand, like you don’t want to sit, you don’t want to sit on your laurels. You know, you have to keep growing, you know, so sent then the stunt business kind of

38:54
comes into the studio, you know, then we started Breakfall Studios, right? What is it? 11 years ago, you know, and then out of that came the podcast, another business, but they all sort of support each other’s growth. It’s an iterative process, at least for me with business is it’s this constant like reassessment. Where can we go? Try it, fail or succeed, reassess again. Where can we go? What can we do?

39:21
How can we support the existing business with a new business and keep growing? now, you know, now like my partner and I, Paul, we own a small production company that not only runs the podcast, but we do, you know, we’ve done stunt coordination jobs on other productions. We’ve done productions for, you know, Adobe Creative Cloud and for Paramount Pictures and things like that. And then it all kind of dovetails together, right? Oh, you need a space to rehearse with your actors? I happen to own a place. So it’s really all about

39:51
Making sure everything is supportive of everything else that you’re doing, but the same time in a way that where if one fails, they don’t all fail. Like they can all function independently, but they also all support each other. Yeah, that’s a great philosophy. And I like your, metaphor of the tree, cause you can really visualize it with the different branches, but it all goes back to that strong base and the strong roots beneath everything. And so it’s beautiful that you turn, you know, really sad moments with

40:20
you know, your family and family members passing away and were able to take some of that and fuse it into something that’s helped out so many people and inspires so many people online now these days too, you know. So you’re doing the offline and the online for good, which is pretty great. But you have to, you have to, whatever, I don’t care what kind of business you do. Like in our case, it’s a training facility and a production company, but we’re all sort of living in the same environment.

40:49
But you have to have a community that people want to be a part of. So take our gym. So the first thing, if you walk right into the door of our studio, the first thing you’re going to see is food stores, like literally stacks of food containers. And people will be like, what’s that for? I’m like, that is for our students who experience food insecurity. That’s for our students who lose their snap. That’s for our students who lose a job, who get laid off. So we have a food drive in-house.

41:19
And by the way, over the counter medicine drive to in-house. So if you lose your health insurance, you lose this. have, we have supplies of cough medicine, you know, like basic stuff, first aid supplies and food. also have an online food drive for feeding America, by the way, which anybody can donate to it’s linked in all our stuff. But, um, the idea is that you have to. I take the, the act locally and think globally moniker very seriously. So like we want.

41:49
the community in our space to be the way that we would want the world to be. And that means having a diverse group that trains there and works out there. It’s a safe space for LGBTQ people. It’s a safe space for trans people. We embrace that because that’s the way we want the world to be. And if you walk into our gym and that’s something that you’re not comfortable with, the door’s that way.

42:17
But I truly believe in the end, the success of the, could have the greatest business model, but if you’re not aligning with the right people and with the right mentality and with the right desire and intent of what you want to bring to this world, then it will be, eventually it will fail. Eventually it will fail. Well, without fail, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire Q and a. You ready for it? boy. Here we go. Yeah. All right. Putting you on the real, putting you on the, what’s putting me in the hot seat.

42:47
Is there a name for the, the mat or the surface in Sambo? Here’s the thing we do. A lot of grappling schools do this. It’s called shark tank. So it’s where you’re in the middle and you’re grappling people one after the other, one after the other, or lose. You’re just going next person, next person, next person, whatever they can throw at you, you have to deal with. So this is very much like verbal shark tank here. Perfect. You worked in an entrepreneurship tie without even trying that. That was beautiful though. So, Oh, I didn’t even catch that.

43:13
Yeah, let’s get wild. Let’s let’s swim with the Samba sharks here and Samba Steve. So you mentioned art therapy, which is like a whole other separate like we could do a whole episode on that. I think it’s fascinating. But what is a just personally is a style of art or an era of art that you think is the most therapeutic to be doing? Oh, my gosh. Well, I think that the most therapeutic creative pursuits

43:42
whether it’s art or music or theater or whatever. But if you want to just talk about visual art, I think the most creative aspect of it is the process of making it. So I could care less what it looks like in the end. It is irrelevant. That’s the art side. When you’re doing it for yourself, for your own personal reasons and therapeutic reasons, it’s about the doing of it. Doesn’t matter what it looks like. Doesn’t matter for anybody ever sees it.

44:12
It’s irrelevant. It is the act of creating that is therapeutic to me. That’s beautiful. And it actually flows right into the next question or the next shark tank. mean, creating music is a form of art. You mentioned it, you play music all your life, especially growing up in bands and stuff like that. Let’s say you are playing the piano and you are the biggest name in the world in music.

44:42
Piano is what I play by the way. I don’t know if you knew that, that is my instrument. So that’s from my research. We’ll pretend that I didn’t know that. But thank you. Um, let’s say you’re playing the key tar now and, am an eighties kid. You’re playing like a Woodstock original Woodstock size concert or live eight concert, you know, where it’s like seemingly millions of people on and on. If you’re the headliner, who would you want to be, you know, direct support or the, the opener?

45:12
Right before you. Oh man. Okay. Let me think. Richard Ashcroft. For those who don’t know from the verve, I would have him doing a solo acoustic set as my opener. Wow. I’m key tar. Yeah. Can’t have an acoustic keytar, man. We can invent it. We can invent it. What’s a coach in any sport that you would say you most

45:40
resemble in terms of your coaching style when it comes to martial arts? Interesting. I’m not sure who I most resemble, but aside from my coach, I’ll name two coaches that I did some training with that I really embraced their approach to how I do things. And one is Matt Lindland. Some people might know him from his MMA career, but he’s a Olympic level wrestler. He is the Olympic Greco-Roman coach.

46:07
now for the United States, I was able to spend some time at training camps with him. And he absolutely, you know, like we were talking about how WIC or these movies or these points in time that change, like training with him changed how I do certain things regarding coaching my athletes, approaches to technical instruction. The second would be Greg Jackson, who’s also a very known MMA coach. And I took a

46:36
workshop with him that really changed how I scout opponents. When I was training fighters, how I would scout opponents and build strategy to defeat them. Kind of business related too, but basically the nutshell of it is like you’re scout, you’re going to fight someone. You’re, my guy’s going to fight some guy and you have two options. know, first thing I would do is I would watch every fight that that person had from beginning to end in order that I could get.

47:05
from their amateur days all the way up to their most recent. And I would literally sit with a notepad, round one, fight one. How many times did he try a takedown? How many times did he do this? How many times? And then I watch for trends through his whole career, which things he keeps, which things he disregards, discards that. And then you look for patterns in this person’s performances.

47:31
Right. that those patterns are going to show you what they think their strong suits are. The other thing you look for is where do they go when they’re not doing well? What do they do when they’re not having the outcome that they want? Where’s their safe space? So every fighter will have a safe space that they go, you know, that they can depend on when things are not going right. So when you’re scouting an opponent and coming up with a strategy of how to fight them.

48:00
You have a choice. can either destroy their strong, what they consider their best stuff, which you’ve learned from watching every fight. This guy always does this. This guy, always does this. He always does this. So you could take that tool away from him in the very beginning, or you can craft your strategy to make them go to their safe space and destroy that. Because if you take their safe space away,

48:27
They have nowhere to go when they’re in danger. Then they’re in unknown territory. And when people are in unknown territory, that’s when they make mistakes. So basically that was the crux of Greg Jackson’s workshop on how to scout people. And it changed the way that I, uh, look at opponents, you know, or competitors. Yeah. Sounds like a one-man NFL scouting department. love the analytics and diving into trends and all that. Watching tape. It’s all a lot, a lot going on in the, in the film room. All right. Last one.

48:57
Yep. Last shark here. I’m just always blown away by special effects. And of course they’ve evolved and evolved and evolved over over your career. And who knows like what it’s going to look like in 20, 30 years, 40 years. Was there ever a scene that you’ve been a part of in some form that when you’re filming it,

49:23
It doesn’t stick out as that special. And then when you saw the final result with special effects and everything, you’re like, holy shit. I’ll tell you a scene that’s almost the flip of that. Yeah, sure. You flip the shark, you know, backwards. Well, this is a scene where they opted to go without the practical effects. But anyway, so I was on an episode of Dead City, Walking Dead last season, showing up to set. The original plan was we’re all going through these swamps.

49:50
Like real swamps, by the way, pretty gross. Like real swamps are trudging through these swamps and there’s water walkers in there. And the idea was that they were going to be pulling us down into the water one by one as I was part of Maggie’s crew. You know, we’re going to, we’re getting picked off by the walkers. And so the original plan was that they were, they had three prosthetic necks for me. They were going to, they were going to, I was going to get pulled down and they were going to show my throat getting ripped out and.

50:20
Blood-Sprite, know like the whole classic. Yeah, I was so excited dude. I was like so excited. This is gonna be the best Halloween ever. Yes So then the director Got the notion that they wanted it to be more like Jaws You know where it pulled under the water and you don’t know what’s going on a little more mysterious And I was like, oh man, and even the effects people were like damn We just brought three necks for you. But you know like

50:48
So, but we went without it. then, so basically Maggie and I are walking through the, uh, the forest and I get pulled down out of frame. And it was a very simple, just like, just had to fall down at the right time and make it look like I got pulled down. And then they had the VFX guy, uh, the practical effects guy with a blood cannon was going to shoot blood up from, up here. Like I get pulled down, blood gets sprayed up.

51:16
So we did some takes with the blood and did some takes without the blood and they were concerned for the blood for continuity purposes getting on Maggie’s wardrobe. You know, so there was some concern about the spray of the blood, but I remember we did three takes. None of them I felt good about. Like, you know, as a performer, you know, sometimes you get to this, you feel like I could do better than that, but you don’t see what they see on the monitor. You know what I mean? But there’s plenty of times where you feel like you’ve done a great job and it looks terrible.

51:44
And you’ve done a terrible job, but it looks great. But on this day, I was already disappointed that I didn’t get to do my neck ripping out scene. And I was disappointed that in my performance, even though they were like, check the gate. So check the gate for the people not in the film industry. That’s an old, that’s a carryover from when it was actually film where you would have a gate on the camera. Check the gate. That means we’re moving on to the next scene. We got what we wanted.

52:11
I wasn’t happy. was like, I want to do one more. Can I do one? No, it looked great, Steve. It looked really good. Trust me. We’re moving on. So I don’t know. I left feeling like I didn’t do my job. And but when I saw the episode, I was like, oh, that looked really fucking great. know, it looked really good. So they were right. You know, so again, you know what it is. Trust people. You have to trust people. They said it looked good. It looked good. But I definitely didn’t feel good at the end of that day. The ultimate.

52:41
Trustful there. Yeah. Yeah. Steve, you’ve taken us from action porn to blood cannons. And so we have a whole lot of new terms for our vocabulary. So thank you so much. Uh, could talk with you forever. Just so fascinated by what you do. And it’s, it’s awesome and super inspiring that like all the cool stuff you’ve done on the screen, but also the fact like you’re a multi multi-business owner now. And then you’ve, I mean, for, decades, um, and you’re helping out so many kids and adults and doing a lot of good stuff out there. So

53:09
Really glad we met and so glad we could reconnect again in this forum and excited to chat again in the future. So thanks so much for coming on. You know, you have Breakfall Studios, you have New York Combat, Sambo. Did I say that right? You did. You did. And then awesome podcasts, which I was binging earlier. Oh cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Film fights with friends. So definitely check those out. Especially geeked out about the Penguin episode and the

53:37
football coordinator, stunt coordinator. Yeah, Rocco. So there’s a lot of good stuff there. Yeah, that was a cool episode. We try not to be, know, people think we’re a stunt podcast, but we’re really not. We’re a filmmaking podcast. As you see, we have people from every department on the show. And like a fun buddies busting their chops podcast because you guys get at each other. I mean, there’s plenty of places people can learn more about you. What’s like the simplest way for people to learn more about any of your stuff? You just search for Samba Steve, S-A-M-B-O.

54:07
Steve and you will find me everywhere. It’s pretty much universal across YouTube and Instagram and, you can just search for my name on Facebook or the name of the school. can go to ussambo.com and that will bring you to the gym and Breakfall studios. And from there you can find everything. Awesome. And then for those not familiar, Sambos S-A-M-B-O. Yes.

54:31
Last thing final thoughts stages yours. It could be just a quote one line, whatever you want short and sweet Send us home here Sambo Steve. Huh? I will send you home with what I said before if a door opens in front of you Walk through it That you don’t want to be that person that a year from now says I should have done XYZ Don’t be that person you want to be the person that tried If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, but you have to walk through the door or else you’re just gonna be stagnant

55:00
Like my coach used to say, stillness is death. You got to keep moving. Walk through the door.

55:10
Or in Steve’s case, let yourself on fire and do a triple McTwist headspin break dancing, beat boxing, piano playing stunt through the door. Thank you so much, Steve, for coming on Wild Business Growth. Make sure to subscribe to Wild Business Growth if you’re not already tuned in, subscribed, subscriptioned out there on your favorite podcast platform on YouTube. It is @MaxBranstetter

55:39
And for all things podcast production or the podcast or the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, that is at MaxPodcasting.com. Thank you so much. And until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!

00:00
Well, we’ll get to the procrastination part in a little bit, but.

00:18
Here, here, welcome back to Wild Business Growth. This is your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur turning wild ideas into wild growth. I’m your host Max Branstetter of MaxPodcasting. This is episode 360. And as if we’re not usually corny enough on this show, we’re coming full circle in this episode. Today’s guest is Rob Mattson. Some call him Robbie, some call him Gramps, some call him Rob, and…

00:48
He is a longtime friend, longtime fan of the show from the early, early, early days. He is a Navy veteran, served as an aircraft technician on an aircraft carrier. He has had a very successful sales career and he has walked the equivalent now of about one and a half times around the earth. He had a goal to the walk the circumference, circumference, circumference of the earth.

01:17
by age 50 and he’s still going. So we’ll talk about that in his awesome second lap podcast. It is Rob Robbie Gramps. Enjoy the show.

01:36
Alrighty, we are here with Rob Mattson, also known as Robbie Mattson, also known as Gramps, the man with three names as he’s known by anyone. uh Good friend, we’ve come back. We’ve actually never been in person, but feels like we have because we’ve been connected online. Shout out our mutual friend, your old Navy buddy, Patric Fransko for introducing us in the first place. Pat. What’s up, Pat?

02:05
uh This is episode 360 and we’re coming full circle with this podcast because not only have you been a fan of this podcast and a big supporter of this podcast from the early days, you are someone who literally has walked the equivalent of walking around the entire world. So 360 feels like a fitting episode for you. Rob, Robbie Gramps, thanks for joining. How you doing today? Fantastic. I’m grateful to be here. Thankful. And the irony in the numbers in my life, like when I finished walking the circumference and I don’t want to steal a lot of the thunder,

02:34
but I finished on Pi 314, 2022. So there’s these number of things that show up and being episode 360, I mean, it’s impressive. It’s great. Thank you. I appreciate that. Were you listening to Lateralis by Tool and got the Fibonacci sequence going when that ended too?

02:55
No, half of what you said, I’m like, what is he talking about? All right, that’s one of those songs and background of the songs, either know it or you don’t. So, we’ll spiral out of that one. And I’m a fan, I am a fan of Tool. So it’s surprising. Yeah, well, I’m sure we’ll talk music too, but I wanna start off with something that you and I haven’t really talked about before, but I know it’s a big part of your background, how you and Pat connect in the first place. Your time in the, I wanna say early 90s on the USS Kitty Hawk.

03:24
aircraft carrier in the Navy. I’m somebody who grew up loving Behind Enemy Lines, obviously Top Gun, those movies. I just think aircraft cooliers. Shout out. uh What’s the show? Full House, Dave Coolier. I think aircraft carriers are some of the coolest things in the world. Can you share what life was like on an aircraft carrier? I followed in my dad’s footsteps. And I was going to say, it’s kind of ironic, same name dad. When we go and you look at LinkedIn.

03:53
we have our names in reverse. like one has Robbie quotes in the middle, Rob Matson, the other one says Rob, in the middle is Robbie Matson, and I can’t remember which one of us did, but I followed suit because he had done it first. uh I’ve gotten his uh retirement envelopes for years, the supplies, like that. Anyway, so he watched,

04:20
And I struggled with meningitis in college. And so I was forced to, hey, this is going to happen or you could join the Navy. And I was like, Hey, I’m going to do that. went and because of Top Gun was very, very interested in joining the military all of a sudden. And I think it was the motorcycle and I did buy the motorcycle. And so I fulfilled all of that. think the leather jacket didn’t play volleyball as much as maybe I should.

04:49
Uh, but my humor is not going to get any better. Uh, but yeah, you did my podcast. You know that you still invited me the as VAB, which is the score or the test you take to decide what you could do in the military. I took it and basically I had, think it was a 99 out of a hundred or 98 out of a hundred and I could do whatever I wanted. So I actually decided at first I was going to do ET, which is electronics.

05:15
technician more nuclear. So, hey, I’m gonna do something different than what dad did. He did AT and then ultimately I got talked into doing aviation electronics technician, which is AT, same thing he did. And so I went and basically joined, went to bootcamp, went to A school, which is to learn how to do this stuff and then was stationed with a squadron attached to the Kitty Hawk. So I was never…

05:45
a black shoe as they call them, you the guys that are ship’s company. I was always a Brown shoe or an Airedale or, know, I had the wings of on all of our, ranks and ratings, um, showing that we were part of the squadrons. And so I was part of that. And then similar to like watching Top Gun, you know, not all of the pilots names are actually on the plane. They’re flying it’s on the squadron planes, but they rotate through the planes. And so it’s like, anyway, some of the things that they show.

06:13
in that movie ultimately are nothing like what it is. And then some things are very, very close to being like it. I met Patrick within a couple of months of joining the squadron. So call it just shy of two years in the Navy because I had to go to bootcamp school, then go to the other. then anyway, so it was quite a bit of time in just over a year and a half before. And then all of a sudden I was on the squadron and I Patrick.

06:41
He was in AT as well and it was like, hey, great, we met each other. But he was doing this cool thing called troubleshooting. And I was part of the, basically where you’re gonna do each individual shop. And so I was in the AT shop. And part of that is being in the military and the stuff that they don’t show you in Top Gun is you have to kind of earn different pieces. And so I did the first three months of the first six month tour actually

07:11
temporary assigned duty or TAD to the mess hall. And so I was washing dishes and serving food and things like that, getting scalded with hot water for the first 90 days of that. And then I moved in and had all these clean uniforms and everybody else was all dirty and nasty, because for the first 90 days they were working. And I was, as I said, getting scalded. But I did that, I worked nights. So I got to shift my whole body, and I would basically have breakfast

07:41
dinner and vice versa and that was fun and I enjoyed that. I learned how to drink a lot of coffee at that point in my life. And then I got to do at the end of that first one, so right before Patrick, actually it Patrick was leaving the Navy and I was transitioning actually into being a troubleshooter. My dad flew out to Hawaii and did a tiger cruise with me and got to spend a week after the end of a cruise with us, we did flight ops and

08:09
They get to eat in the mess hall and do all the things we do. And even though he and I did the same thing, he was a reservist, so he’d never actually get to experience it. So was kind of really cool to experience what I was doing through his eyes and actually learn now that I’m older what perspective is. He thought it was super cool. And I’m like, yeah, some of this sucks bad. I can see how you would think it’s cool. I guess what’s the misconception about?

08:36
besides working in mess halls. What’s the biggest mess conception about working on like an aircraft carrier and with these like crazy powerful, I think it was F-18s that you were working with? F-18s, yep. That’s the Hornet or Super Hornet? Yes. That’s all I know about planes right there. That was it. We were Hornets. The Super Hornet was out when we were in VFA 97, which is what I was in. And we actually have a Facebook group. So shout out, hey, whatever. I’m one of the admins.

09:06
But we were running, I think it was A, B, they then had C, Ds, and then the super hornets were E, Fs. And the different letters were one cedar versus two cedars. And so I believe ours were Cs at that point then. So anyways, we had like the oldest planes and all the new guys had that. And so there’s that kind of misconception like, you’re always gonna have the latest and greatest. And we were…

09:31
kind of like the bad news bears and that we were making these things limp along. Shout out, Patrick will know some of these terms, but we had a hangar queen, which basically means we had an airplane that sat in the hangar. The whole cruise, I think one time, just because we didn’t have enough parts to keep 10 of them going. Which, you don’t wanna advertise that because the enemy’s like.

09:58
Hey, whatever, we want to go attack them. And no, they’re really strong. I’ve been like, no, they don’t even have a full set of planes because they’re trying to keep limping along with old technology. anyways, shout out. I normally go really positive, but that’s probably the negative thing I’ve ever said on a podcast. I never thought about that before. That’s cool. I think the statute of limitations is that the hanger queen will forgive you. can you put into perspective the feeling of a

10:24
just being around a plane that’s either landing or taking off in an aircraft carrier. Max, it’s like incredibly humbling to be around, you know, an airplane. And I’ve been around airplanes and interested in airplanes. And, you know, when I lived in Alaska as a kid, my dad had tons of friends that had either float planes or small planes. And I’ve held the stick and flown and all that, you know, as youth.

10:54
You get around, you know, an F-18 and I mean, it’s like being around a Canon. It’s like being around a Dragster, if you’ve ever been around a Dragster or a NASCAR or some sort of high performance piece of equipment that is just, you know, if you get too close to a certain place, it’s going to suck you in like a Ginsu. You have to watch out for that as well as the back. It’s, you know, similar to like a horse. You’ve got to, you know, make sure you’re in the right place during the right time.

11:23
incredibly humbling. I’ve got permanent hearing damage just because they’re extremely loud. And for being a troubleshooter, you have to be able to have the muffs on and be able to communicate with the pilot. And so you can’t have double hearing protection. so at some point I’m to go in and they’re going to start paying me disability because I’ve had permanent hearing damage since I was 20 years old. But anyways, long story. You’re around a very powerful machine. You’re

11:51
kind of ducking under because it’s, you you’ve got them all stacked together. So you’re very conscious of space. They’re usually chained down. So you’re not only trying to avoid the plane, but you’re also looking or not looking. You’re not able to see the like trip wires, if you will, that are there. You’re kind of sometimes even feeling with your pants and you’ve got your pants that are stained with a brown from the chain rust at all these memories that you’re

12:20
you’re bringing up as I’m thinking about the life of that. But yeah, you’re ducking around and then if you’re up there during flight ops, then you’re also dealing with planes that are actually launching and landing and trying not to get vaporized as that’s all happening.

12:39
I’m glad you’re not vaporized. I’m going to, this is going to be a hard cut from, you know, the fastest machines on earth and above earth to one of the slowest things we can do as humans, which is walking. And so I think when I think about you and what you’ve done in your personal brand, and now you’ve got the second lab podcast, which I’m fortunate you had me on recently, really, really cool. You started walking at some point and now you’ve kind of made it part of your identity. And obviously there’s tons of positives that come with it, but you,

13:09
You’ve now turned it into media platforms as well. And so there’s a really cool story there. I actually don’t know what’s, why did you start walking every day in the first place? I’ve thought on this a lot while walking, you know, when walking as one does as one walks and thinks. Yeah, exactly. Well, I call it defrag in my hard drive when I’m walking, I’m actually fixing the realigning and things like that. But if I go back, I

13:38
I would go back and I would tell you that as far as I can remember, uh, we as a family live in Alaska, you know, elementary school, did cross country skiing, cross country running. We were doing five K’s and 10 K’s as a family, all of my youth. So it was always, you know, physical downhill skiing, uh, mountain bikes and living in Alaska mountain bike. And actually mountain biking kind of terrain off road and

14:05
different kinds of tires and just kind of craziness like that. even up to becoming part of my first business, my partner and I, would, in between sales calls, we would pull off and change shoes, kind of like Mr. Rogers, for those that remember who that is. And we would go for a walk for an hour and have a water bottle with us and just have kind of partner meetings, team meetings.

14:32
you know, talk through what did that sales call just mean? How do we, know, sort of a, you know, they’d call it like a post-mortem or a debrief or a, you know, an analysis. We would do that while walking. And that happened and progressed. And then I had kids and, know, I grew to as large as I think I ever was. I think it was probably 225 or 230 pounds, six foot tall. And I was like, why am I not doing this?

15:00
Fast forward, I started to kind of occasionally mowing the lawn or different things, never on a consistent basis. Then I basically got divorced and I think there’s this time where everybody gets sort of slapped in the face with something that was mine and with me and so I bought a Fitbit. This is probably my 12th one maybe or 13th and I’ve had this one. uh

15:27
The one right before this, the longest, I think I had five years and then it shorted, bought this one and then it started working again. So it’s down in the drawer and I have a backup to the, anyway, so 12 of them in and I started measuring sort of the walking and I was doing it and I was, hey, I wanna do this daily and it was passe. People were doing like contests, like a daily contest, hey, who can walk the most and.

15:52
You would do things to sandbags so you could be the winner and things like that. So that started going on and then eventually and fast forward to the meat that you’re looking for and you may cut right to this. So this may be the intro and boom. We’re gonna cut. gonna cut. We’ve been recording for 15 and a half minutes, but you were listening have heard four seconds. So thanks for, no, I’m just kidding. I would not be surprised. No, no, no, no,

16:18
We’re at minute three. I listened to these and I was gonna bring the headphones. I have them over there. I’m not gonna stand up and make you have to whatever, but I had wired in headphones at the time and I would bite on the cord because when you’re walking a lot, they would fall out of my ear. But if I would bite on the cord, whatever. And so I probably have some sort of cavities that came from all the electromagnetic impulses that I put into my face. But I started to listen to podcasts and I started to listen to…

16:46
books and I started to listen to people and David Goggins was on with Jesse Ixler on Joe Rogan’s podcast and talked about living with a seal, which was the book that he did. And I was like, is interesting. by the way, for those picturing like a zoo living with a Navy seal for, you for those, not the seal, the animal. So yes, yes. No, no. Thank you for saying it sounds like a kid’s movie, actually, if you first think of

17:14
If you get to see the cover of it, it’s pretty funny because there’s a, you know, curly head, stir crazy kind of, think Gene Wilder when I think of him and his wife actually refers to him as Gene Wilder like, but then there’s this guy screaming in his ear and that’s David Goggins. oh We listened to them talk and then with, and I was very fortunate to listen to all that. And then David Goggins book came out. And so I basically was probably the 10th book that I listened to on Audible.

17:43
in the time I was listening, been walking at that point three years, two and a half years, three years, and I listened to it and he was basically, the short version is when you get done the way that we are brought up as humans, when you get done and you’re winded and gassed and feel like you just gave the world everything, you’ve given 40%. You have that much more capacity, capability, you have more, but yet,

18:13
there’s things in circuitry and systems that want to protect you and save you and keep you sane and alive and all those other things. And I say that lightly. And so I took that and I was like, I’ve got this much time. It was 20, what was it? 2017, 2018, right in that timeframe.

18:40
And I had just over three years until I was gonna turn 50 years old. And I’d been walking and I did 2,500 miles the first year of my Fitbit without reading this book. I did 3,500 miles the second year without reading this book. And I think I did 4,800 miles the third year and I had read the book and this is when this all started. And I basically went to…

19:03
at the restaurant business would say, went through, I did a soft opening and I started to see how could I do this? I wanna do 12 miles a day, that’s how I can get to this number that I wanna do, which is 24,902 miles on my feet.

19:18
Max, I failed miserably. I couldn’t do it. Like I could do 13 miles and then I would do 12 miles and then would do 11 and a half and then I would do eight and then I would do 11 and a half and then I would do 15. And I’m like, damn, I can’t. And I’m a traveling salesman. Like, you know, your dad is a sales guy. uh Like I’m traveling, I’m at Southwest Airlines, I’m doing all these things and it’s like, man, I’m still trying to squeeze in four hours walking like every day. And how do I do that? And I realized I could do 84 miles a week.

19:49
I failed, I think once in three and a half years to do 84 miles in a week. Every other week I did 86 to 112 miles. I, I over, which made it so that I actually finished 28 days earlier, four weeks early. So instead of my birthday of April 11th, I finished, as I said, 314 high 2022. And now you brought up second lap. Now we’re sitting at 38,000, 100 and something as we speak.

20:18
So we’re halfway through lap two. Congrats on that. That’s. That’s a lot of walking. It’s a lot of walking. Call you Christopher walking, but that’s the best joke I’ve heard you say today. Thank you. It’s the only one. So, yeah. It’s really cool that you you started doing this. You obviously saw there were benefits and then you you set a goal for yourself. And this is like a.

20:44
big goal. This is not like, you I want to run a mile by the end of the month. You know, like this is it’s a lot, a lot of miles. And then you did the work to figure out, OK, what’s actually the equivalent of of walking the circumference of the earth? So congrats on making it this far, you know, one and a half so far. I have a few logistical questions because I’m just really curious, like behind the scenes. So first of all, schedule wise, how do you work this time into your day? I mean, you’re a traveling salesman. You’re busy with your day job as well. How are you still able to get everything done?

21:13
including work and walking. In the early days and through lap one, that completion, it was all hands on deck and it was get everything done. And it was sometimes walking on the treadmill until midnight and sometimes even till two in the morning because I could preload like I would wake up in the morning and I’d already walked two miles the night before technically, but it was that counted as that day. So that’s the

21:41
That’s the problem with their system is it’s a 12 to 12 and because it’s at midnight, it sort of throws things off and then in early days, and I’m not going to go down this tangent, but I’ve probably walked 290 to 350 miles that are untracked because of them and their technology. last mile. It’s like the last tapes, the last miles, secret life. What happened on those walks?

22:07
No, I’m just kidding. it didn’t happen because I don’t have it recorded technically, but I would get on a plane in Dallas at 10 p.m. and I’d have my 12 miles in. It’s like I’m going to get this done before I get on a plane. Well, I can’t sink at, you know, 33,000 feet. So when I land in Seattle, I’ve already gone past one morning in Dallas. So my Fitbit started to reset. So when I land, I get credit for 150 steps.

22:37
I don’t get the 25,000 that I did the whole day before. So it did that a bunch in the early days. I think they fixed that glitch. So there were a lot of matrix-y kind of learning things that it went through, but it’s, as I said, started to say all, all, all times. Like I would get up in the morning and it’s amazing, which you can do between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. You know, can get a couple, a couple hours of walking. And then I would walk during lunch. As time went on, I learned because I create my own schedule as, know,

23:05
a sales guy that I would do, you know, the two-ish hours a day of the mandatory either training or sales profile, you know, the, the, people are sitting like I’m doing now and sitting in front of a screen, those people, instead of doing that, I would have my phone in my pocket and I’m walking and I’m participating that way. And I would do that, or I would have, you know, just where I didn’t have to have a presentation.

23:31
I can talk through pretty anything. And so if my S and engineer, I was gonna say SE, a systems engineer was there, he could drive a presentation and I could talk while I’m walking as well. So I would just prioritize walking. When you get to the grocery store, would park as far out, if not walk to the grocery store as possible. Anytime, anywhere that I actually had to get in a car, I would end up walking maybe close to 500 steps from the car to get into wherever I was going.

23:59
Anyways, because that’s just what I would do is you, you find ways to do it. My house has a central part where the stairs are and I can walk in circles. And so in an hour I can walk a lot. Like I can walk a lot and I would do like patterns on the floor because we have tile floors. I’m going to give you the warped sense, you know, kind of like things because I’m

24:23
trying to keep going. But yeah, you just walk anytime it’s possible and to the point where we set, we’re one car family. We sold the car because it’s like he’s made this goal and he’s not going to ever get in a car by himself. Next you need the Fred Flintstone mobile where you can get your steps in while moving in the car too. I could see this, the whole Tesla and self-driving. I could see you sitting in the passenger side of a self-driving Tesla.

24:51
with one of those pedal things that you have. So you could be actually moving while you’re doing it. I tried doing it. So my equivalent of that, so where my brain goes, during the circumference of the earth walk, or circumference earth 50 is what my tagline was, when I was doing that, I flew to India. So I traveled for a day and a half. So I was walking up and down the aisles of the airplane. While we were flying and people were looking at me and you know,

25:20
all of the stuff about people and the whatever, I was like, hey guys, I have to keep walking. I’m literally walking around here. So like, and in any case, like I said, it’s sporting events. I would walk around the field while everybody else is sitting down in the chairs watching soccer. You know, those kinds of things, Max, like literally, if it’s possible, I would be on my feet. Speaking of feet, I know that you’ve gone through.

25:49
lots and lots of shoes. What tips do you have for keeping your feet in good shape, keeping, you know, just like your joints aren’t aching too much. Cause like you’ve, I’ve heard stories of, especially those who do like ultra distance stuff. And I mean, well, Goggins is one of those like super ultra distance marathons, things like that. some of the blisters and you know, it’s almost like you can get trench foot at some of these tough matters, stuff like that. Like how do you, how do you keep your body and your feet and your mind intact for doing these long distances?

26:18
I take a lot of my life from the movies that I’ve watched and the lessons and the learning that we’ve got there. This is why you run like Forrest Gump does. Lieutenant Dan, it’s amazing the miraculousness of you choosing that movie. Lieutenant Dan, he basically says to Forrest and to Bubba when they’re there, he holds up a pair of socks and he says, socks, take care of your feet.

26:47
That’s the magic. I change my socks on average four times a day. Like every time I go for a distance of walking when I come back, I put those socks in the laundry. Hey, they’re gonna get cleaned up. I buy socks and I’m all tangent. You buy the kind of socks that have a lifetime warranty that if everything goes wrong, you just write the thing and they exchange them. So we’ve been, instead of, I used to throw them away before I knew that was the thing. Like I would wear socks out, cause I’m walking all the time.

27:16
And then we found that out. so when I wear them out, my wife does this program and sends in, we get like eight at a time because we just sort of both use the same brand and, and do that. But I changed my socks after every walk, which is roughly four times a day. Um, so there’s nothing there. Uh, I spent a lot of time in bare feet when I’m not wearing Brooks. So Brooks is your, your running shoe or walking shoe brand of choice.

27:41
Brooks Glycerin is my brand and I’ve had, I think I started with 12s and now they’re in 25s. So I mean, I’ve gone through all these model changes. For a second, when you started saying that I interpreted that as shoe size and I’m like, your feet are just growing, you have shack feet. That would be so awesome. My shoe size is actually a 12. It’s, think it’s 11 and a half, but because you so much, learn, you always get a little bit bigger for your feet swelling.

28:12
Especially when you’re walking 12 miles a day or 16 miles a day at point sometimes How often do you switch those shoes up get new get a new pair? That was the for the joints I can start to tell where when I’m getting close to four Probably 450 to 500 miles. I know that it’s time to get the shoes I’ve gone past when it is and so I can I’m you can’t see me But I’m rubbing my knees my knees and ankles like that’s where you can feel it and it’s achy and you’re like man

28:41
and a new pair of shoes, then we go through new kicks day and you wear those and those are, it’s an amazing day, super comfortable. I tried the tricks where I bought two pairs and I would alternate days. So I would wear a shoe and then I wouldn’t wear it the next day and then I wouldn’t wear it the day after. I got no extension of life. All I did was have to manage which pair I wore yesterday by leaving one set tied and the other one untied and things like that. So I wouldn’t.

29:08
you know, break the system and it gave me no increased effectiveness in the shoe. So it, at the high point of my walking, it was literally 29 days. I had 29 days and needed to do a pair of shoes. You’re like on like a lunar schedule there, pretty close to it. Yeah, exactly. It ties just into all your walking, but as we hinted at before, so you started over the past couple of years, the second lap podcast, which I think is brilliant because you were

29:38
I mean, we talked about it when you had me so kindly on your show, but ah we had talked in the very, very early days about you doing this and what you’re doing and your goal. And I want to start a podcast, but I’m not sure the best way to go about things like that. Something that anyone who starts a podcast goes through those and you had so many great ideas. And so it’s really cool to see it come to life now. But I second lap is that much cooler because, yeah, like

30:05
it would be great to start something along that first lap and kind of follow you as you go through your goal and of course, you’re posting throughout, but there’s nothing wrong with having this. You’re doing the second lap again and now you’re talking about what you’ve learned the first time, you’re talking about what you’re doing on the second time as well. For anybody, like I highly recommend checking out your show. You literally walk and talk. So it’s like while you’re walking, while you’re getting closer and closer to your goal each time and you’re having these amazing conversations. I also have to say that you’re some of the best I’ve ever seen at.

30:35
just getting people to have real conversations and genuine and oh you don’t need to plan out like a 20 bullet point outline or scripted questions, anything like that. Like I think, you we can all agree conversations are good for people and good for connection. And so that was one of my favorite parts when you had me on was of course, yeah, we talked some podcasting stuff. We would talk some technology stuff and that realm, but probably two thirds of that podcast was talking about how I became a

31:02
a father over the past year and talking about how Jamie’s doing and how my outlook on life has changed. And that stuff is so fun to connect upon. And I’m sure it was fun for you to look back at that time in your life too. So for sure, we’re just going to talk for 10 minutes about, you know, compliments for your podcast. no, I, for you, I think what does it mean to you to be able to kind of add this layer where now not only are you walking, but

31:26
You’re also connecting with people during it and you’re talking about all sorts of things and it’s kind of all under this second lap brand or second lap podcast. I think, you know, when we started talking about doing a podcast had, you know, a plethora of ideas and you throw in ADD and you throw in, you know, all these things that you’re doing and, you know, I’ll put a pin there and I’ll pause that when people are getting excited about people and their goals, their

31:56
They’re really excited as people are getting close to their goals. So when I started this whole process, I got to walk this in three and a half years. People, they lose interest in 20 minutes. You know what I’m saying? And I’m trying to be funny and human, I’m being serious as shit. Like people get, even without ADD, they’re like, oh, okay, no. And I’ve learned that as a sales guy, if at 20 minutes people start looking.

32:24
at their phones or they start moving around, it’s because you need to tell a joke or get them to stand up and sit back down and do something. We’re just, a domesticated wild animal. And I was two and a half and then one and a half and a half a year. And so I was always far enough away that that never really entered my mind as that’s gonna be the identity. I’d have to, once I get there, I can have that identity, but it kept me from, I never had a shoe brand or Brooks’s,

32:53
Brooks has taken between me and my bride before she found a bigger toe box and she’s not a Brooks person. We could talk about that. But before she changed, she was Brooks for probably 50 pairs and I’ve gone 130 pairs. So they’ve gotten more out of me than they will get out of a lifetime of most individual runners. And I’m still walking. But I got nothing from her, no endorsements, no free pair of shoes. And I even started this whole campaign.

33:22
Walkers are people too, because their tagline is Brooks running. So I then got an Instagram and I made it Brooks walking and I tried all those things to get in their face and nobody cared because I wasn’t there. And so I got past that. became, hey, I accomplished 25,000 miles on my feet. I did most of it in 12 miles or 84 miles a week, 12 miles a day. I did it in these things. I had a broken toe. I cut my foot.

33:51
traveled around the world, I went on vacations and what one week didn’t even have the Fitbit on my body and that was during the, you know, the thing. I did these things to throw landmines in my own way. In addition to the landmines that are just there as a natural human. And then all of a sudden I was there and I had it. And so I started to do these podcasts with, he goes by Food is Fueled New York City. uh Ryan, I started talking through V Friends.

34:21
Big into web three. And so we started talking. This was the podcast that he did. He interviewed me as a podcast before I even started doing my own. And so I did his and he and I had kind of a jam. And so we did kind of what I’d say, probably probably close to 26, 28 episodes. So we did half a year where we did an episode a week and we just talked to each other and we kind of went back and forth. And that was on the, for those listening, that was on the V dads podcast, right?

34:50
Yes, it wasn’t, didn’t, we hadn’t moved it in and it didn’t have really its own identity. So we were sort of, you know, triaging and helping each other. And as we said, I’m feeling around in the dark a little bit. I don’t know exactly what I want to do. And this is, hey, I’ve seen some people where it’s like you and me, we could just do a weekly podcast and just talk and that could be what goes. And then it’s like, well, how does it be different than other people? How do I do something that’s different? How do I do something that people are going to remember?

35:19
And other than the technical difficulties, which you are going to remember, cause I’m moving, wireless is not ubiquitous. And I’ve been in wireless since 1998 and experienced it. It is so much better than it was, but it’s still not perfect. And if you’re moving, you’re going to deal with those things. But anyways, long story short, Ryan had some changes in his life. And so I found myself sort of an island and I

35:48
had met Ronnie, my current producer, current, you know, better half, 51 % of second lap, met him at VCon through Patrick. So back to the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Of Patrick Fransko, yeah. Of Patrick Fransko, for sure. But Kevin Bacon makes it so that the people will pick it up and we’ll get more likes on YouTube. I’m trying to tell you, I’m trying to learn these things. Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate you. I all your movies.

36:18
Footloose. That might be a maybe a clip. We might start that the movie with. Oh, I thought you’re gonna ask me to cut it. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no. We’re now at the six minute mark, um This is Oh, Ronnie and I got together. Yeah, we had talked to Vycon. We had touched skin. We had become friends. We had shared some NFTs. We’d done some things and he had a podcast and

36:47
I don’t know if he took pity on me, but he sort of, hey, I could help you with some of these things. I could help you with this. And I was like, hey, if we’re to do this 50 50, I can talk to everybody in the world. I can do whatever, but if it doesn’t go in the right socials, if it’s not the right tags, if it’s not the right product coming out the other end, and you and I talked about this, this was the magic sauce that I had to come to terms with. And most people that I do the podcast with don’t fully understand yet.

37:16
the parts are worth more than the whole. Like the whole YouTube shorts, the back to the whole people have 20 minutes worth of attention span. My podcast, a lot of times are 45 minutes. I’m defeating my own rule. I’m going too long. Yet Ronnie can cut it up into 50 clips of Opus, through Opus Clip or whatever it is, and he can start posting it on different socials. he’s slowly, as you said, you don’t wanna get flagged and stuff, so he slowly turned the spigot on.

37:46
you know, four a day and now five a day and six a day. we’re, you know, trying to hit the right people, but we’re, really trying to spread the news and we appreciate you highlighting the podcast, but we’re really trying to spread the news and help a younger generation to, you know, have conversations, to learn the lessons, to hear some of the, you know, skinning of the knee or bumping of the, the forearm, you know, the scars that we have that

38:16
keep you from becoming maimed or worse, you We wanna be able to share those and we try to do it in a humorous way. I think one of the things that I find most curious is curiosity. Like I really have become more and more and it’s getting faster and faster and I’m wondering when it can slow down and.

38:42
And I can’t remember if it was you, somebody that I was talking to as the podcast things were kind of come into terms. And I don’t know if I credit you, might’ve been Brian, another guy was in the Navy with Patrick. But they were like, you’ve consumed all of this stuff. Like it might’ve even been Dr. Danita who was a guest like two depots ago. They’re like, you’ve consumed all that. You need to get it out. You need to share it with some people. you’ve.

39:10
It’s not like I was going to boil over, but you know, they do share with you that, you know, to learn the best things in life, you get to the point where you’re, you’re teaching, like you’re, you’re a mastery of it. And I’ve been waiting a long time to say this. I’m glad your podcast is where I’m going to use it. They say 10,000 hours of anything makes you like a professional. I’ve walked for like 15,000 hours now or whatever it is. I’m like,

39:40
I’m a double platinum professional procrastinator and walker. Like I’ve got a couple of, you double majored in both those. Well, we’ll get to the procrastination part in a little bit, but I think that was my best joke ever. Start the whole thing with that. That’s the clip. Half the people won’t understand what you just said. So you might have to go back. They’ll get there eventually.

40:09
So I guess whether it’s whether you’re doing it, you know, walking and talking to a podcast or not, just high level, if you kind of zoom out, why would you recommend walking, you know, for anyone who can to add as part of their daily repertoire? We all talk about health and we talk about mental health. We talk about how to be a better person. We talk about all these things. All of them require action. So I equate walking to action and it gives you

40:39
That ability for me, I locked in when, and I don’t know if he’ll be a bad guy at some point. So if the future, he’s a bad dude. Remember that we’re all in this. Yeah. Disclaimer. Yeah. Disclaimer. But I, I watched an HBO special. I think it was on with in Bill Gates brain or something like that. And he would take these pauses in life where he would grab a bunch of books and he would go off and he would consume them and walk and.

41:08
think about them. And so that was part of what I was thinking as I put the earphones in and I started to do the circumspect the earth by age 50, you know, challenge with myself is I started, I want to be like Bill Gates. I want to be smart. I mean, he was the richest man forever. When I lived in Redmond, Washington, going to Redmond high school, he would be Bill sightings that you would see working at Microsoft. And so was like, man, I want to attain that. and so

41:38
Walking gives you that time. I said earlier, defrag your hard drive, which is, you you do all these things and you’re in the midst of something and all of a sudden, your kid comes up and you have a kid now, so I can use this as an example and you understand, you’re in the midst of, you know, dicing onions and this beautiful human comes up and grabs your leg and you go off and do this thing and you come back and hopefully your onions aren’t stinky because you were gone for too long, but you finish up kind of doing your thing. in our mental world, we rarely come back.

42:06
Like, so it’s like this garbage in your head. And I think it’s why we have certain dreams or nightmares or we don’t sleep well or we eat bad or we do all these other things have anxiety because we have these thoughts in our head that never get to end. I use the walking to have that, you know, way to clear that out. But it’s really been me going to school. It’s been my ability to learn that curiosity thing I said.

42:35
My big thing now, I’m kind of a snob when it comes to it. I wanna listen to autobiographies read by the author, read by the guy that it’s about and listen to their tone and inflection where the humor comes from their body language that comes through because it’s them that they’re reading. And I want it to be over four hours because each book costs $12 and so it’s like a financial thing. It’s just really hard for my brain to get around. Hey, I can just listen to a three and a half hour Joe Rogan podcast and it’s free.

43:04
I don’t have to do this four hour book over here, but I wanna get as much out of each as I can. I think that is so walking for me and why back to your original question is it gives people an excuse to go out and do something that’s gonna be good for their mental health and they can take the opportunity through AirPods or wired headphones to do something else or go with a partner and have a conversation like I do with you do somebody that’s stationary.

43:34
On second lap, that was the last plug.

43:40
Well, that’s a wonderful note to end on and would be a perfect place to wrap this up, but I’m going to screw it up because I really want to do some rapid fire Q and A with you. Please do. Yeah. You ready for it for this? All right. Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s get wild. We’re stretching. We’re doing some, some tibia dorsiflexion. That’s my favorite workout from high school football. remember. Uh, well, it my favorite workout. It’s just a fun thing to say. It is. It’s when you, when you’re stretching someone, uh, I mean, it’s usually with the partner when you’re, you grab the

44:09
the front of their feet and like pull wait the top of their feet and pull it down towards you. it stretches your shin. Okay. muscles. I guess. Yeah. I guess you dorsiflex your tibia. Anyway, more where that came from Alaska. So super cool. I mean, I’ve always been fascinated by Alaska. I haven’t been there yet, but I definitely want to go there at some point. It just seems endlessly beautiful and also endlessly huge when you see the

44:38
realistic maps, it’s almost intimidating. Genormous. Yeah. What’s like your elevator pitch for why someone should either visit or move to Alaska, live in Alaska? So I moved to Alaska as a kindergartner, spent the year, a fourth grade in Utah, and then I left Alaska in the ninth grade. So was there during the youth. I give that as context of if you’d asked me then, I’d have said,

45:07
want to be here. I want to be back in California with my friends. I want to go swimming. We would go to Hawaii on the dividends from living in Alaska every year. And I would love to be at the beach. So I’m a beach person. So I would have said that I did cover it as a, as a sales guy in my early fatherhood. So I would go up and I would sell industrial products and drive around up to Fairbanks, things like that. And going back as an adult, I would tell you that it’s so awesome. I mean, it’s like, you know, untarnished world.

45:35
There are some dense populations of humans that you can go and get your supplies and be around, but you can easily get on a float plane or get in a car and be gone and away. We’d spend all weekend from Friday night through Sunday down on the beach in Alaska in a camper that my parents left there. And we’d go fishing and just outdoors and downhill skiing and riding up on this chairlift above the clouds and then skiing through the clouds. mean, just.

46:04
All of that stuff, being in rivers and hip waders and a moose walking in while you’re fishing for salmon, all that’s happening. Like a bear standing up against the outhouse of the cabin you’re renting, out of Lakeia to fly into a thing and somebody pulling the trigger of a gun so the bear would run off and not maul us all and eat us. And that all happened. Rapid fire, I tried to rapid fire back to you. Let’s hope you weren’t in the…

46:32
I can’t imagine how scary that is if you’re in the, if you’re sitting down at an outhouse where we’ll talk about what doing, but a bear scratching at, oh my God, geez. We were, we were at the campfire and the outhouse was up behind us. So no, the guy that would have been, that was a shitty situation. All right. All right. Sales. haven’t, haven’t, Diven dove, dived much into it, but I mean, you’ve had an incredible sales career.

46:59
a lot of big name companies, especially in like the tech space, the cybersecurity space. For anybody in sales, what’s like your best sales tip? Just quick tip on sales. The oldest one is two ears, one mouth, listen more than you speak. Them talking is you winning. Ask open-ended questions so that once again they’re talking. I the ultimate goal is to get them talking. I use it to get my biggest secret hack to ADD.

47:27
which is in the midst of the presentation, there are times where I will go to Bermuda. And then I come back and there’s still a room of people and I’ll look at the room of people and I’ll be like, what was I talking about? And they’ll either know, and if they know, I know they’re listening and hey, it’s a cue and I can’t, whatever. And if they have no idea, I start over, I go somewhere else. was like, we don’t remember you. And then it’s like, okay, I used kind of my…

47:56
What does it say, using my negative as a positive? So I would say that. But sales really is about people liking you, people buy from people they like. That’s why I think, and I’ve had numerous conversations, thousands of conversations with adults, and we do all believe that AI will never take over the job of a salesperson because people wanna talk with people. They wanna human interaction. And I’ll say this to you.

48:23
I hate talking to these automated systems on the phone where you just. it’s the worst. Yes. It’s like, I just want somebody to hear my voice. Oh, we just did a, um, I actually mentioned it on, uh, when you had me on your show, you know, we had this cousins get together in the city a few weekends ago and then we had a big family style meal at car mines after, which was great. And it all worked out. I’m not kidding. I, I had five or six different calls with car mines to get that reservation and make sure there were enough high chairs because car mines has some automated system.

48:52
where how can we help you? What are you interested in? All these things. to be, to specifically be like, all right, we have a group of this many, we need this many high chairs. It eventually got to the point where they were just like, sorry, I can’t help you. You know, it’s like, and so you need to, you need to talk to the host or hostess. They changed the systems where it used to be, I’m gonna show my age here, but you used to say zero and you come up and say, no, but I want you hit zero again. would know zero again. And then would, it would hear you.

49:23
the third zero. And then it was like the pound sign. And then it’s like, you have to know Morris code now in order to get past. Or you can’t get to a human ever. And I just, anyway, so I don’t think salespeople will ever be replaced. You’ll get replaced by a bad salesperson or one that can’t use the technology or the tools or the things, you know, can’t get behind the times, but you’re always gonna have a human because people just, as I said, they just want it. So listen more than you talk.

49:53
War movie, you mentioned Top Gun was very inspirational for you. Besides Top Gun, what was your, and I know that’s kind of romance as well, but what is your favorite, if you could watch it on repeat on a plane, what’s another war movie that you put right up there? Max, I don’t like to watch the war movies as much as I did when I was youth. really have, I take my TV time and I give my TV time to have acts or Twitter for those of us who are old enough to know there used to be a bird.

50:22
I kind of give my time to a different way. Yeah, I’ve tried and I really, my thing is lead with love, leadwithlove.eath, if you’re into Ethereum, I’m really about either fear or love, you get to choose and I’m choosing love, so I’m leaning in that way. I have sons, you look at war movies differently after you’ve had a son, you’ve had a daughter, you maybe look at differently after a daughter. I can’t remember that far back anymore, because the daughters were first.

50:50
I’ve seen all the ones that I would say are worthy of the awards they have, Saving Private Ryan, I think the first 20 minutes, no real conversation, just those doors opening and the guy next to you’s head exploding and the realism of being that I’ve been on an aircraft carrier and around people and thinking all, you know, I’m very.

51:15
much because I listen to books more than I watch movies. My brain is a better movie projector than that. Whatever. I kind of shy away from, but I would also say that I grew up in a family where my parents were huge, like dirty dozen, uh Magnificent Seven, anything with the Duke.

51:38
all those Telly Savalas, I’m trying to think of all the guys. mean, I just, all the old war movies, my mom was really big into those and even with a son. So I just kind of contradict myself really crazy. But, or Clint Eastwood, you know, all those kinds of things, you know, those are kind of dating myself. I don’t know, the new ones like Full Metal Jacket. Now you’re dating yourself because you called Full Metal Jacket a new one. And it’s probably 30 years old, right? It was a…

52:05
Yeah, I mean, it’s got to be 80s from the 90s. It’s got to be the 90s. I’m trying to bring it. I’m bringing it north. New ones would be. uh Oh, I actually really liked Warfare. You watch Warfare. Warfare was really good. I watched it on a plane a couple. It was it’s just in one of those classic movies where it’s so innocent at the start and then it just spirals out of control. But it’s like all pretty much in one setting. It’s crazy. And that’s our that’s our version. My wife just watched all seasons of Homeland in a.

52:34
seven week period and I got to watch all of it and it was like very reminding of the whole Saddam and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I have one. I know keep going back to this, but one more military adjacent question for you. What is the song that was either like your guys like pump up song or that you listened to before you got deployed? Like what song do you think about when you think about that era and when you were serving? There are so many pieces of music that take me back.

53:03
to that time because not only was I in the Navy and hair on fire and being that whole thing, was having two children and becoming a father as that’s all going on. So that’s happening and it was 1996. Michael Jordan is winning the NBA champion for either the, was it the second three Pete? It’s like, so I’m trying to think when Space Jam came out and then-

53:32
Yeah. Yeah. So back up from there. know, what year was he a baseball player? That’s what you got to figure out because that’s kind of the defining thing in there. But I have these shirts where I had to wear it, you know, because I was a CL Supersonics fan and my other family was in Chicago. And so the rivalry because they were in the better. But back to the music. I can always come back around the tree. I would go to either anything on the Top Gun album.

54:00
just because you’re gonna take why it’s the association. Kenny Loggins stuff. Yeah, Kenny Loggins. For me, I would listen to, while I was reading books, because I didn’t have audible at the time, would listen to Discman, so I’d have the CD and I’d have the earphones, I, R.E.M., the Smiths, I grew up on everything ACDC, everything Van Halen, everything, you know, sort of that guy, and I just…

54:28
It was anything but country western and I would tell you with Kenny Chesney and a couple of these guys that have gone in and bastardized David Matthews I’m even listening to a little bit of country western now So i’ve you put music on and i’m probably gonna start moving my head. Well that answer was tnt. It’s a dynamite so I think one of jamie’s favorite uh post-bath songs by the way, so fantastic Rob, thank you so much. Uh, oh I had one much later one to throw in just because you mentioned it

54:58
Are you a crier when you chop onions? I’ve tried every single, what do call them? Mama’s lesson or whatever. Wives, wives tail. Yeah. Nothing stops it. A good, a good onion. When that’s going to be really good in your flavor. Cause I like onions. Like I like raw onions. I like sauteed onions. like burnt onions. like all that’s a whole, that’s a whole other thing. Cause that

55:24
I can’t stand raw onions, but I think sauteed onions are some of the best flavored and smell in the world. My parents tried to punish me with onions. Didn’t work. Joke’s on you. I love them. Yeah, jokes on them. Because I lived in Seattle, showing my days before I graduated in high school out of Southern California, moved a lot. We were home of Costco. And you go to Costco and you get the ketchup and a row of raw onions on the top of it.

55:53
You get the flavor and the heat and the crunch and all. It’s just sorry. Awesome. No, that’s that’s great. I love little like quirks like that. I have the same. I I cry like a lot when chopping onions. Also in general, but yeah, chopping like like I’m the same way where it’s like you there’s nothing like you can kind of try to close your eyes, but that’s not safe while chopping. So.

56:20
I don’t know, I just learned kind of recently that not everybody has that. Like some people don’t cry while chopping onions, which blows my mind. So crazy stuff. So. can of duck your head out. Like if you do the kind of duck and dive. Yeah, but all this is not safe for chopping stuff. No, no, no, no. Everything. Like I was thinking when you started doing the, I know what this is, but you’re right. I was like, no, you’re right. Everything is knife safety avert. Like anything you do to try and avert. mean, I mean, guess you could put the whatever is.

56:47
cotton balls or something up your nose. I’ve never tried anything like that. That doesn’t sound, yeah, nevermind. Don’t do that. Well, as Bill Raftery says, audience. So Rob Robbie-Grams, thank you so much. This has been an absolute blast. I know it’s been a long time coming. Thank you for having me on your show and for, know, obviously that naturally led into this as well. It’s like, it’s long overdue you coming on here. So appreciate all you’re doing. uh

57:14
Strongly recommend everybody check out second lap podcasts. I know you’re you’re on all the platforms. You’re on Apple You’re on Spotify on YouTube as well YouTube even do live streams, which is awesome more power to you That’s a whole other bag of worms in terms of tech issues and all sorts of things, but you’re up for it So where else Rob, you know, whether it’s social media or anything else you’re doing, know, what 3.0 space like what’s your main CTA? What do you want people to check out to learn more about you?

57:38
The best way to find me, because in my world, especially when we’re looking at web three and a lot of these X people is I want to be a doxed real human. You know, you’re not talking to some bot. And so I am R H M A T T S O N.

57:57
at all of the socials in a blue check mark fashion so that you know it’s me. And I only say that if I type R-H-M-A-T-T-S-O, you should see how many people are trying to look like they’re me, all the way down. so I guess it’s flattering because they’re doing that, but yes, just check me out. I’m on Instagram and Facebook, both as I said, blue check mark, just to make sure people know that in this sea of

58:27
digitality of people that you know that you’ve got a buoy of me over here that you can know that you’re talking to a 54 year old man that’s got Einstein and Johnny Cash telling you what you can do for the world. And smooth sailing and uh you know hopefully a lot more smooth sailing than uh a blues from a fulsome prison or anything like that but Rob. Good one. Thank you. I’m grateful. Appreciate you. Back at you. Final thoughts just literally one line take us home here could be a song lyric could be your outlook on life just

58:56
Send us home. Hug the human every day. Make sure it’s 20 seconds. It’s when you get the best amount of positive events.

59:08
Rob, you are lucky that this episode wasn’t edited down to 20 seconds. Rob, no, thank you so much. Absolute blast. Long, long, long time coming. Really, really appreciate all you do. Make sure to check out his 2ndLap podcast. And for those of you, Wild Listeners, Wild Viewers out there, make sure to subscribe to Wild Business Growth on your favorite podcast platform or on YouTube. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter for the video versions.

59:34
And you can find all things MaxPodcasting, the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, anything else about the show at MaxPodcasting.com. I hope you all have a nice Memorial Day weekend in the US at the time of this recording. And until next time, Let your business Rob Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!

00:00
An unbelievable commitment to quality.

00:19
HeyG1, welcome back to Wild Business Growth, your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur turning wild ideas into wild growth. I’m Max Branstetter of MaxPodcasting. This is episode 359er and today’s guester is Kat Cole. Kat is the CEO of AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens. AG1, if you haven’t seen them advertised in some form.

00:49
is absolutely seemingly taking over the world in terms of supplements and nutrition and nutrition’s plural. You can tell I don’t work there. uh Vitamins, daily health drinks. It is a fascinating, fascinating company. And in this interview, we talk everything from Kat’s journey from a Hooters girl to up the ranks of Hooters, leading the charge for more and more tasty food brands like

01:18
Cinnabon, Anne’s, Welcome to Moe’s, and everything from how AG1 markets their one-of-a-kind product to how she has been able to help them triple their revenue in recent years. It is K-A-T-1. Enjoy the show.

01:44
Oh, Rady, we are here with Kat Kohl, CEO of AG1. And we’re gonna set a record for things that have three syllables or three letters. Boy, I’m on top of it today. Kat, thank you so much for joining. How you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me. Of course, of course. Thank you so much for making time. know, it’s really cool. I love when whenever I have a guest on I love

02:12
listen to them in other podcasts and looking at their LinkedIn and learn more about their background. Just so I know a couple of questions to ask you and for you, it kept coming back to Hooters and Cinnabon. So two iconic brands, very different realms. So of course I want to talk a little bit about that before everything with AG1. Hooters, near and dear to my heart, we actually have, uh you know, we used to go to Myrtle Beach growing up and there’s some big family

02:36
picture that we have, like including my grandparents and cousins and all, like a huge family picture that for some reason we took outside of the Hooters in Myrtle Beach. So it’s like if you look at in our family lore, you know, the Hooters brand is there. Also, I know growing up, uh I was nervous whenever I was talking to a Hooters waitress there. So let’s hope today I’m able to get over that and as a former waitress yourself, things can be smoother. So on the Hooters front.

03:06
Obviously, there’s so much we could say about the brand there, but what’s something about the Hooters brand or the Hooters business as a whole that you think most people would be shocked to learn? I mean, the big one, look, it’s a very mature brand. was born out of the early 80s. It’s gone through many iterations of the concept, but because it’s known for female waitstaff, there is this assumption that, oh, there are these

03:34
these women, these girls who are waitresses, and then the men run the place. And actually women ran the company. One, like 80 % of the hourly workforce was female. Every person I worked for in my 14 years there, until I worked for the CEO was a woman. So you just think 14 years, assistant managers, general managers, marketing managers, promo managers, regional managers, and I had incredible male mentors in the company as well.

04:03
But it’s pretty wild to think about an entire career of that duration that is predominantly female leadership. And certainly that contributed to not only my story of seeing incredible examples of women in leadership, but many others. My story is not unique. There were a ton of former Hooters hostesses, waitresses who moved up into salary roles, management roles, became franchisees, became executives like I did. I’m one of many.

04:32
actually. So I think that’s the thing that might surprise people. Yeah, it’s really, really cool to hear. And from your standpoint, I saw I think you’re 26 when you got your first VP role there and moving up there. So what do you think made the difference for you to go from, you know, working at one location to actually being like in charge of, you know, training and development across, all these places around the world? Well, first, I think, again, it wasn’t very different from my predecessors there. So

04:59
many of the executives came out of operations, came out of running restaurants. So in that system, it wasn’t exceptional, but it is exceptional when you compare it to many other people in different businesses and different industries. So I just want to give credit where credit is due. Like the business was just a talent machine uh pulling people from the stores into roles where they would shape policy procedure and make decisions that would then affect the employees.

05:29
on the franchise and corporate side. So that should just be noted. It wasn’t all me, but it was me among many others. And so if I look back and think of the me related things that made a difference that were similar when other people got those opportunities as well, uh one was I worked all the jobs, right? Not everyone wants to work all the jobs. I worked all the jobs. I was a hostess, a hostess, a waitress.

05:58
a bartender, a shift leader, a promotions manager, a regional training coordinator, a new store opening manager, a fix it trainer who would go to stores that had problems and uh retrain team members, a management trainer. So that’s part of the outlier element of the people who did move up in the company, including me, is we had the breadth of experience of knowing end to end how the restaurants ran and

06:27
that is required to be exceptional in corporate management at such a young age, right? Because there’s so much when you’re that young. I was 20 when I took my first corporate gig. So I moved to Atlanta and became an employee training manager in the training department and then moved up as the company grew. And as you said, at 26 became one of the vice presidents and then was in various executive leadership roles for six years there. And so what I lacked was experience in years.

06:55
at that level of management in multiple companies. But what I had was unparalleled knowledge of the way the operations worked, what the employees and managers needed, what good looked like from the inside, not just the outside. And that makes a difference if you’re willing to tap into that internal experience as a strength. And I did so worked all the jobs is one thing. The other is I enjoyed working all the jobs. I wasn’t working all the jobs because I felt they were rungs on a ladder to get

07:25
up the ladder. That certainly ended up being the case, but that wasn’t my why. I was working all the jobs for three reasons. One, uh I grew up in a tough upbringing, very poor family on both sides, single parent, alcoholic father, helped raise my daughter or my daughters, my sisters who are like my daughters, I guess. have an actual daughter and son now. And so I needed to make money. And if you can work more different hourly jobs, you have more access to income.

07:54
So it was very self-serving, the reason I wanted to work all those jobs. The second driver of the why is I love to help. Sometimes the way I learned the job was not thinking, oh, if I learned how to be a bartender, I could have two more shifts this week. It was that the bartender had to go home because her son was sick uh or the manager needed help because her assistant manager called out and I wanted to be helpful. So the second of my why is I’m a helper.

08:21
I like to be helpful. like to enable others success. I have since I was very young. And the third is, I uh was curious, like, can I do it? I think I can. Can I do it? No way to know unless I try. And usually when it’s in a moment where someone needs help, it gave me more courage to be not perfect at something because no one would expect me to be perfect because they’re asking for my unexpected help. And so I’m like, can I do it? Yeah.

08:49
It’s probably fine if I’m not perfect. So I needed to make money. I wanted to be helpful. And I was curious to see if I could learn and do the new thing, put those together. And I ended up raising my hand for almost every opportunity that came up, whether it was an impromptu need or something that was more typical, like a job opening or an opportunity to travel and open new operations. Well, the other thing that we didn’t even talk about with Hooters, but they always found delicious was the food. uh, and speaking of delicious food,

09:19
Cinnabon. So I will raise my hand and voluntarily, you if you ever need Cinnabon taste testers, you know, I’m always game for that. But these are kind of quirky questions, but I just have to know first, what’s the secret? how did the team create the Cinnabon smell anytime you’re by a Cinnabon to be like the best smell in the world? It’s funny, you know, people have all this lore around do they pump it through fans and

09:49
It’s just the fact that the ovens are out front. And so when you’re baking all day, fresh baking, I mean, every hour you’re pulling fresh baked cinnamon rolls. It’s like when you bake cookies in your house, right? The whole house fills with that aroma. Same thing, except imagine baking cookies in your house all day, 24 seven. That is what we were doing. They’re all fresh baked. Many of them made from scratch for many, years, hand rolled in the store.

10:18
baked in these ovens right behind the counter. And so that aroma is just getting out everywhere. And there were times that the founders of the concept tested putting the ovens in the back like a normal restaurant. The reason they were in the front to begin with was they just got a small space and so it was an accident. And when they put the ovens in the back, the sales dropped by half. So they’re like, even if we have more space, those things are going out front.

10:46
And it was also part of the theater, right? It helped you see that they were fresh made. You literally could see them going in the oven as raw dough roll and coming out fresh baked. So there was something about the theater that also drove the watch, the awe, the gawking, in addition to the aroma, attracting people. So nothing other than just fresh baking, delicious, uh full of sugar and fat products that you definitely should not be eating every day or very frequently, but.

11:15
iconic, right? Like iconic aroma, iconic product, the cinnamon roll the size of your face. And something that in the 80s and 90s was beloved and, you know, in every mall. And then over the years, even trends of, of consumption and indulgence has changed. People wanted smaller products, more responsible indulgences. We ended up expanding the product into grocery stores where it was just the cinnamon and coffee creamer, just the cinnamon in

11:44
coffee flavors and finding more ways to extend that nostalgic flavor and that delicious aroma, but into things that were less insanely indulgent as the world moved to more conscious indulging. Yeah, that’s actually, and that hints to my last question for now, before we get to AG1, I promise we will get to AG1 in this interview. I guess the distribution or retail strategy, whatever you want to call it, there’s not that many brands that

12:10
come top of mind when you think about like airports and malls and historic like, there are very specific locations that like Cinnabon, Anyands, I know another brand that you you touched over the years. Yeah, fantastic smelling one, by the way. But what went into this, like such like a defined distribution strategy there of like, hey, we need to be in all these airports, we need to be in those malls. And then I guess ultimately, testing out grocery as well. I mean, if you think about any

12:40
business’s distribution strategy. There were a few things that lead to it. And it was certainly true for Cinnabon and the other brands that were in focus brands, the parent company that I led. Cinnabon gets all the love because it was, you know, I was president of Cinnabon in the recession and we turned it around and it’s a really fun contrast comparison to AG1. People like to highlight like from cinnamon rolls to nutritious drinks and supplements. But the reality is we had many brands in between. Jamba Juice,

13:09
uh, Mo’s Southwest girl where we had. Welcome to Mo’s that, you know, my wife, says that all the time. Uh, McCallister’s, Schlotzky’s, had deli soup salad. So we talk about Cinnabon a lot, but my portfolio of brands, I ran the parent company, there were nine presidents and seven incredible brands, some of which were healthy for you. Some where you could pick your, pick your path of more indulgent versus healthy and others like Carvel and Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon.

13:38
or just pure fun, ah not good for you, but fun for you. The strategy for those brands, if you think about it, is that fact, that the average consumption for Cinnabon, the average frequency of a customer was 1.25 times a year, one visit per year. So if people only come see you once per year, what must be true about your location? You must be around many unique

14:07
visits per year. If it’s the same people every day, like a roadside of traffic patterns going to or from work, you won’t do very well because they’ve already those same people who drive that route every day have already come to see you. They’ve made their one to two visits per year. so airports, casinos, vacation destinations, travel plazas, malls, these are places that

14:38
Individuals don’t go very often, but many people go occasionally. That’s just it. So the snack brands are in high, unique feet, unique foot traffic locations. They do not require the same people going every day. If you contrast that with something like a Mo’s where you would go to lunch every day or a schlotzky’s to get a salad or a flatbread, those, while they might do very well in a mall or an airport,

15:05
perform very well with the same people, office work, travel, commuting, and so different distribution strategy versus say an AG1 that is a daily consumption habit subscription business makes a ton of sense to be online in the most direct to consumer convenient way for people to shop in a way that is the best value for that high frequency consumption habit. If you put those two occasions together,

15:35
very low frequency, sporadic, indulgent occasions, very high frequency health consumption. You have this stuff in the middle, which is grocery. People who shop a couple times, not every day, but it’s once a week, twice a week. So when you’re shopping in grocery retail, you are less likely to indulge, purchase very indulgent things because you don’t want that in your home, shouldn’t have that in your home, right? That’s a special treat. But it might be expensive to buy something you’re consuming very frequently.

16:05
there. But for things like an occasional like muffins, cereals, coffee creamers, grocery and retail makes a ton of sense. It also makes a ton of sense for discovery of a brand. And so we would put some of our restaurant brands, sauces, products, uh well known versions of those items in the freezer section in grocery stores, because it’s a great place to discover the brand or be delighted by a brand you haven’t had in a while if you don’t go to the mall often.

16:34
Whereas AG1, people who are really serious about supplementation and their health are probably likely to go to our website and find their favorite flavor and their perfect subscription package for the best value delivered wherever they want. But we’ve just rolled out in Costco in the last year, in Target just this week, AGZ and AG1 with seven counts and 14 counts, which is a great place for people to grab that in between amount if they forgot it on a trip.

17:03
ah If they want to gift it to a loved one or just try it when they never have that’s easier for many people to do then go to a website with larger portions and a subscription

17:17
Not that I’m full yet, but with that appetizer of Hooters and Cinnabon. Let’s get to the AG1 entree. And as you mentioned, it’s fascinating to compare and contrast these brands. And the previously mentioned brands have seemingly been around forever and iconic and have very distinct personalities. And AG1 now compared to those, it’s like, it’s a baby. It’s brand new. Yet, I mean, in my lifetime, like I’ve never seen any sort of nutritional drink or

17:47
supplement, vitamin, whatever you want to call it, product take off like this. And I know since you’ve been there, there’s been really, really cool, know, tripling of revenue, we’ll call it that we’ll get into all that. But so AG1, formerly athletic greens, I heard that one of the big influences of you actually landing this role in the first place is uh has to do with the podcast. Can you tell us about that?

18:14
I’d been on a few podcasts that were more, you know, had more of a venture capital backed audience, more of startup audiences. And the founder of then called Athletic Greens heard me on two of his favorite podcasts and then asked to be introduced to me because the business was growing so quickly and he was humble enough to know he could benefit from advisors outside perspective to help him on growth, leadership, brand.

18:43
operations. And so he asked for an introduction to someone he realized was a mutual connection that guy made a dear, just incredible human made a connection with us. And the founder asked me to advise him and I just left 10 after 10 years at focus brands was taking time off to be with my little kids post COVID and reshaping that whole business within the restaurant and hospitality industry. So it was

19:11
beautiful timing because I was in this advising era of my life. I’m like, I’m going to advise, invest, work on blogs, books, whatever I can do to share knowledge while I think about what will I do next? Will I operate again? Do I want to start a fund? Will I spend my time in more of a portfolio approach? Really all were considerations in 2021. And then Chris reached out to me and said, look, here’s the things I heard you say. This is what I think I need help on.

19:41
Could you be an advisor? And he didn’t know because the subscription was under my husband’s name that I had been a customer for two years. So I was a huge fan. And actually I had no idea how big the company was and I didn’t know much about the business of the product. I just loved the product. It had helped me so much with my energy, my immune health, my hair, skin and nails after my second child. And I was one of these over-supplementers going to the grocery store, getting a bunch of pills and powders. And my husband called me out one day.

20:11
and said like half this stuff is expired. You don’t travel with it. You travel so much. You don’t keep up with it. Try this. And he gave me a pack of AG1 and I tried it instead and I was able to stick with it. I built a routine in the morning, shaking up this like incredibly healthy green drink. And then I started feeling the benefits. So I was a huge fan. And so you put that together. He asked me to help. I was in a moment where that’s what I wanted to do. I’m an angel investor.

20:40
many, many early stage companies. So I have a deep love and respect for founders and early stage businesses. And I was a fan, a customer. And so I started advising him and that advisory work turned into him saying, look, just come help me build this. And it turned out to be an incredible moment. Many people have heard this word, the Japanese concept, Ikegai, where you have

21:03
overlapping circles, almost like a Venn diagram. And I forget all the specific circles, but it’s like your purpose, the opportunity, the chance to grow, mission driven, fits lifestyle, right? Like all these things. And that was absolutely AG1. So I joined in the fall of 21. And alongside the founders, we grew the business. It was growing like a rocket ship, like over a hundred percent year over year. We raised our only round of funding raised 120 million at a 1.2 billion pre.

21:33
uh valuation and then grew the business. And as you said, we’ve tripled the business since then, turned it to profitability, which it wasn’t in those early hyper growth stages and moved it from a single product, single channel business to now multi-product, multi-channel AG1, AGZ, uh all these things. And now Costco, Target, Amazon, and more to come with the broadest breadth of those products, flavors.

22:02
and incredible science-backed innovations available still on drinkag1.com. Well, congrats on that. It sounds like you guys have been busy. You might be napping every now and then, but not constantly. I think uh that’s a really important point that you shared is that you, mean, unbeknownst to the founder at the time, you were already a fan of the brand. with brands and big name brands like that, I always think that uh there’s a finite level of how passionate you can get.

22:31
about a brand that you didn’t start yourself, unless you’re like a fan, like if you’re a customer, and you’re using this all the time, and you kind of live that lifestyle. And so that was such a great, perfect fit, as you mentioned there. Now, looking across the category, do you even, how do you describe the category that you’re in? We actually straddle a few categories, which is like Ikegai. Yeah, it’s quite interesting, right?

22:59
As a product, we are a daily health drink that combines three very clear supplement subcategories. A multivitamin, there’s a full stack, very thoughtfully curated research-backed multivitamin, multi-mineral on the label with amounts showing you what is the amount of each key vitamin and mineral. We have probiotics in AG1 NextGen, five of the most clinically studied, live, dairy-free.

23:29
live culture probiotic strains, uh incredible. then, so that’s the second category of supplementation it combines. And the third is what people would consider greens, superfoods, phytonutrients, prebiotics, right? This beautiful fruit and veggie blend that serves many purposes. One of the purposes is those fruits and vegetables themselves contribute to vitamins and minerals. They are prebiotic.

23:56
uh fibers for the probiotics. So you get many different um plant varieties that help feed beneficial bacteria in the gut. And then you have uh adaptogens, herbs, mushrooms, things that have other benefits over time. And so it is a daily health drink, which used to be, I guess, in the OG days like orange juice or Tang, like what do you wake up and drink that gets you going?

24:24
This is, AG1 is definitely the thing now, but it is also replacing your multivitamin, replacing uh your base level probiotic and combines those things in a ritual that you can stick with. People stick with it because it becomes a ritual versus something you have to do like pills, a lot of separate pills. And it doesn’t replace everything that everyone needs, of course, but it radically simplifies.

24:52
a growing complex stack of vitamins, minerals, and superfoods that work together to support energy without caffeine. uh Love caffeine, but it’s also great to have that mental focus and nutrient-driven energy throughout the day, that more natural sustained energy. Gut health, all of our human clinical trials have continued to show proof of beneficial bacteria growth that helps support uh

25:21
a healthy gut, all kinds of other markers of a healthy gut, short chain fatty acids, digestive perceived digestive benefits, less bloating, et cetera. And then all those things come together, right? Vitamins, minerals, energy, natural energy, gut health to lead to a strong immune system because a large part of our immune system lives in the gut. So we are in the natural energy, nutritional supplement, immune support, digestive support business.

25:50
But ultimately, the way I think about it is it’s functional food and beverage. It’s your daily health drink. And what we’re starting to see really driven by GLP-1 usage is this fusing of food and beverage and supplementation. How do I make sure what I put in my body is nutrient-dense? I can eat as healthy as possible. I can take supplements, which you have to make sure are high quality to know what’s in it and it’s getting into your body and doing what the company says it’s going to do.

26:18
What’s starting to happen is those things are coming together because there’s only so much food you can eat and only so many supplements you can take. So the more you can make sure you’re eating and drinking the nutrients that you need on a daily basis, not just occasionally, the more you’ll cover natural nutrient gaps and meet growing nutrient needs in a busy, stressful lifestyle. you look at all that goes into it, it just makes the story that much more impressive because the people say, especially in the like,

26:47
the service business, people always say like, don’t try to appeal to everybody, you can’t do everything, like you really have to find your niche and focus and like, if you’re known for like one thing, that’s how you stand out. That’s, you know, in the service business, like that’s how people refer people to you. And your standpoint, like, there’s so many benefits, and there’s different types of ingredients. And there’s really like, if you’re looking at this, and like, you know, like when I was in business school, I could see back then if AG1 was around, this could have been thrown as a case study of like, where should they focus? Like, who do they market to and all those sorts of things.

27:16
So it’s that much more impressive that you and team have been able to put it in what started as one core product and now there’s multiple products, but the brand and what’s behind it is such a strong thing. What do you think has allowed you to achieve such consistent growth uh with the product that many people could say, you know, it’s kind of complicated at its core, I guess. An unbelievable commitment to quality. You don’t get this much

27:46
Um, repeat purchase. Think about it. People are writing a check metaphorically speaking, right? It’s hitting your bank account every month, or if they’re on our three month plan every three months, either way you are being reminded, you don’t forget, you don’t set it and forget it, right? You are being reminded that you are paying for this thing and it is showing up physically at your door. It’s not even like a SAS subscription you can forget about. You have constant reminders.

28:16
that this is something you should value. If you don’t, you cancel it because we’re high integrity, we make it pretty easy to cancel if you want. And so what would drive that level of growth? In a DTC business, you can’t keep acquiring your way to that type of growth. Not in an economically feasible way without constant subsidies, fundraising somehow, which we’ve only done one of. You have to have people who love it enough.

28:44
to make it a part of their daily routine and tell their friends. That doesn’t happen because of, no offense, podcasts or marketing. There’s no And you take that back, no, I’m just kidding. Yeah, yeah. There’s no amount of marketing that can get someone who is investing $2.63 a day in their health to keep doing it if they don’t feel that it’s working. It’ll get them to try it. It won’t get them to keep drinking it or tell their dad or their kids or their friends that they should drink it.

29:13
So that focus on quality from the early days that then led to outlier attributes like having NSF for sport certification that proved what’s on the label, proves what’s on the label is in the package. Our commitment to an additional 20 million worth of research, five human clinical trials, peer reviewed, double blind, randomized, placebo controlled for anyone who says it’s placebo.

29:41
There’s more human trial rigor in this single multi-ingredient skew than anything similar. And those are the types of things, those investments that say to a customer, A, I’m feeling more benefits because the quality is there and the consistency is there. But even for things that I may not feel, when you eat an apple, you don’t miraculously feel healthy. When you eat broccoli or chicken, you don’t

30:10
miraculously feel better, but you know that there are good things in there for you. So you should do that pretty often for a supplement, especially one that’s on the vitamin side versus say sleep or energy where you’re going to expect to feel something. You have to trust that what is in that is covering your gaps. How do you trust proof?

30:31
So over the years, we’ve invested more in proof, more in third party verification of our label, of our ingredients and of our claims, Eurofins, Alchemist Labs, NSF for sport. I could go on and on and form sport in Europe. And then the human trials that prove what’s going on in the body that explains why people feel the benefits that they do or what is going on even if they don’t feel something that they might have a question about like a particular vitamin or uh a probiotic.

31:01
And so that, that’s it, right? It’s quality, quality, quality. That is what drives growth. That is what drives trust. And it is millions of tiny decisions and lots of big ones that in many cases, the customer won’t ever know about or see, but stack up to that level of high quality experience. And then what we’ve shifted to in the last few years, turning that quality into marketing.

31:29
Like actually filming at the labs, having the labs talk about our procedures, having our creator partners talk about our approach to safety, our approach to quality. Like it used to just be lifestyle, unboxing, all these fun things. And now it’s what really wins and converts is yes, people talking about their own experiences, but it is really people advocating for how do you know what’s on the label is in this stuff? And how do you know it’s the good stuff? Because it’s the wild west out.

31:58
Yeah, I think there’s endless desire to know like, okay, what are the actual ingredients in here? What’s the behind the scenes? Like what are the trials look like? What’s the kitchens look like? You know, what’s the kitchen smell like? Shout out Cinnabon. I think, so you and team have done an incredible job obviously in terms of that focus on the quality, the focus on the testing and to make sure everything is know, shaped from that perspective. You mentioned that

32:24
you the word of mouth and referrals to friends and family is what really takes the business to the next level, which is true. It is true in pretty much every business. Obviously, you know, podcasts can only go so far. That being said, I know you yourself had appeared on lot of podcasts. Some might say you got the AG1 job because you’ve appeared on podcasts. I’m just making that up. No, but it was a catalyst for sure. Yeah. But then also the. So like I personally am a huge fan of Tim Ferriss and like you guys have been sponsors of the Tim Ferriss show for I mean, as long as I can remember.

32:54
And so can you just talk a little bit about like when you’re looking at your marketing strategy overall, like what are some ways or some levers that you’ve found a way that maybe this is a potential way that can create some word of mouth? What’s interesting is we, um one, I’m so proud of all the partners that we get to work with. since I’ve joined and long before it was in our DNA, we only work with people who are authentic AG1 drinkers or AGZ drinkers if they’re promoting AGZ.

33:23
because the customer can tell the difference, right? A paid read is a paid read, but it’s that in between occasional mention of, love this stuff, or I was drinking my AG one and then, and it is so important in a high skepticism industry, like supplements to have truly authentic partnerships. And you mentioned Tim Ferriss. So Tim Ferriss put us in his book, The Four Hour Body, ah that was 15 years ago, and he didn’t have a podcast then, and we didn’t pay for that.

33:52
And there was no sponsorship. And so many people will call out the highlights of our big scaled business today and miss the fact that Rogan was an AG1 drinker right long before he had a podcast. Huberman, same thing. Tim, same thing. And there’s so many other partners who that is true for, who we have worked with over the years. So it starts with they’re a customer, they’re a fan.

34:21
then they start telling their community, we wanna double down on that. And we did that early before podcast sponsorship was the thing that it is today. We were very early because some of our early customers became those very originators of the podcast movement. So then the way we thought about it is trusted recommendations. You’re a real customer, no one can talk about the product better than you. And if you’re spending your money, your time, if it’s your job building a community,

34:50
that has value, we’re going to pay you for that value. We’re not going to take advantage of that. And so we built a machine to do that consistently. But today, as we’ve brought on incredible leaders, our CMO, who’s led world-class brands, our chief growth officer, that’s done the same. Our marketing mix today would probably bore some people who think it’s all podcasts. is out of home. It’s TV. It’s direct mail. It is a

35:18
very diversified marketing mix. The creator part, if you want to think of creators broadly, is a low double digit percentage of our marketing mix. The way we think about it is one, at our scale, a full funnel approach. We have demand generation where we want to be in front of people, community, IRL, activations, run clubs. Our run clubs are unbelievable.

35:42
And really just having the brand out there. And occasionally we’ll be sampling and mixing things up, but it’s about enabling people’s morning and their start. Then moving more mid funnel, right? Getting people who have some awareness, but helping to explain what is this product? It’s green. What does it taste like? What’s in it? Is it a vitamin? Is it an energy drink? Is it a gut health product? Right. Taking people on that journey to understand when you see AG1, the daily health drink.

36:11
What about it is a health drink? Oh, I’m drinking my multivitamin and my probiotics. Got it. Oh, I’m getting a good diversity of plants that are hard to get. Got it. uh Then it’s taking people further down that funnel of when I get that, what does it do for me? It supports natural energy. It supports digestion. It’s an incredible companion to people on GLP-1 agonist class of drugs that are eating much less and have less access to nutrients. It’s a gut health support product. Okay, got it.

36:40
Now I understand what it is, I get kind of what’s in it and I understand what it’s supposed to do for me. Then people, you’ve got to bring people on different journeys. Some say, eh, I don’t know if I can trust that. How can I trust it? You take those folks down the third party certification, human trial research path. There’s others that are like, yeah, I trust it because someone I trust recommended it. My dad, my brother, my trainer, my doctor. Where can I try it?

37:08
I just want to try it before I subscribe. So then taking them to trial mechanisms versus the people who are super warm, they’re definitely interested. They just want the best value, which is going to be subscribing. Three month plan on our site. So there’s a full funnel approach that requires giving people the information they want and not more than they want in that moment and giving them the opportunity, long form blogs to go deep or quick fun hits on paid social.

37:37
or something that reinforces who is this brand on streaming or on TV, like our Hugh Jackman partnerships. It’s like, someone who’s a incredible performer seems to defy age, doesn’t promote a lot of brands. That guy drinks AG1. That’s interesting, right? Like women and men alike are resonating with Hugh Jackman, of course. Some people see him as Wolverine. Others see him as the greatest showman. So if you think about that range that I just described.

38:05
It is really an approach of full funnel demand generation, demand creation, pulling that demand through and recognizing a premium supplement purchase that simplifies and combines so many things is also a deeply considered purchase. It’s not something people hear about the first time and decide to buy. We are long past that moment. And so we have to have what people want and need throughout their consideration journey.

38:34
As you said, you all are doing an incredible job and I think you called it a highly skeptical industry or an industry that people get highly skeptical about. I’m not sure the right terminology. Unfortunately for you people are going to be highly skeptical about my next questions because we’re going to wrap up with some rapid fire Q &A. You ready for it? Yeah. All right. If you just random ones here, totally not tied to the business at all, but all right, let’s get wild. I heard that you had a very non-traditional, I guess, order.

39:04
in your life of you got your MBA before any sort of undergrad, anything like that. Can you just give us a quick look into what was involved in you getting into a grad school without having that degree? One, I’ve gotten pretty far in my career. was a vice president of a company doing 800 million in revenue.

39:25
And I had a mentor tell me, look, everyone in the industry knows you. If all you want to do is be in hospitality, restaurants or franchising, you’ll be fine. But if you ever want to break out into different industries, you need an advanced degree. And while I didn’t know if I agreed with her, and certainly that is far less true today than it was back then, I didn’t know if I agreed with her, but I hated the idea of having a door closed to me. Like I am the queen of optionality. I do not want a door closed.

39:55
And so that was one reason I pursued it. was good advice at the time. The other was she also, you know, gave me a provocation where she said, you’re an incredible leader, but you’ve been in the same company for 14 years or at the time it was 12 years. And I thought, am I as good of a business person as I think? Or am I only good because I just know this company inside and out. And one way to prove that was to get an advanced business degree where I’m working with.

40:24
other professionals. And so that was the why behind like, why do it when you’re already a vice president? Many people do that to get a job to like get I, I had unresolved questions. And I wanted to make sure doors weren’t closed to me. So what was involved is many of these incredible universities and business schools have executive MBAs, where you go to school nights and weekends. So it’s not Monday through Friday, eight to five, it’s Thursday through Sunday, um five to nine. And you have to

40:54
have led for a certain amount of years at a certain level. You have to take one of the qualifying tests for uh an MBA and pass with a higher score than is typically required because they’re trying to de-risk it. then you need referral letters from sitting CEOs. And so I got 10 letters from CEOs uh of people whose companies I had helped over the years.

41:21
those I had advocated for, who I would have never thought I would have anything to ask of them. But this was the one thing I asked of them. Can you write me a referral uh letter to make sure they know I’m a sure bet? And so that’s what was involved. They did. And I got into all the schools I applied to. That’s an amazing look. I’m exhausted just from your application process for that. But that’s a great story. All right. And speaking of exhausted, you and your husband are certainly a power couple in many ways. Can you share the crazy world

41:50
trotting feats that your husband does and that he tries to achieve? My husband who has spent his entire career split between operating venture backed companies and then transitioning to the investment side, being an investor uh in venture capital with the focus on early stage businesses. uh He is also as a hobby, an ultra endurance athlete, is one of these people who runs hundred mile races, helps other people train races like

42:20
Leadville, the Leadville 100, the Ultra Trail de Mont Blanc. So he does that stuff, you multiple Ironmans around the world. And then that led him to ocean rowing. He rowed the Atlantic Ocean with a rowing partner, set the US record, fastest crossing of the Atlantic in a rowboat in 45 days. And when he was done with that, he decided he wanted to keep going.

42:44
and circumnavigate the globe on only human power, which means he rose the oceans and cycles the continents. So he has rode the Atlantic. He has rode the Caribbean, which took two attempts, a Southern attempt and a Northern attempt after having to be rescued in a very dangerous situation on the Southern attempt. ah He has cycled most of the U.S. so he’ll complete the U.S. cycle. And then when he does that, he will have completed one third of the planet and will plan the Pacific row and the Australian cycle in the years to come.

43:16
A lot of AG1. A lot of AG1 on that boat. say you have your built-in uh power influencer ambassador there. All right. And then last one, you mentioned a little bit at the start that you had a bit of a tough upbringing and uh you basically were put in a role that you had to help raise your siblings at a young age. Looking at the positives of that, what do think that meant for your career to be kind of thrown into a higher responsibility role at such a young age?

43:45
It certainly created a incredible muscle for leadership and in particular mission driven leadership. Like I wasn’t paid to take care of my sisters. uh You negotiated your baby. I ended up from a very young age in a related way, volunteering for a lot of volunteer leadership roles, nonprofit school activities.

44:12
So it was clearly my joy, my muscle and my calling to lead groups of others, to help other people be their best. And I can’t think of a single one of those examples, debate team, track, cheerleading, the nonprofit where I was the best performer, the most knowledgeable, the sharpest, the smartest, there was always someone who knew that thing and performed that thing better than me.

44:41
And I felt the most fulfillment, not in trying to be better than those best people at that thing, but in uniting everyone who was doing the thing and bringing the resources to bear and being there for when things got tough. And that was my joy. So certainly building that muscle when you’re not in business or in income driven things is pretty powerful when you then combine.

45:10
If you can lead people when they’re not being paid, it is an incredible skill to have when you then bring in financial stakes or other elements of business that bring in other elements of the human experience, ego, teamwork, again, compensation, career development, impact on the world. So it gave me an early start is the short answer to what most people don’t really start getting to until they’re in their twenties.

45:38
maybe in their early 30s, like actual leadership roles. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid. So it builds a muscle, a real comfort with being wrong, a real comfort with not being the best, a real comfort with the range of the human experience that occurs in teams and in different types of businesses at different moments in their trajectory. And I love work. Like I grew up, I love work. I am not a…

46:06
Uh, one day I’ll go sit on an Island. Like how long can you sit on an Island? You’re going to be sunburned. You’re going to be bored. You know, I feel work is noble and I love all types of work and championing all types of work, whether it’s solopreneurship with incredible AI tools for people to shape their own freedom and narrative and opportunity or big, big complicated networks of human type of work. that early experience built me.

46:35
almost I’m built for purpose for leadership at scale in particular. Okay. Thank you so much. It’s just a wonderful message to live by and to learn from and really appreciate you sharing all, all the behind the scenes of, you know, different stages of your career and all the amazing growth at AG1. I know if people want to learn more, they can do so at drinkag1.com. You’re on LinkedIn, you’re on Instagram. Is there anywhere else you want people to connect with you? Oh, all the places. X, I’m Kat Kohl, ATL on X, we’re drink.

47:06
underscore AG1. AG1 was taken and we couldn’t get it. So we’re drink underscore AG1 on a lot of those platforms. But yeah, we’re on we’re in all the places, all the all the things if you’re there, we’re there. Come find us. Perfect. And then I often end with final thoughts where it’s to live by. However, I think you’re a last answer. I mean, it’s gonna be hard to top that. So we’re gonna land this nicely. Thank you so much, Kat. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

47:34
Thank you, Kat. Thank you, Wild Listeners, for tuning in to another episode of Wild Business Growth. You can subscribe or hit follow on your favorite audio platform, as well as subscribe on YouTube @MaxBranstetter for the video versions. And all things about this podcast, about me, about the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, if I could even pronounce it correctly, would be at MaxPodcasting.com. Until next time, Let your business

48:04
Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!

[00:00:00] ​

[00:00:05] All righty. We are here with Jess Loseke, co-founder of Midwest Barrel Company, uh, as someone from the Midwest and who loves barrels and companies as well. This is a dream come true. So thanks Jess. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining. How you doing today?

[00:00:33] Great. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:35] My pleasure. My pleasure. Well, thanks for all you guys do. Um, we we’re gonna get into all sorts of your story involving barrels and bourbon and wine and beer and all that, all that fun stuff. But before that, I have to rip the bandaid off in a very, I’ll call it inappropriate way, but it ties to your business.

[00:00:53] Um, as prep for this, there’s some interesting things I’ve learned about your business and a couple things involving barrels. One being sex toys and one being bungholes. So choose your own adventure. Which of those, uh, would you like to share a story?

[00:01:12] Uh, I mean, let’s just tie ’em together. How about that? That’s, that’s where we wanna start.

[00:01:17] Yeah. Well, it might be,

[00:01:19] Okay.

[00:01:19] well, you can decide if that’s where we wanna end too, but yeah, go. Yeah, go for it. Uh, share, share what those have to do with your business.

[00:01:27] Okay, so we are gonna get right into it. So, um, let’s do a little barrel anatomy for you. So every barrel bourbon barrel anyway, is built from American Oak. American white oak wood, and each barrel has what are called staves, so you can think of those as the slats. They have two heads and they have six rings, and the rings are what hold it together.

[00:01:49] There’s no nails, no screws, no hinges. One of those staves contains a hole in it, and it goes either on the, what is called the belly of the barrel, or it goes on one of the heads and wherever it is that is called. The B hole, which gets lots of chuckles from people outside of the barrel community.

[00:02:11] it’s a, it’s infamous for, uh, from Beavis and Butthead, right? There’s a famous line about it. Yeah,

[00:02:16] know, I am not super familiar with, um, EVAs and Buttheads show, but I could imagine that fitting right into the type of comedy that, that they enjoy.

[00:02:28] there’s some famous line about TP in in Bungholes. We’ll just leave it as that. But anyway, that’s how I first heard about it before the barrel anatomy came into it.

[00:02:37] Yeah, so probably the most, um, crazy story of any barrel that we’ve ever sold was when we were still located in Nebraska and there was an individual that lived in western Nebraska that liked to produce interest rate in interesting contraptions for. Intimate activities, and so he purchased a barrel from us and was going to make some sort of contraption.

[00:03:11] And I don’t know how the B hole was working into that, but I’m sure that’s, that’s as far as I got in my, my questions. We, we left it at that.

[00:03:20] I appreciate that. Um, yeah, and I just threw you through the ringer right away. Uh, don’t always start with every guest talking about bungholes and sex toys, but we’re relevant. You know, we always try to ring it up. So thanks for that, Jess. But, so let’s.

[00:03:33] That’s the most interesting podcast intro I’ve ever done. So

[00:03:38] Great.

[00:03:38] that to the

[00:03:39] It, it’s up there. Well, next week we’re, uh, helping a client launch the Bung Hole podcast, so that should fit well. No, I’m just kidding. So,

[00:03:46] Yeah.

[00:03:48] all right, let’s get a little, a, a little less unruly. Um, let, let’s get to Midwest Barrel Company. And so you hinted at some of the, uh, the interesting ties of the barrel world there, but, uh, I heard that.

[00:04:04] This actually started like way, way, way back in the day. Kind of from your, your husband’s hobby of like buying and selling stuff online. Can you, can you take us through his shoes and kind of your perspective of that?

[00:04:16] Yeah, so when

[00:04:18] I.

[00:04:18] first got married I was working in HR consulting, so I specialized in human potential and positive psychology and traveled quite a bit with healthcare clients, and so I was gone a lot and he was working on his PhD. What is called viticulture. So viticulture is the science of growing grapes, and he had quite a bit of extra time on his hands, and so he started going to garage sales, auctions, estate sales, if you’ve ever seen the show, American Pickers, that was like right at their prime and he was like right in the American Pickers era. So I like to tell the story that he started out buying other people’s junk and reselling it to make money. So he did that from 2013 to 2015. And in 2015 we had our first kid and I thought, Hey, maybe we shouldn’t spend all weekend, every weekend at these auctions, because he was buying farm equipment and collections of things, so he would have to be there.

[00:05:19] Very first to scope out what he wanted, but then he always wanted the most expensive things that went at the end of the day, and then we’d have to go back it. It just was a whole thing. So he decided to start thinking about what’s one item that he could and resell, and he landed on wine barrels because of his connections in the Nebraska Wine and Grape Growers industry. And he started doing that and quickly learned that craft breweries were using barrels to age beer and started getting requests for bourbon, ba barrels. And just this hobby kept getting out more and more out of control. that’s kind of the background story. Do you want me to go into it? How I got into it?

[00:06:01] Yeah. Yeah. Would, would love that. But, uh, I, I think real quick on, on that part, what, what is going through your mind when. Your husband’s spending all of his free time, just like basically a whole black market online of all sorts of different products.

[00:06:17] Yeah. Yeah. So. I, I tell, I get asked a lot, how do you work with your husband? I, I could never do that. I could never work with my husband and I, I totally understand that, but I think the thing that makes us a really unique match is that we both let each other be who we are and we don’t try to change each other.

[00:06:36] And so when he started wanting to do this, it really wasn’t out of, it wasn’t motivated out of making money, it was motivated out of. opportunity and just something that he thought was fun. And so I was super supportive and my support started to change as we started having a family, because he would go to state auctions and buy things, and the police kept coming to our house because he would buy like a bicycle, for example.

[00:07:07] And then he would list it on Craigslist at the time, then somebody would see their bicycle listed, contact the police, and then they would show up at her house. So this was happening fairly regularly. He would go meet people in parking lots. I didn’t love that one to sell. I mean, it can kind of be a bit of a dangerous game, but ultimately he got a lot of joy out of it and I was not involved.

[00:07:29] That was like his thing. And he did his thing. I did mine and we were happy Couple.

[00:07:35] All right. So what turned you into an unhappy, no, I’m just kidding. No, but what, what made you what? What made you realize that it is time for you to join the business as well?

[00:07:46] Well, nothing made me realize. Um, so in 2017 we had our second son and I had a four month old baby and I was getting, I’d gone back to work for maternity leave. I was getting ready for work and I was running through the house, like physically running, and I went around basement. Landing and I slipped off the top of the landing and I shattered my left humerus bone.

[00:08:11] I broke ribs. I eventually had to have back surgery, it was a life changing injury, I took another leave of absence. I tried to go back to work the following January and I just, I wasn’t ready. I still had a ton of physical therapy I needed to do, and Ben was in his last semester of his PhD program, and so I quit my job without a plan. So we were living off of, he worked at, for the University of Nebraska. And so, um, we were living off of his very small salary and then he had this business that took up a ton of time, but we were really, we were funneling every dollar back into it because he would just use that to buy more inventory and. quit my job not ever intending to be in barrels, but he had hired one employee and through 2018 they were with him and I, I had kind of started, you know, showing up a little bit more. then at the end of 2018, that individual quit and we just had kind of our own come to Jesus moment of. Do, do we want this to be a real business or is this a hobby that we need to scale down?

[00:09:19] And ultimately we decided, let’s go all in. reengaged in childcare and I showed up not knowing anything about bar barrels, but I knew how to work really hard and I knew a lot about leadership and scaling, um, companies just from working with other great leaders that I had. And so it turns out we’re a pretty good team, and that’s how I entered.

[00:09:42] I just kind of showed up at work one day and I was like, at least I,

[00:09:47] Uh, I got chills in multiple ways. Uh, one just fired up that, you know, you guys were like, let’s do this. Um, but on the negative side of, um, on the childcare side, you know, we, we’ve learned over the past year how expensive daycare is and that, that’s

[00:10:00] mm-hmm.

[00:10:01] not a fun, but a very, very, uh. Worthwhile cost to add to your, your costs.

[00:10:07] So, um, that’s a, that’s a huge adjustment there. So, alright, so at the start, um, my, depending on who you are, either very impressive or very immature start to this episode. Uh, I shared a little bit of the aspects of the barrel world, but can you just give us a background of like, you know, we don’t need exact numbers, but like, just kind of high level, what, what are your barrels.

[00:10:33] What type of clients do you have? Like most often these days? What are they used for?

[00:10:39] So we have three. The largest amount of barrels that we ship go internationally. So they’re going to go a BA bourbon barrel can only be used or filled one time, but, and it cannot age bourbon a second time, but it’s still a very great product. And so here in Kentucky, distilleries will fill their barrel, they’ll empty it, they can’t use it again.

[00:11:03] That’s where we come in, we buy it, and then in a often as possible, we wanna get that barrel. a second fill because it’s still a super great product. So we ship a lot of barrels to Scotland, Ireland, and India, China. So those are all huge whiskey markets. We ship to over 30 countries, but those are our four biggest ones. it’s not going internationally, which a a barrel for scotch can be used up to 40 years in Scotland. So it’s filled here for four to 12 years, most commonly, and then it can go there for another 40 years to hold more whiskey it’s not used for that, the next. Consideration is can it go to a brewery for craft beer? So craft breweries will use a barrel anywhere from. Three to up to 12 months. Um, probably six to nine months is the, is the sweet spot where most of them will do that. So a lot of them, and that’s where we really grew and got our start, was in craft beer. And then the third outlet is my fa favorite when it goes from our home to yours, where you’re going to use barrels for really cool and interesting projects.

[00:12:07] And so we sell the full barrel, we sell the barrel parts, we sell smoking wood, kind of anywhere in between that we wanna extend that barrel lifecycle as long as possible.

[00:12:17] And now we know that it can be extended in many different ways, but so it’s really cool. It’s like something that, I mean, like I, for a while now, I’ve been a huge fan of beer and bourbon and. Um, you know, anything in, in that ballpark, but I had never really thought of like barrels from, I guess from a product standpoint, I always, you know, if you go check out, if you go to Louisville and check out, you know, whiskey Row there, um,

[00:12:45] Mm-hmm.

[00:12:46] there’s barrels everywhere and all those distilleries.

[00:12:48] But you, I hadn’t really thought about like how many different ways they can be used and how they can be recycled. And so like you guys, it’s like the, the niche of niche in like a cool, cool area and can be used in so many different ways. And now if you look at, you know, like if you go to like a craft brewery, it’s always pretty cool when they have something that’s like a, you know, a barrel aged beer, like a special offering on tap.

[00:13:11] So it’s cool you guys are a part of all that.

[00:13:14] We kind of hit the, um, the sweet spot with that, where we entered the market when craft beer was really exploding.

[00:13:21] Yeah.

[00:13:21] And so we became a, a, a trusted resource because we didn’t just buy one type of barrel. Our goal was let’s bring in all different types. We can be a hub. So if you are a craft. Brewery and you’re gonna do four barrels of beer, maybe one of them is a bourbon barrel, one’s a wine barrel, one’s a tequila barrel, and one’s a rum barrel.

[00:13:41] And so that’s really been a sweet spot of ours, is being able to service customers that can’t afford to buy just a onesie twosie. So we bring them in and then we’re able to distribute everywhere.

[00:13:53] Onesie, twosie. I like it. It’s like samesies from super bad. So the how, okay, so the way you’re, you’re, you’re painting the picture of your husband getting started with this and. Before your injury and everything there, it kind of just sounds like a crazy guy with a bunch of barrels in his house. Um, and now you’ve, which you’re not rejecting.

[00:14:15] Um, and now it’s like you’re this international company that’s got, you know, tens of thousands of barrels at any time and you’re trusted among some amazing, amazing clients. Uh, what did you do personally to like. Change that to like, alright, we’re gonna get this to like a real, like, trusted company.

[00:14:37] So the, the first thing, and I have to give Ben a ton of credit, um, he’s super scrappy. He just starts without all the information. And the thing that he did that really changed everything for us was he put a barrel on the internet. So he actually built his own Wix website, put a

[00:14:55] Hmm.

[00:14:55] on, and then we’ll never forget the day that somebody bought one online. And so what I’m really good at, Ben, is really good at just starting without all the information, like actually to the frustration of our team a lot of times where he just. and I’m really good at coming behind him and putting systems and process and scaling that. And so I’ve been able to really grow our e-commerce, um, platform.

[00:15:19] And so we’ve had, I mean, we did then we moved to Squarespace, then we moved to WooCommerce, and then we’ve built two different Shopify stores. And so we’ve really been. You know, perfecting that. But I think to go back to your question, the key differentiator of what we’ve done is we’ve focused on hiring really great people and put and making that core to who we are.

[00:15:42] So identifying what’s our mission, what’s our vision, and what’s our core values? And really trying to stay true to that and being will, being willing to pivot wherever the business us or takes us to, has allowed us to. Not just narrow ’cause it is a niche category, so you have to be flexible as needs change.

[00:16:01] A couple of years ago you couldn’t buy barrels anywhere. There was such a shortage and today it’s the opposite problem where the spirits industry has changed a lot and so barrels are readily available and so we have to be able to, will be willing and able to adapt as markets change. And because we focused on. Uh, I mean, I, when I hire somebody, the conversation that I have is we move really fast here and we change all the time. And so whatever job that you think you’re getting hired for today, might not be doing that exact same job six months from now. And if that sounds exciting for you, this could be the right place.

[00:16:36] If that sounds intimidating or unattractive, you will struggle to fit in here because we just are constantly evolving.

[00:16:44] I think that’s. That’s something that’s really appealing to a lot of people, especially like new company startup space. I think a lot of people want to, like, they’re craving that entrepreneurial aspect of, I wanna help out any way I can here. Or like, let’s figure out stuff. And there’s something incredibly rewarding about like, if you come up with a new idea, you know, we can get this rolling pretty quickly.

[00:17:05] As opposed to, I mean, I was just talking to somebody on a call earlier who was saying how when, you know, when they worked in the corporate world, they were so frustrated by. It would have, everything would need to go through like three rungs of approval. Um, and you can just go. So that’s really exciting.

[00:17:18] And then, I mean, I mentioned startup, but like now you guys have been around for over a decade, so congrats on that. Like it’s, it’s really cool how far you’ve come and Yeah. Yeah, it’s really, it’s really inspiring. Um, when you look at the, the operation side of things. It’s, uh, I didn’t plan to make this pun, but I’m sorry.

[00:17:43] It sounds kinda like a barrel of monkeys where it can get really complicated really quick if you’re not organized with things. So now, I mean, I heard you mention another interview that you’ve, you know, sometimes can have like 20,000 barrels in your warehouse. So how do you keep things or like, how do you get it to the point that you can run things efficiently and organize at a scale like that?

[00:18:04] So we’ve made a really strategic decision up to this point that we don’t do what other cooperages do. So most of our, our competitors actually make new barrels, or they repair used barrels. And I’m not saying that we won’t ever get into that space, but up to this point, we’ve found that our specialty is really getting the barrel from point A to point B as fast as possible. so we have an inventory management system, and that sounds very basic, but a lot of people in our industry, this is, it’s just very historic. They haven’t, they haven’t needed one. And so they don’t have, um, inventory management systems in the same way. We can’t operate our business without one because we’re trying to move so many barrels, so, so quickly.

[00:18:45] And even when we need to get our barrels repaired, that’s a great example of. They’re still ours, but they have to go, go somewhere. And so just having the tech, the tech has been really critical to us. And I’ve actually strived to lead our business, like tech founders think I went through a program a few years ago, it’s called Pipeline Entrepreneurs, and it’s an amazing um, program.

[00:19:10] And they’re a cohort system. They take 13 entrepreneurs out of Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri every year. And you go through four different modules. I went through that because it’s mostly tech founders that do it. And I really wanted the experience of learning to think and act like a tech founder because I wanted to build everything tech enabled.

[00:19:32] And now we have these great, all of the platforms that we use are AI driven and were able to move way faster than we would be able to if we didn’t use that.

[00:19:45] Yeah, that’s, yeah, inventory is cra it’s something I got a little exposure to in, uh, just my short time in the corporate world. And it’s kind of satisfying when you can get things organized and you figure out what skews to get rid of. And we call it skew, rat skew rationalization, things like that. But um, man, it can get so complicated and so tedious.

[00:20:05] And what advice do you have for anybody who is looking to get like a handle on their inventory like that?

[00:20:13] Yeah. For us too, our inventory all looks identical and so to, to the layman, the barrel. A barrel is a barrel is barrel. But to us, what matters is what was held inside that barrel. it could be produced by the same cooperage, it could look identical, but what it held, it could contain vastly different value. And the, the best advice that I probably have is that you need to start small and your, and your tech is, it’s something that it’s not a one-time investment. And this was something I had to learn. So I’ll just use my, our website as an example. I came on. So Ben had built a Wix website and then in 2018 we built a Squarespace and I was involved.

[00:21:01] I wasn’t really working in the business, but I was really involved with that website. when I came on full time, I. WooCommerce was my big, my first big project. And the, the goal of moving to WooCommerce is I wanted a way for our domestic breweries to be able to quote an accurate shipping quote from the website.

[00:21:21] I didn’t want them to have to call us because understand how e-commerce works. You wanted, want to get online and see, well, I’m gonna add four barrels to my cart. How much would it actually cost for me to get them there? They don’t wanna call me and ask that. They just wanna be able to see that. And so that was the first. Big project that I did, and when I did that, I thought, oh, we’re done. We’re set. We’re good. I quickly learned that every year you really need to have a CapEx budget for your website, and it’s something that you’re gonna have to continually invest in. And it’s not just, we bought this, the software, we did an implementation, we’re done.

[00:21:59] It continues to require, it’s just like a piece of equipment. It’s just like a, a truck that you buy that you have to maintain over time and then you get so much life out of it and then you have to buy a new it. Tech works. You can’t look at another company of the same size and see where they’re at and think we’re gonna be at the same place just by implementing this one piece of tech. You have to map it out and you have to start with baby steps, because otherwise it gets way too overwhelming and things break, and that’s where your whole operations breaks down.

[00:22:35] And that’s why large companies really struggle to implement. Tech enabled features when they haven’t used them is because it has a trickle down effect and then systems start breaking and they ship the wrong products at the wrong time to the wrong people, and then they stop using it.

[00:22:52] And, and I have to ask you a couple definitions there. You reminded me, uh, cou, cooperage I’ve heard of before, but, uh, technically what’s the cooperage?

[00:23:01] Yeah. A cooperage is a. Facility for barrels, they are going to be somebody that produces a new barrel from scratch or they repair an existing barrel. And, um. It’s a historic practice, so Coopers, um, that they employ what are called Coopers, and it’s a trade and it’s a, it’s a very fascinating trade. And so historically barrels were made by hand, and today there are really advanced manufacturing facilities that can do the majority of it by machine.

[00:23:36] But a Cooper still oversees the process.

[00:23:38] I got it. Yeah. I knew it was something barrel related, but I didn’t know it was like, I thought it was just kind of like a wood factory as well, like if that even makes sense. A wood something like, I didn’t know it was barrel specific, so That’s awesome. There’s a whole like history there too.

[00:23:51] So yeah, so kind of the process is every barrel starts as an American white oak tree that grows somewhere between 70 to a

[00:23:59] They’re all, they’re all oak.

[00:24:00] tree down. They’re all yes, but there, there’s French oak, Hungarian Oak, there’s some other wood types, but American white oak is kind of the tried and true that everybody wants. Uh, and so they grow, you know, up to a hundred years they harvest the tree and then every tree only makes between one and three barrels. so then from there it goes to what is called a stave mill, where they. Take the logs and they produce the staves, which are the slats of the barrels, where the bunghole goes.

[00:24:30] Watch your mouth. I’m just kidding.

[00:24:32] step, the next step is those staves, actually they’re, it’s a process called seasoning. They’re gonna sit outside anywhere from six months up to three years. And then, then when they’re done with that, that’s when it goes to the cooperage. So the Cooper actually assembles the barrel before the heads are put on.

[00:24:50] Everybody knows and loves the fire part of it, so they either toast or char the inside of the barrel. And that char is what gives your bourbon the flavor that we all know and love.

[00:25:00] I feel like I’m back in fifth grade and we learned about the water cycle and, you know, evaporation, condensation, precipitation through the lens of barrels. It’s really, really interesting industry. Um, like who would know that? Well, obviously you

[00:25:12] you there’s a,

[00:25:13] guys Go ahead.

[00:25:15] yeah. Didn’t I tell you there’s a quiz

[00:25:16] Yeah, exactly.

[00:25:18] Yeah.

[00:25:18] pop quiz at that. Uh.

[00:25:20] Yes,

[00:25:21] The other definition real quick.

[00:25:23] I’ve heard of it, but, uh, CapEx, is that capital expenses or is that,

[00:25:27] yes.

[00:25:27] cool. You can tell I didn’t study accounting.

[00:25:31] yeah, and, and again, that’s, more so just thinking about like what areas of the business are we going to invest in. So it’s not, it’s not a monthly expense, it’s not a, uh, what would be considered like a yearly expense. These are, are generally more one time expenses. You can deduct them differently on your, your taxes, but you have to plan for them.

[00:25:53] And if you don’t plan for tech expenses. It’s, it’s really challenging because they sneak up on you and if you don’t plan for any maintenance and something breaks, I mean, I found that that websites, they do break. And so you have to have a plan for what am I gonna do when something doesn’t. We, we actually, we, we moved a couple weeks ago and so we took our website offline and our, um, marketing team was doing some updating while our warehouse team was physically moving, when we turned our website back on. Google had unindexed all of our pages, which we have thousands of pages on our website because every product listing is its own page, and so we’ve had to spend the last two weeks re-indexing, and that’s never a word I thought that I would know what re-indexing on Google is. So it’s just things like that that we didn’t consider that we we’re just like, oh yeah, we’ll pause our website for a week.

[00:26:49] Our marketing team will be working remotely. This will be a great time. We, and then we had to physically move our inventory. We’re like, we won’t take orders, so it won’t be confusing. This will work. Perfect. And then lo and behold, Google’s like, Nope, done.

[00:27:03] Oh my God. Sorry. You have to deal with that. Yeah. That sounds, that’s just like one of those things as a, as an entrepreneur that just like the whole, like anything that can go. Wrong will go wrong. Like you never know what you’re gonna see and what you’re gonna have to deal with there. And internet’s always a, you know, it’s always like wrestling a rattlesnake there.

[00:27:19] Um,

[00:27:20] Yeah,

[00:27:20] so

[00:27:21] sure.

[00:27:21] actually moving was one of the things I was really excited to ask you about. So, um, there’s a big move which we’ll get to, I mean, an even bigger move. But, uh, your recent move, so is that just, is that within Louisville or did you, or What’d you guys do? Okay, cool.

[00:27:35] So we are like pretty much professional movers at this point.

[00:27:40] And, and professional rein indexers.

[00:27:43] yes, exactly. You know, all, all the things. So we, um. Okay, let’s back up ’cause I’m sure you’re, you’re wondering about this. So, when we started in Nebraska, we, I mean one year we moved five times because barrels are very big. And every single time that we, we would move, Ben would say, if we ever fill this warehouse, we’re doing something wrong.

[00:28:03] Because our goal is to get the barrels in and out as fast as possible. And lo and behold, the business continued to grow and so we continued to get bigger and bigger. At one point when we were in Nebraska, we had moved to what I thought was like our dream facility and everything was, you know, finding dandy.

[00:28:21] We had worked so hard to find it. And then we made the decision to relocate from Nebraska to Louisville. clearly the biggest move that we’ve ever done. And it, it was a proce, it was kind of a lengthy decision. Um, we knew we needed to make the move because we were shipping so many barrels from the Louisville surrounding areas, so Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee.

[00:28:45] We were sending them to Nebraska, and then we were sending them back out to a port to go overseas, and it just didn’t make any sense. we first tried to set up a remote facility in Louisville and that we just couldn’t really get that off the ground. And so then we decided, well, Ben and I are gonna move for six months to a year to get it up and going.

[00:29:04] And then we pretty quickly realized. I think we’re gonna need to move full time. So then we decided, okay, we’re gonna have our Louisville facility and we’re gonna keep our Nebraska facility. And then after doing that for a little bit of time, about a year, we’re like, we cannot continue to have our Nebraska facility. It just didn’t make any sense. And that was, was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made as a leader, because we had a really great team in Nebraska that had stuck with us through the move, I had to personally make. The decision of do we keep these people working remote? And we know with COVID that there’s so many more things that you can do remotely, but culture is such a big part of what we do. That there was a lot lost between having half of our team remotely and having half of it in person. So ultimately we brought everything to Kentucky, but there has been an industrial, um. Warehousing shortage ever since we’ve been here. So our journey to find the right location has been really hard. And in 2024, we thought we found the perfect facility, we, um, leased again.

[00:30:14] What was our dream building? It was huge. It was, would allow us to substantially grow bigger and then the market crashed. And so I don’t know how much you’ve been following the spirits industry, but it’s like the housing crash of oh 8, 0 9 is what we’ve been going through. And so ultimately in the last six months, we’ve had to really evaluate how do we continue to operate a, a financially healthy business and reduce our expenses and. Reducing our footprint was the, it was our biggest line item. Um, and so we made the, the difficult decision to move out of our other, I mean, it was a, a beautiful facility and we found a fabulous new facility that we just moved into two weeks ago. It’s quite a bit smaller, but it’s going to function really great for what we’re doing and I’m really excited about it.

[00:31:03] But it’s been one of the, one of the more difficult leadership journeys that I’ve been on has been, you know, the past six months.

[00:31:11] It’s kudos to you for having the, uh. I guess the courage to make those decisions. I mean, those are not easy at all. Um, do you have any advice for any entrepreneur out there who’s kind of struggling with a big decision like that, that could have big payoff, but also has a lot of, you know, scary aspects too?

[00:31:34] Yeah, I think the one thing, looking back there, there, you know, hindsight’s 2020, so you see the things that you did well and then you think, see the things that you wish you would’ve done differently. And the one thing I really wish we would have done differently is I wish we would’ve acted a little bit sooner.

[00:31:51] I think that some of these decisions would have caught, had a lot less angst if we would have. Actively started reducing our costs a little bit faster. And I, I think we really believed what every, all of us in the bourbon industry want is that it’s gotta, you know, it’s gotta turn around, it’s gotta pick back, pick back up.

[00:32:11] It’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. it just hasn’t happened quite as fast. And so I think that that’s the one thing that I, my experience share is like when. As an entrepreneur, we have the closest pulse on what is going on inside our business and oftentimes outside of our business. And even if your advisors or your team members are telling you no, that’s oftentimes because they don’t want the consequences of the change. did not wanna move. We had just moved, not even a year ago, and moving. I mean, I think we moved 6,000 barrels. That is no easy task, and we did it in four and a half days. And that we’ve never done something like that before. I, I wish that I would’ve just trusted our intuition because the result ended up still being the same thing.

[00:33:00] We, we knew we needed to move a lot earlier than we did, and we still ended up having to move, but it was a lot more painful because everybody was a lot less prepared for it because we had to do it so quickly. kind of the, the big thing. The, the other thing that I will say is that, um, when you’re going through. Periods where your business isn’t working in the same way that it once did. Really digging deep inside of you to figure out, well, I didn’t have a plan when I started. I didn’t know what my markets were gonna be or what products I was going to sell. And trying to get back to that, that founder that started it that wasn’t worried about failure because. There, there wasn’t anything to, to lose or to fail, but when things get hard, we get really, we get scared and we stop making, we start making safe decisions. But when you’re going through big changes, that’s actually when you need to make the most bold changes.

[00:33:56] That’s an incredible point. Uh, we, I mean, I’m very guilty of this. Like, it’s nice when you have a business and you get to a point of a certain level of stability and things are clicking and it’s like, it feels so good and you don’t want anything to change, but the reality is like. Every business needs to evolve over time.

[00:34:15] And there’s crazy forces like market forces like you’re talking about, um, that just kind of dictate how this, you know, something needs to change. And so, um, I think looking backwards and trying to, you know what’s funny? I, I, I have a client, um, shout out Shane. He’s got the, uh, the couples therapist couch.

[00:34:37] It’s his podcast. So I’ve learned a lot about couples therapy through this and. One of the things he talks about working on with his clients is like inner child work and how, I guess in therapy, um, you know, it’s common for, you know, to, for him to talk to clients about, like, looking inward and things that, you know, working out with your inner child.

[00:34:57] I’m clearly not a therapist. I don’t know how this works, but it’s almost like you’re, your inner first time entrepreneur work is what you need to do to like, look inward and, and get to that like. Back against the wall, but also, um, just entrepreneurial spirit and that’s what can keep things growing. So I’m, I’m, I’m a big fan of what all you, what you just said there.

[00:35:20] Yeah, you.

[00:35:21] Thank you. Well, you nailed it. I just, you know, regurgitated it and added a random example. Anyway, I trust on that random note. I trust that you’re ready to, uh, switch it up a little bit. I promise. No more question off the wall questions, however, this is, um, this is a segment called The Unusual So Pet Peeves, quirks.

[00:35:40] Weird comments. This is more, doesn’t have to tie to your business at all. Just about you kind of as a founder, you as a person, really. Um, first thing,

[00:35:49] So, okay, before we

[00:35:51] yeah.

[00:35:51] this, um, I saw that you had this on your list and so I asked my husband what he thought was interesting, and he gave me a list of really boring, generic facts about myself. And so I’m concerned, I’m uninteresting, and so I’m very curious to see where we go with this.

[00:36:05] You are very not uninteresting. Did I say that the right way? Not uninteresting. I get tripped up. Yes. You’re very interesting.

[00:36:12] Double negative. I

[00:36:13] Exactly.

[00:36:14] The double makes the positive. Yeah.

[00:36:16] Yeah. It’s so fa uh, we’ve had guests in the past that have asked their significant other or family members for that and it’s so funny to, it’s a fun exercise for any to be like, what’s.

[00:36:25] What’s unique about me in certain ways. So, so that’s fun. So anyway, we’ll, we’ll give him him some crap. But, um, let’s start with quirks. What’s something a little quirky? This could be from you or from Ben, a little quirky about your personality that somebody calls you out for, but it’s who you are.

[00:36:41] Uh, yeah. And this is kind of where we started. So he’s just like, you just, you love to work. And I was like, well, that’s super generic. And he’s

[00:36:47] I.

[00:36:48] he’s like, it’s to a different level where like this is like your brain works. So. Differently. And so parenting young kids, that was actually like being, being a mom, something that was really hard for me because, you know, little toddlers, they don’t, they’re not interested in, you know, dad works with barrels and mom works on her computer.

[00:37:07] That’s what they used to always say. Um, but I think how this is translating now from a quirky perspective. So last night I, did a keynote at Bellarmine University and it was 150 women that were there. And I invited my 10-year-old son to go and we were sitting at the table before I gave the keynote and I was like, Hey Theo, can you tell, can you tell this group, um. What, like what’s your, your biggest takeaway from it? And he said, my framework verbatim to, and he had only heard the talk once. And so from a quirky perspective, like I involve my kids in my work, like they’re going to run this someday. And like this is their, and, and that’s not my goal per se, but. just think I didn’t grow up with this privilege, and they have such a privilege of being able to get exposure to things that none of their peers do. And so I’m trying to get them to start thinking like a founder now. And so I have a very interesting parenting style, so that that’s where I went from. Ben’s like, I work a lot to, like, I have a very interesting parenting style.

[00:38:13] I’m all for that. I mean, I, I grew up with parents who are entrepreneurs. I think growing up with in an entrepreneurial family is so rewarding and definitely helps you think outside the box and think about, you know, problems and solutions in a different way. So, uh, I’m a big fan of your, what we’ll call it, Jess’s, take your child to workday every day.

[00:38:31] Uh, plan.

[00:38:33] There you go. And I did not grow up with parents that were, I mean, my, my dad drove a tractor at a feedlot, a cow feedlot, and my mom was a nurse, or she is a nurse. And so I, that I did

[00:38:43] Yeah.

[00:38:44] that way. And so I, you know, maybe it, it will seem normal to other entrepreneurs or founders, but for the average people, like I just to my kids around to work with me every day.

[00:38:54] Well that’s, yeah, and, and that’s like the best part of it is like, so you’re, I mean, so you had like an in incre, I mean. Fulfilling. Rewarding. Like loving, I’m sure it was absolutely amazing, but you had an incredible different experience and dynamic with your parents as far as work goes than you are and will with with your children.

[00:39:12] I think that’s awesome. Is just like how it changes over generations and um, I guess to an extent the, you know, my. My dad is the same way. Um, like his dad worked at, you know, international harvester forever and before that and, you know, and, and before that it was like farmers and stuff and, and before that.

[00:39:34] And so it’s like, there’s different, there’s different levels of just like what type of work everybody does. And so it’s really cool. And your, your entrepreneurial parenting approach. All right, so that’s, that’s, that’s quirks. Um. We will fire Ben after that one. And then, uh,

[00:39:49] Yeah.

[00:39:49] about, what about weird talents?

[00:39:50] What’s something that’s like, or like a, I call it like a party trick. Well, I call it a weird talent, but it’s like a party trick. What’s something you’re really good at, but it really has no impact on your, your business. A little thing

[00:40:01] I have no special talents. Like I’m a very

[00:40:04] You like to work? No, I’m just kidding.

[00:40:06] Um, yeah, I, yes. Um, I, I guess this kind of goes back to like. It’s not a party trick, but when I was a kid, I really liked to read a lot, so I was actually, I didn’t play at recess. I read books I think that has translated into me being a very rapid learner. And so I am able to consume large amounts of information without getting tired. so that’s kind of my, um. Like my superpower from a party perspective, um, since you use that word. I will tell you my, my biggest flaw is I’m super, super competitive. So much to the point that if I go to a party and there’s going to be a game played that I’ve never played and other people have played it, I won’t play because I will know I can’t.

[00:40:59] Hmm.

[00:41:00] And that it’s a huge, huge personality flaw. Now having children, I’ve tried to expand my, my game repertoire because they also don’t know how to play, and my chances of winning are substantially higher against them. So, so I feel like I am, um, I, so like I mahjong

[00:41:17] Yeah.

[00:41:17] you know, it’s, it’s

[00:41:18] Mj. Yeah.

[00:41:19] with women my age and I didn’t learn for a while.

[00:41:22] Well, then finally I went to a place where there were a whole bunch other people learning.

[00:41:27] Hmm.

[00:41:28] an advanced Rumi cube, which is like my favorite

[00:41:30] Oh yeah, my wife loves that. Yeah.

[00:41:32] think I’m, I think I’m for Mahjong and Mahjong for me, so.

[00:41:37] Oh yeah. I never thought of it like that. Advanced runway. It makes sense. I’ve only seen from a distance, all the little tiles out on a board. Um,

[00:41:45] Well, and they’re very pretty. And so that fits nicely where it’s like very, yeah, very pretty. At the same time.

[00:41:53] Um, okay. And then what about. Pet peeves, what’s something that just kind of ticks you off a little bit, but in the grand scheme of life, it’s not a big deal.

[00:42:04] Oh, I mean, I have a lot. Um, so I think from a business perspective,

[00:42:10] I.

[00:42:10] my biggest pet peeve is when people. I get frustrated with where they’re at and they want to grow, but they don’t know what they want to do and they don’t take any ownership over. Wanting to do it. And I’m seeing this a lot in the Gen Z.

[00:42:29] So I mentor, um, a lot of young women and I’m kind of seeing a very clear split between women that are growing up as athletes and have the discipline to work really hard. And then other women that are getting influenced by the social media culture that you can be a millionaire by the time that you’re 23 That’s just not how, that’s not how real life works. And so as a leader, it’s this constant challenge of trying to mentor people to figure out what makes them tick, because they have to take radical ownership over their own And as somebody that grew up very, very poor, I just can’t understand. Not having a good work ethic.

[00:43:14] And so I, I do struggle with that and I don’t struggle with that a lot in my own business because really, you know, I, I try to find top performers and people that are really, have a strong work ethic, outside of my company, I continue to have these conversations and you just gotta own it. And so that’s a big pet peeve of mine.

[00:43:36] Yeah, that’s fantastic. No matter what happens, whatever changes in the tech world, AI world, everything like work ethic, will always have extreme value. Um, I, I think none of that, that, that will be untouched. Alright, let’s wrap.

[00:43:52] I think

[00:43:52] Yeah.

[00:43:53] continue to see the, uh, bigger, um.

[00:43:55] I.

[00:43:56] A bigger gap between the people that are willing to work hard, because as ai, it affects every single job and role. People that aren’t willing to go out and learn and figure it out are gonna continue to fall lower and lower, where the people that are willing to just start doing and learning, they’re, I mean, that gap is just gonna continue to increase.

[00:44:14] Totally. Totally. Yeah. It works on that level as well. There’s a, the stave between groups will be, no, I was trying to think of a pun. That was awful. Alright, let’s.

[00:44:25] Chat gt those? You can, you can, you know, insert them. Insert them in. I, I can, I feel like you’re, you’re, I like

[00:44:31] Exactly. I like to use my brain sometimes, but yeah. All right, let’s wrap up with some rapid fire q and A. You ready for it?

[00:44:38] Let’s go.

[00:44:39] Alright, let’s get wild. You mentioned a pretty serious injury you had. Um, you know, unfortunately, like in our family, you know, we’ve seen with my father-in-law and my father. My mother-in-law, like I, some of my clients, I swear over the past few years, there was just like a crazy uptick in just fluke random injuries like that where somebody’s breaking bones or has back issues, things like that.

[00:45:04] Um, based on like your experience and your recovery, what tip do you have for anybody that is currently going through something like that where they’re on the in, in recovery mode?

[00:45:14] It kind of just hits on what we were just describing, but you need to take radical ownership over it. I also have an autoimmune disease that I’ve had since I was 20. There’s, there’s nobody else that’s going to own your physical, mental, or spiritual wellbeing. I mean, I’m a big person of faith and I think that when I had that freak injury that I was supposed to have a complete life pivot, but it really took me down to a dark place because I, my entire identity was wrapped up in the career that I had built, and overnight it was gone and, and I had to learn that. A job doesn’t define you. Even now with the role that I’m in, I have to, I have to be very careful that I don’t let that happen. But you do have to take radical ownership and there’s not a perfect balance. So you are gonna wake up some days and figure out, man, I’m super lonely and I don’t have any friends and. You need to go make friends then. And then you make some friends and you realize like, gosh, I haven’t been performing as well at work. I need to work on that. Okay, go work at that and, and then, man, my kid is really struggling in school. I can’t invest in work or friendships now. Okay, well go, you know, you have to just go where life calls you a lot of times, but be really radical and unhinged about your approach in that.

[00:46:27] Radically unhinged. I like it. Uh, yeah. Uncorked un unbanked. All right, so lo, so lowville, which, if you notice the reason I’m, I don’t know if I technically say it right as a local would say it. However, um, I don’t say it as. Louisville or Louisville because my dad actually, my dad’s side is from Louisville and he grew up in, uh, Jeffersonville, like right across the river.

[00:46:53] And so, uh, visited, been there many times. It is a great city. Love that city. Um, what, what’s the, what’s the thing that, since you guys have moved to that area, what’s the thing that you enjoy the, the most about the, uh, L one C four? Now, I know you’re not a Cardinals fan, but.

[00:47:13] I’m a Cards

[00:47:14] You are card fan now. There you go.

[00:47:15] yeah. We decided when we moved here that we, you know, we didn’t have Nebraska anymore, and so let’s go with Louisville because our, all of our red wardrobe transitioned very

[00:47:26] Hey, well welcome you for IU too. You know, just keep going.

[00:47:31] That’s a little further up the road. But then, um, we’re also big volleyball fans, which is huge in Nebraska. And Danny Bus boom, Kelly, who is from Nebraska, she was the Cardinal’s volleyball coach and got to know her well and she’s now back at Nebraska. But yes, we’re, we’re all in on the cards. We we’re all in on the Huskers.

[00:47:48] Um, but the, gosh, the people here are. Just top notch. Um, before we moved, everybody said Louisville’s like a small town, big city, and I didn’t really understand what that meant, but what I, and in Nebraska, there’s, there’s something called, at the state slogan for a while, was Nebraska Nice. And I’ve realized that Nebraskans aren’t nice compared to Louisville.

[00:48:12] Like

[00:48:12] What.

[00:48:13] Nebraskans are just, you know, and. All my Nebraska people, I love you. Don’t come for me. But there’s a different level of hospitality in Louisville that when we moved here, we op, they opened their arms to us and have just made us feel like we have always lived here. And I realized with that. I was like, wow, I didn’t do that when I lived in Nebraska.

[00:48:33] I didn’t, I wasn’t doing that for people that picked up their lives and moved. And I now, I’m like on a mic. If I ever meet somebody and they’re like, I’m new to the city, I’m like, I will introduce you to you. Everyone I know, I’m super passionate about it.

[00:48:46] Well, if your friends family in Nebraska are truly Nebraska nice, they won’t come after you. So appreciate that distinction there.

[00:48:53] Yeah. This is their opportunity to prove that they’re nicer than l. I don’t know if that’s the correct terminology, but we will

[00:49:01] Yeah, exactly. Also, you guys, I mean, you have a business in the bourbon or bourbon adjacent space, so of course they’re gonna welcome you with, you know, gung-ho over the arms. But no, absolutely. Yeah, I agree. Great people. Great place. All right, last one I saw in your Instagram bio, I think it was. Pickleball Pilates and Prosecco, which I’m a sucker for alliteration, so congrats on the three Ps.

[00:49:23] Uh, I use three Ps in my business too. Different three Ps. But if you could only have one of those Ps, what would it be?

[00:49:31] Oh, Pilates for sure. I love, and I probably need to edit that because, um, my mother-in-law would be so. that it still says pickleball because I haven’t played pickleball in a long

[00:49:42] Oh,

[00:49:42] went through it. She’s like, she’s super good. Um, and I, I am not, and so I, I, I got hopped on the trend.

[00:49:50] But if you’ve never done Pilates or lagree before, here is my plug. It will change your life. It will change your body. It, it’s, it is amazing. Um, if you’ve had back pain, we touched on that. It’s, it’s amazing for it. So that’s my, know we were gonna get Pilates in here.

[00:50:05] Of course, of course. Yeah. It’s a wonderful, uh. P to finish with. So, Jess, thank you so much. Um, huge fan of your business, what you and, and Ben and team, uh, Theo apparently as well are, are, are doing. So,

[00:50:20] And

[00:50:20] yeah, Brooks. Yeah.

[00:50:21] forget the, the

[00:50:22] Yeah, exactly. So, uh, thanks so much for making time and, and for all you guys do. Um, I know, and so if people wanna learn more, i, I know it’s, uh, midwest barrel co.com and then I know you’re on LinkedIn.

[00:50:34] Is there any anywhere else that you want people to connect with you guys or you online?

[00:50:40] Yeah, so I’m, um, I’m everywhere. Jess Loki. Um, I also have the, the Barrel Girl handle, um, LinkedIn. I, um, I’m gonna be reviving my newsletter soon, so you

[00:50:51] Awesome.

[00:50:51] um, can certainly follow that there. Um, and you know, I’m, I’ve, I’m on jess loki.com as well, so find me on all the

[00:50:59] Awesome. That’s Loseke. I, I’m terrible at spelling on the podcast, but L-O-S-E-K-E.

[00:51:05] Correct. You can also look up the barrel girl.com because nobody can spell my last name, so trying be smart about that.

[00:51:11] Perfect. And hopefully you can spell the correctly. All right, and the last thing, final thoughts. It could be a quote or kind of words to live by whatever you want. Just like one line, one sort of statement to, uh, send us home here.

[00:51:24] So I just wanna challenge all of the, the listeners that wherever you’re at in your journey, just to be unhinged on purpose and to just go live your best radical lives and take radical ownership over, over that. Be unreasonable in everything you do!

00:00
Oh, it’s Steve Nash and the wrong David Lee go on stage.

00:19
Hi, welcome back to Wild Business Growth. I am your host Max Branstetter from MaxPodcasting. This is where you can hear from a wild entrepreneur turning wild ideas into wild growth. And this is episode Heinz 357. You’ll need to catch up on that joke. Today’s guest is David Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Nex, spelled N-E-X. They are the creators of Nex Playground.

00:47
The little smart cube that sits below your TV in your living room transforms your living room with all sorts of cool games. And here’s the best part, it’s without a controller. In this episode, you’ll hear all about that, including their subscription model. You’ll hear about the company that David sold to Apple and his experience there and with that. And…

01:13
everything from who the real David Lee is, whether it’s him or the former NBA player, to aliens. It is the real David Lee. Enjoy the show.

01:34
Alrighty, we are here with David Lee, co-founder and CEO of Nex, known for Nex Playground, one of the coolest video game gaming console things that you’ll ever hear about. You don’t even need any controllers or anything like that. David, so excited to speak with you today. How are doing? I’m doing really well. Thanks for having me. Of course. We’re going to get into all things gaming life. uh For those of you watching on video,

02:03
This is very intentional wearing of a basketball jersey by me. We’ll talk some basketball as well. But before that, so you’re one of the few people that had an incredible journey of starting a company that then got acquired by Apple. And obviously people can speak forever about how cool the company Apple is and all the innovation and creativity there. So for your journey, you don’t need to give us like the full background, but I’m just curious, what’s the biggest thing that stuck with you or that you learned?

02:33
from building a company that actually could get acquired by Apple? Wow. What a question to get started. The first startup I built was building online spreadsheet. And it was the beginning of Web 2.0. When Reddit is just get first to get started, we are thinking offering get started around that time, building web apps, you know, and Web 2.0 is about like not just, oh, you can build a website, just.

03:02
one way publishing is about, you can also read and write, right? So it’s like, you know, can start editing the web so they’re making contributions. Web apps begin to become a thing. And I remember at that time I’m reading the blog uh of Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. I was in Hong Kong, so it’s like, you know, he has influence, you know, way beyond America.

03:31
And he talked about like having online spreadsheet makes sense, having a lot of people, you know, edit the same thing to get it makes sense. We were building something similar. We were at that time, we still in like more like an agency helping other people write web apps. say, and I was serving a customer, which is the Hong Kong arts festival. Imagine Hong Kong arts festival. Okay. They are managing millions in budget. All in spreadsheets. They have like 20 something artists.

04:02
you know, organizing the budget. We come in and say, hey, we can do you, we can help you collaborate better. And end up what we deliver to them is like, hey, these guys probably don’t know anything other than operating on spreadsheets. So let’s just make that spreadsheet like, collaborable. the people probably get at the same thing at the same time. I think at the beginning of us building something, solving real problem. And they love it. So we end up with prioritizing that and it become one of the earliest online spreadsheet in the world. We shipped that two months before Google ship.

04:31
on the Google spreadsheets and we have a hell of a ride of like, you know, building that product and getting a lot of people use it. Google joining the market just make so many more people aware of this. And we are one of the top online spreadsheets out there and that eventually get acquired by Apple. It’s part of this, just, you know, you, you think something is right. You have experience of why this makes sense and you build it and you’re obsessed about it and make it one of the world best and people pay attention.

05:01
Um, eventually Apple reached out and say, guys want to join us and we, we joined Apple and, uh, have a way of chance to work for Steve Jobs. And then, you know, spend eight years at Apple build like bringing the technologies we allowed iWork switch to be, to be collaborative. So multiple people can work on the same document at the same time across native apps and web apps. So we, we, uh, spend a lot of time to do just that. When you.

05:31
do something and push it to the world best, then you would have the opportunity to get discovered, have opportunity to basically rise to the global stage ah and make a big impact. What is it about Apple, this seemingly larger than life company? What is it from their perspective you think that attracted them to you, attracted you to them? I always get that messed up. What is it that stood out about that company? Like this is really Apple worthy.

06:00
Let’s talk a little bit talk about like what’s the process of shipping a product at Apple. Oh my God. So we have a product already and the shipper product inside of Apple took us four and a half years. So because Apple want to keep a secret, they keep like the old product running for a long time, for years, know, proxy running. apparently the Edigreed guys just disappear.

06:30
And, but it probably keep running, but we were already working for Apple and building the Apple version of the online productivity suite. Basically making, uh, building web apps for, for Apple. The first three and a half years is literally just keep building demos and to show to Steve many times. And Steve would challenge you to do some of the craziest thing and web apps that worthwhile of.

07:01
the Apple logo is the bar is very high. You know, you need to feel like butter. The scrolling and everything and the rep process, you need to wear it, render it all in piece. All in piece of three million characters on it. Um, I think at that time, Google can only take one million and that’s it. I don’t know how much they can do now, but the bar is very high. It’s also very challenging and everything is like a deep, hard, challenging technical problems.

07:29
and to get to something that’s world-class. So it starts with what you want your customer to have, like high fidelity, you need to render and looks as beautiful as what’s rendered natively. So we need to kind of touch pretty deep technologies on the web and do something pretty crazy. And it need to be fast as well. So we also spend a lot of time on optimizations. Those are the skills that are so valuable.

07:58
And so transferable when we do something else too, basically making something that’s fast, meaning that you, you can be the best or you can be the first, you know, when something you come up and you are the first to have an optimized version of that. And like normally when new technology appear, it always be the person who actually can optimize it in, in, in so well that it become usable. become wow. Um, so what is it in Apple? I think I learned a couple of things in Apple. still like.

08:28
become a little more like life lessons. So there’s a couple of things. First is Steve Jobs, reality distortion field. So people had about, okay, well I still have this superpower, the reality distortion field, distort reality. But if you build an onion and understand, what exactly is that thing that really pull people into ambitious project, is it just a really big idea?

08:57
idea that’s worth doing, idea that’s worth sinking your life into. So, you know, that’s the first thing I learned at Apple. you know, the behind the reality distortion field is actually a really big idea that really pulls minds. You feel in Apple, know, you, when Steve talk about certain thing, you feel you’re drawn to it. You just feel you are, I just attracted to execute that and do that because this is great. That would be great if this thing exists. That is

09:27
The first thing, the second thing is Apple have a really deep demo culture. So the storytelling that all these meetings are centered around demos. Demos actually is a beautiful thing. It’s basically just focusing on the user, how you take user from point A to point B and how you solve a problem. No data.

09:56
Not saying that they would never, yeah, there will be some data inform as well, but the way that you talk about it is talk about the problem and now how like the product take user from point A to point B. Like everything else disappear. So it’s just focusing on the problem and the solution. And you know, that’s the second thing that I learned in Apple. think it’s just become life lessons as well and how we can keep focusing on a user, focusing on the problem.

10:26
and do something great.

10:30
Well, speaking of something great and something with a really, really cool design, which is clearly something that is just everywhere, you know, omnipresent in Apple. Let’s talk next, the next playground. And before we get to next playground as it is today, Little Birdie told me that in the early, early days, the idea actually had to do with basketball. Can you take us back to basketball and what you had developed originally? It was 2017. I left Apple.

11:00
And looking for my next idea. So I did not leave with an idea in mind already. I just left and looking for next thing to do. People know me, know that I love basketball. I go distance in making sure that every week we have a pickup game. Um, and that thing’s going on for over 10 years. So after, after Apple, so, Hey, we connect with myself. We connect with world. What should I be doing? Hey, maybe do something with basketball.

11:30
something that we love and is complete change of lane. feel like, Hey, you build up so much in like being the world productivity expert and full away all of that. And now about let’s do something basketball related, which is extremely rejuvenating and doing something that’s like, you genuinely excited about what we can do there. And we end up building one of the world first edge AI application.

12:00
So using AI to understand video, to track basketball shots. It’s a really niche idea, I would say. It’s like people who want to check their shots are the people who are obsessed about basketball. It’s just like what we, nerd basketball player would do. Hey, I want to track my shots so that I can count my make, miss, count my, you know, where I shoot it. So we push it pretty far um and we build like the world first.

12:30
password training app called HomeCourt. And it was using AI on the edge to process video in real time to understand password shots, understand whether it make or miss and keep counting. And also how you take it as well, where you take it from and all the mechanics, like the angle, like how high you jump, how fast you move before put up shot, how long you hold the ball before you put a shot, your time taken.

12:58
for that to get a shot up. So all these like, you know, very interesting and we, dive pretty deep into that. And that was the first thing we did before we, uh, it leads to the journey of next playground. But this is the first thing we did, which is pretty wonderful. We especially need home court today, because if you look at the NBA today, people are taking like seven steps and it’s not being called a travel. So we need to watch track that movement too.

13:25
It sounds like something created by somebody who plays a pickup game every, you know, every week for 10 years. So it’s pretty impressive. Yeah. We love that journey too. It’s about how we break down a complicated problem, right? Hey, what a camera can see. You see the hoop, you see the board, you see the lines, you see the ball, you see the players, and we want to understand everything and breaking that problem down and getting to a deep understanding for in front of camera in real time. I think it still is and pretty incredible achievement that we’ve made.

13:55
Just using a phone camera. So it’s a phone camera on a tripod, looking at a basketball court, understand everything and extracting intelligence in real time. It’s a wonderful solution to a very small problem. in that, you know, still focused on home court, the camera and the AI tracking and that, like that’s super cool technology. Well, can you give us some behind the scenes of, I guess the aha moment for that technology particularly? It starts with, we want to do that.

14:25
and break that problem down into smaller problem and solve those things one by one. It begins with, I cold call the basketball coach around my area. So I get to become friend to the basketball coach in Montevista High, Cupertino High, um and all the Los Altos High and all these high school basketball coach around the area. So they allow me to just go into their gym.

14:55
I thought you were going to say Steve Kerr next. Well, we actually went to Duke, so coach K, similar category. Yeah, not bad. He hasn’t done much in his career. To capture training videos. So we actually captured a lot of video and understand how the ball go through the net. And when you go to, when you were in high school, when you go to go to college, you say, wow, college kids can get the ball to go through the net like that.

15:25
every such so fast, so clean. It’s a swish. And, oh, we don’t have this data before. We think this is a miss because it just like go full is so fast. Because normally when you make the baskets made, right? Like the ball kind of go through it, just got the net, like you slow it down a little bit. And when you go to Stanford, for example, wow, the ball can go through the net this fast, can be this good.

15:51
And okay, well, we need some more training data so that we can detect, detect as a make. um So there’s a lot of data collections and I remember drive around to capture like image of basketball hoops, collect a lot of myself. We bang a lot for myself, tens of thousands, probably a hundred thousand rebounds that I did for high school kids shaking their sweaty hands. That was quite a year, a whole year.

16:20
to just do this. It’s a lot of data collection, a lot of breakdown, and a lot of hard math as well. So you can imagine how the, when taking come from the camera, right? So all the chord lines feel distorted. And then we work on an algorithm to basically turn it back to a bird eye view from that. So there’s a lot of camera projection math there. It’s fun. And I remember my team, hey David, I don’t know.

16:48
Whether it is a good, it’s a big problem, but it’s fun problem. So let’s try to solve it first and see how we go from there. It’s challenging, it’s fun and we have a good time. When did the pivot happen? When did you know that actually it’s not just basketball, there’s potential here using this technology for like a video game, know, family play system. How it all started is that we solved that fairly niche problem beautifully.

17:18
To the point where like Apple said, wow, you guys did some amazing. How about you talk about it, you know, on stage in 2018, iPhone XS announcement event. And we did that and we get NBA attention as well. So NBA invested in us the next year, hoping that we have them find the next Stephen Curry all over the world. ah Not just in the US, but all over the world. That was their hope that we, that the app that we created.

17:48
like help to bring training to, kids worldwide. And then with that find the next Stephen Curry. But we know this is a very niche problem. So who in the right mind would take their phone out, put it on the tripod and track their own shots. And when they’re doing shooting workout, very few people in the world would do that. Uh, we want to do more. want to make some things that meaningful to more people. So we begin to.

18:17
Think about what are the use cases we can do. So home court on a tripod, use the rear facing camera to capture what’s in front of it. Then we say, hey, maybe we can use the front facing camera as well to give some interactive feedback when you’re other form of practices, like your ball handling or your agility. So can we do more there? So we begin to explore those applications and then pandemic hits the next year.

18:48
Those part of Homecourt went viral, grow much faster than the short tracking part of Homecourt. The agility one grew 40 times. So 40 times usage. All of a sudden, like half a million people, wow, like we thought we have a pretty niche app. Then like half a million people is like using it. You know, this we reach like half a million monthly active user. People come in and they’re not even playing, they’re not even basketball player.

19:17
They’re a player for all kinds of sports. So that’s give us inspiration to do the first pivot. Hey, how about we take those things out and we create another app called Active Arcade and see how that goes. And Active Arcade went even more viral than Homecourt. But we begin to learn what’s actually working. And we find that the retention of using Active Arcade on iPad is three times of Homecourt.

19:45
And the retention of anyone could connect the phone to the TV or tablet to TV and use it there is 10x the retention. we finally discovered we actually building for the wrong platform. Uh, we need to find what I called at that time, a 64, 65 inch iPad, big device with camera and have processing that can do it. cannot find one. So end up that one of go find, Hey, let’s just build one. And that’s how we.

20:16
uh, begin the journey of building next playground and get to where we are, get to where, we are today is a hell of a journey at the hell of a pivot. Um, from home court about the training app all of a sudden to, uh, like a motion game console, we call it an active play system. So it’s a quiet journey. Well, I have to say that you have the cutest game console of all time. Cause anybody look it up or if you’re watching on video.

20:45
It’s like uh a cube that what is it like a few inches by a few inches? Yeah, it’s pretty small. Yeah. Yep. Three inch Cube. That’s what we have here. So like if you have in your living room It doesn’t disrupt the space at all and then when you watch the videos and what this thing can do is unbelievable the different games ah Now you’ve gotten to the point where you’re partnering with like pep the pig uh Bluey all you know our daughter I’m sure is soon to be favorite things, you know on the latest flight we were on she was just she liked the seatback screen so she was just

21:14
Fast forwarding through all those, but in time she’ll sit there and watch those. anyway, anyway, you know, this thing has really exploded in terms of the potential and, you know, the sales now as well. On that, uh, design note, how did you, you know, channeling your inner Steve jobs, how did you guys get to the point that you’re able to put all this amazing technology in, in camera in like such a cute little box, if you’ll call it. When we explore the industrial design of it, we write

21:44
the design brief. you know, our VP of design, Josh Finno, who also spent a lot of time in Apple before leading that effort, but he cannot do everything himself. So we do go out to a couple of industrial design firm, give them the brief and ask them to come up with a proposal of what that could look like. And then we get a proposal from, from Laval, who is an industrial design firm.

22:13
Momlad, this industrial design firm based in San Francisco, their design is different. They find out, we get it. It’s like, you when you say, hey, you build a game console and someone come in with something looks like a game console. And they come in with something very completely different. When we see it, we just fall in love with the design. And it’s our, they call it design rubik. It’s just like, it look like little bit look like a rubik cubes.

22:41
is we need to do a lot in, in after that, is it even, is it even possible to do it like this? When the design come out and we just like, wow, this is great. And then the work begin to try to make it work. That is the, when something click, it just begins the quest. Hey, I know it’s difficult, but, then more people want to pick up on that challenge because it’s fun when it become a challenge to our.

23:08
like mechanical design and like the rest of the hardware design need to basically fit everything into one small cube form factor. You get, you get to see everybody actually excited about working on that project. It’s like, and like go back to the Apple thing again, it’s just like when you have something great, you just pull people in. People want to make it, make it happen. People want you because like Nix all by itself cannot do everything. It’s important that we, at that point, when we start building Nix Playground, we have 40 people.

23:39
We lean in on our partners to help us to bring their superpower onto the table. So we have partnership with the SOC vendor AMlogic, who is a leader in set-up box chipset manufacturing. We are working with Skyworth Digital, who have bring in the manufacturing and mechanical design capabilities into the project and level.

24:06
doing industrial designs is like, you know, it’s next in the center, but we pull in a lot of great people to make it possible. It’s just incredible to see. You can’t think about in the 20s of 2023, we actually did it in one year. I was in the beginning of 2023, I was just carrying like a 3D printed model. Hey, we want to make it happen and just keep going around and asking for help to build this product.

24:35
And the whole thing happened in one year and the singular focus, the whole team coming together, not just next, but like our partners come together and make one thing possible with one goal to make sure the first 5,000 people got it. We only have money to create 5,000 units, but at that time, so that’s all we have. And we’ve only one goal to make the first 5,000 units. Or for first 5,000 customers, we’re happy about our product is a highlight of the career.

25:06
You hear people talk about beauty and constraint and how much amazing things come out of that. uh One of my old coworkers, a mentor of mine, Ken Krasnow, back when I was in the corporate world, he’d always talk about beauty and constraint. And apparently there’s some stories about Mick Jagger would learn to dance in like very tight quarters. like, that’s kind of why he dances the way he does. anyway, you had the physical constraint there of like, cool, how do we get everything into the box? And then…

25:33
basically a time constraint there as well. did this all in one year. How do you think you and the team were able to achieve such like a seemingly impossible task and stay so focused on that? First of all, that is the last bet that we can make. I don’t think Nick can come around to have another try if that fail. When it becomes clear, hey, this is the possibly last thing.

26:03
we can do together at that point is 2023, right? The company started 2017. So we are like, you know, more than five years in already into this. And, and over the five years, we build a tech, we start building content, uh, with home, connective, RK and subsequent something, other things that we also build on mobile as well. But mobile was the wrong platform for the experience we’re creating. So we now end up.

26:31
decorating the platform so that our tech, our content can shine and become that unifying factor that get everyone to do one thing only. And the team is incredible. Try to do everything right. I can, I remember those times I can only be really thankful that like we all pour our hearts into it because it’s not just that one year, but it’s all the work that accumulated before. Finally.

27:01
get to a point where this is arguably the best experience that we ever, we ever create and deliver to our customers. And it ended up with what cut through the noise as well. It’s really inspiring just hearing about like the design, like the actual hard product, like the actual physical product and what went into that. And we barely even talked about the games yet. So like I was just binging earlier, absolutely loving.

27:30
clips about what the actual gameplay looks like and what, we mentioned the Peppa Pig and the Bluey, but you’ve partnered with these really, really cool franchises and TV shows out there, and Sesame Street as well, and creating games that fit those brands incredibly well, but are also super fun for families, especially kids. What is your philosophy in terms of adding more games that are

28:00
playable on next playground. the beginning, we don’t have all these partnerships yet. It’s a small company who would trust us. But because we have Homecourt, because NBA behind Homecourt, when we start building motion experiences, we have an early partnership with Hasbro. um We are still really thankful for Hasbro to be the first one to believe in us. And they offer us Peppa Pig.

28:29
which is like certainly one of the crunch roll IP. And I remember the one thing that we are promising them is this is a big franchise and we cannot do any harm to the franchise. That’s the beginning of that. We deeply care about trust and safety. We are creating something that is certainly unique to the brand. Like Peppa Pig, you think about jumping in a muddy puddle very quickly with

28:57
next playground, can really jumping in a muddy puddle. Um, so we managed to get the license of creating a Peppa Pig game. So Peppa Pig is actually one of the game that is, is shipped in playground when we launch. And we have 18 other original IP titles that we created and the kind of accumulated over time. We ship AcuPrk there as well. And then we, we have other things we have.

29:26
We and we also bring in a few partners to create for the platform. So we ship the initial product with 19 games and now it’s grown to over 60 already. But the journey is more like that. We create a platform that’s focusing on trust and safety, focus on safety, privacy, security, because it’s a platform designed for families. And once we have that unique position, create a safe space for brand to connect with, like, you know, the family that we are serving.

29:56
So we are serving also have our own segment that we serve in family of young kids first. And then when Pepper is there, Sesame Workshop come on board. We are partnered with Sesame Workshop and then others like Mattel and Barbie and NBC Universal with Gaby Dollhouse, How to Train the Dragon, uh Kung Fu Panda and then Paramount with TMNT and then Prui come on board. And then we build out our

30:26
Big portfolio of licensed IP games and original IP games on the platform and create a rich experience for our customers. And we have exciting content roadmap for this year as well. I’m really excited about it. So that’s how we build up a library that I think that subscription model just works so well in a way that we don’t need to think about other ways to monetize our customers. Unlike, you know, games on mobile.

30:55
Or even games on PC, not just premium purchase, something with the LC, like, you know, some are as supported, some are having other mechanics. We don’t need any of that. We just, hey, like a simple, honest model of $89 a year, access the whole library of games, and we keep surprising our customer for a whole year. And we keep doing that. It’s exciting and liberating as well.

31:21
So we can be only focusing on how we bring in great content, great partners, great original IP onto the platform and keep serving our customer better and better. That’s something that’s transferable across so many different types of businesses. We’ve seen companies do subscription models really well, and then we’ve seen other ones totally butcher it and, you know, can make or break a company. What advice do you have for fellow entrepreneurs out there that are considering a subscription model? So subscription model.

31:51
mean one thing, you need to build a deep relationship with your customers. You need to have your customer at heart. You need to give more than you take. And the beauty of subscription model is when you have a bigger base, you will have more resources to invest in the offering. Essentially, basically your customer help you make the product better and better. So we have this idea of that, we’re from this model. We actually keep coming back.

32:21
to the market every week with a better product, because we keep shipping updates, new games, um you know, on ongoing basis. It’s really about building trust. It’s really about like, it’s a non-transactional relationship. It’s really about solving our problem that is recurring as well. Yeah, just deliver the value that you you are to deliver.

32:51
you know, serving what I call timeless consumer needs or timeless human needs. You know, our position is to serve the needs to move, the needs to connect with family, with friends, the needs to grow and the need to have fun. And we would always thinking about everything we do, think about our customers, think about how we surprise and delight them. It’s a commitment. It’s an ongoing commitment to do something that’s better and better.

33:22
Well, you absolutely read my mind and I think you AI camera track what’s going on in my brain too, because we’re going to wrap up with something fun here. We want to wrap up with some rapid fire Q and A. You ready for it? So we have a basketball competition. There’s a hoop behind. No, I’m just kidding. All right. Let’s, let’s get wild. Speaking of basketball, who is an NBA player that you say you try to model your game after the most?

33:53
That’s a great answer. well now he’s known as the Lakers coach, before that, I remember growing up, you know, because people are very either hate Duke or love Duke. He was at the time one of the most hated and hateable college players of all time, but that’s because he was so good and you know, like one of the best three-point shooters of all time. So it is more just on court and off the court as well. So catch and shooter.

34:21
And it’s also my role. I’m a student guard too, when I play catch and shoot. There’s a lot I can learn from him on that play style. And second, he’s so articulative. He speaks so well. I remember one time he’s also investor in Next as well. Oh, that’s all. Congrats on that. And we have a chance that we can, you know, interview him. Wow. Just listening to him and how articulate he is. Give me goosebumps.

34:52
So, teach your redneck 100%. Yeah, modern day Renaissance man with basketball player turned podcaster turned broadcaster, now coach, investor as well. It’s really cool. You’re getting to work with them a lot. All right. I saw that you study at the University of Hong Kong, which is something that’s probably just a couple hour flight from me. uh No, it’s probably very, very long from me, but you study computer science among other things.

35:20
What specific class was the most challenging class that you studied there? Embedded system. Sorry, say it again. What’s the first word? What system? Embedded system. Yeah. I remember that was a project that we need to program a train. It ends up, it’s a bit excited. Like, I think like, you know, we have a couple of teammates and there’s so many projects going on. It’s a hit. You guys deal with it. I have you deal with other projects. That’s what happened. That’s one of the harder costs.

35:49
I would be uh absolutely toast at any of that. All right. Steve Jobs, you hear so many stories about him, you know, larger than life figure. What was Steve Jobs actually like in terms of giving feedback on something? You know, as much as I wanted to be in the same room with him, he normally keep his meeting very small. So I have not been in the same room with him, but I would be sitting outside.

36:17
Every time there’s a debrief talk about the feedback he give. It’s always some, wow, is it possible? It’s always, always kind of, you you know, have that challenge that it’s both difficult and exciting at the same time. Sometimes it’s just the feedback is simple, but actually it’s very hard to achieve. But you’ve got to achieve that. Like that thing no longer is just being

36:46
something is transparent and something that’s like, don’t know no longer bothering you. So it, for the years is also trained for me and train a really good eyes for things that’s like irritating. And sometimes we moving those irritations could be simple. Sometimes it be really, really hard. Yeah. So that’s feedback from Steve is always challenges. right. So we’re going to go from that.

37:13
Seemingly almost fictional character they call Steve Jobs because it’s unbelievable all he did in his life to Somebody in a realm I guess adjacent to that so last one Let’s say you could have dinner with any video game character ever Who would that be? Has been alien so before? Somebody in the in Starcraft I am

37:42
Before my daughter was born, I’m big Starcraft II fan. Wow, it’s like so long time ago, like 14, 15 years ago. Probably meeting with someone from Protoss. It would be fun to speak with an alien. Because I’m a big, alien fan, and I’m hoping that the declassification really happen. Big alien fan and… No, I’m just curious. I’m just curious about those things.

38:12
Something that makes humans feel smaller, something that unifies us more, because when we are not alone, I feel that’s very unifying. When human beings are not alone, it’s very unifying too. Because I’m hoping world peace, hoping that we can drop our differences now that we know we’re not the only one out there. I’m hoping for that effect when we know a little bit more about those things.

38:42
It’s a great message and a much more heartfelt message than I expected when I asked about dinner with a video game character. So I appreciate how you keep the surprises coming. David Lee, which by the way, you’re a basketball fan. you familiar with the former Knicks player David Lee? Cause it is funny. There’s the same name. Yup. And I tell you a funny story. So when I go on stage with Steve Nash on Apple stage in 2018, when we talk about how Homecourt use AI to track motion.

39:11
and password shot in real time. I remember somebody make a joke, oh, it’s Steve Nash and the wrong David Lee. Go on stage. You’re the right David Lee in my book. David, thanks so much. Congrats on everything with Next, the Next Playground and Homecore and everything there. So excited to see what you guys do next and, and, and cover, enjoy more of it. So.

39:36
Thanks so much for coming on. Where’s the best place if somebody wants to learn more about Next or Next Playground or just connect with you online, what’s your preferred place for that? Well, you can connect with LinkedIn. I also wrote a blog called playthatmovesyou.com. We have a user community. So if you have a Next Playground, please join us on Facebook or Reddit or follow us on social media. And you will actually see me replying your message there. And I’m actually pretty active because I think listening to customers, interacting with them are very important for Next.

40:06
So I’m championing those effort to be out there and just talking to customers And further proof that you are the right David Lee Last thing final thoughts just like a few words ah Maybe a mission or motto words to live by whatever you want. Take us home here next mission is to connect families and friends through active play and We want to build next into a 100 year company

40:34
and a 100-year company will serve timeless human needs to move, to connect, to grow, and to have fun. That’s what we live by. And we will keep building from here.

40:52
keep building and keep building in particular, tiny smart cubes that are so cute and so awesome. Thank you David for sharing your next playground story, for coming on Wild Business Growth. Thank you Wild Listeners and Wild Viewers for tuning in. You know where to subscribe or follow if you’re not already. And on YouTube it’s @MaxBranstetter for the video versions. Anything else? It is MaxPodcasting.com.

41:21
said in that voice exactly. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!

00:00
I understand it’s not magic, it’s science, but it kind of feels like magic.

00:19
Hello from the future. Welcome back to Wild Business Growth, your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur every Wednesday morning, turning wild ideas to wild growth. I’m your host Max Branstetter. This is episode one. I don’t know where that came from. This is episode 356. And today’s guest is Ben Lamm, the founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences. They are working to de-extinct

00:49
The Woolly Mammoth. What else needs to be said? Well, I will say a little more. This episode has de-extinction. This episode has clones. This episode has DNA. This party’s got booze. I’m doing a bit from Superbad if you haven’t seen that. You have to hear everything Ben and the Colossal Team are doing to believe it. It is Colossal Ben.

01:18
Enjoy the show.

01:25
Alrighty, we are here with Ben Lamm, founder and CEO of Colossal or Colossal Biosciences. And as you can tell from the name, if you’re not familiar with the company doing pretty, cool. I don’t know the right term, historic, prehistoric, Jurassic. We’re not going to get into all that sort of stuff, but de-extinction, that word comes up a lot. Ben, unbelievable what you’re doing. uh Pinching myself moment speaking with you. Thanks for joining. How are doing today? Yeah, I’m good. I’m good. Thanks so much for having me.

01:53
Yeah, yeah, of course, of course. When you hear about like your bio, you expect to be speaking to someone who’s like 300 years old with a beard down to their toes. And, and we come here and it’s our pre chat was just the most casual thing I’ve ever interacted with. So I love your, your easygoing nature, but before we get to colossal, so diving right into the, uh when many people hope to achieve in the entrepreneurship world. So you’ve been part of five different exits, you know, some of them pretty, cool scale there.

02:22
What do you think has been what has like allowed you to lead the charge on actually successfully exiting companies? I think kind of threefold. I’m really curious and I like to learn new things, but I’m very passionate about technology. So they’ve mostly been in like software and a little bit of space hardware, but mostly software. then before now jumping to genetics and genetic engineering, but it’s just a different kind of software. Yes. You know, I’ve been very curious, but I think it’s a big driver. think a second thing is

02:51
I love asking questions and the best way to get good answers is to hire industry experts that are way smarter than you in the category. So everyone always says, you should hire people that are smarter than you. And I think that that really sunk in to me at some point. And so I’ve been lucky to have just great women and men run these teams and kind of like, you know, really teach me along the way, which has been great. I will say from an exit perspective, because I’m so curious and I have ADD, it’s like, oh.

03:19
someone wants to buy this, it’s interesting, it’s economically good for a lot of people, our shareholders, our employees, our investors. Selling them was always just, I guess I just assumed it would always happen. But I never yet got to something as great as to me where I felt as passionate as Colossal. Soon to be clear, I’m not selling Colossal. I was going to buy it in this call, that was the point of this. Yeah. You’re like, am Satoshi and I’m going to buy it right now.

03:46
You know, I do think it’s easier to sell things if you’re in love with the process and you’re love with the building, but you don’t necessarily. I think some people must be in love with software, right? Cause we have a lot of it on this planet. I thought it was interesting. was systems models. I understood it and it built businesses around software, but never like I didn’t wake up every day and say, Oh my gosh, I’m so excited to build software. And, and, but what’s great is I’ve now found that with Colossal. So now I kind of get the best of both worlds.

04:13
the building, I love in the entrepreneurial side and the whole building a successful business, but also in a category that I just think is the coolest thing on the planet. And before we get to that coolest thing on the planet, you hear so many stories about entrepreneurs who have like a big exit and then they kind of are retired or semi-retired and they’re kind of like, like that was kind of my crowning achievement in the business world. What is it besides the curiosity aspect, which you already hinted at, what is it besides that?

04:40
that keeps you coming back and being like, there’s more companies that I kind of want to scratch my itch here. It’s interest. Like I don’t have a lot of hobbies. So I don’t know. mean, I get bored easy. So it’s like, I don’t know what you would do. Right. Like I, I hear those stories too. Right. And, know, maybe I’m just like really jealous of those people that can be like, I’m excited to do nothing. And it’s like, that sounds crazy to me. Like being alone with my own thoughts, maybe like that’s like prison in itself. Right. So I don’t want that. I like, I, I, I need to keep moving and keep swimming. Right. So

05:10
For me, I think that the journey is way more interesting than an exit or a destination. But there are people that love that destination, and I don’t understand them, but that’s good for them. They’re happy. I’m happy for them.

05:27
So let’s get to Colossal and this is extra surreal because I mean, this might have been over 200 episodes ago now, but we had an entrepreneur named Betty Brennan on, which I’m sure I was able to pronounce her name at the time. I don’t know what happened over those episodes, but she has since sold her business, but she used to work in the space where they would make like models and figures for uh museums, like museum displays.

05:55
And the one quote I remember, one of my favorite quotes of any guest, she’s just like, who wouldn’t want to build wooly mammoths? Like she literally would build wooly mammoths and put them in museums, know, like statues, figurines and stuff. how feel. Betty and I feel the same. Yeah, exactly. So now you’ve taken that childlike curiosity that Betty has and you have, let’s just say you’re going a bit farther than building animatronic wooly mammoths here. So colossal for anybody that’s not familiar with.

06:23
Now, obviously there’s a ton on line you can read about, like if you had to put colossal down into like one line or one tiny statement, why does colossal exist? So colossal exists because the world needs a de-extinction species preservation company because we are in the sixth mass extinction.

06:45
man, we should just end the podcast there. That’s quite the mic trap. Yeah, so add some more detail there. So mass extinction, what’s that? What’s that actually look like? The world’s gone through a bunch of different extinction events, right? But this one is human cause, right? And so, you know, if you look at kind of all of the extinction rates out there, you know, it’s forecasted that we could lose half of biodiversity in the next 25 years, right? And some people argue is like, oh, no, it could be 40.

07:14
Great, 40. So in the next reasonable time period, we could lose half of the current trend line is half of biodiversity on Earth. And so I believe that tells us something. That tells us that modern conservation, while it works, isn’t working fast enough. So it’s like, what can we do? ah Coming from software, coming from uh systems designs, we probably need redundancy systems. So how do we think about that? And then we need fail-safe systems. And so when you think about that, the way that

07:43
we decided to put Colossal to make sure that we could help accelerate conservation, build redundancy, and also build fail-safes, was all the technology that we build on this path to bring back these species, we could open source to conservation, which we do. And we also launched a foundation with a separate $100 million of capital. So we could do that, which we thought was good idea. Secondly, we could work with governments all over the world. We just launched our first one in Dubai and build biovolts.

08:13
super, super biobanking ah where you’re banking cells, doing genomics on the cells, understanding population diversity, understanding genetics, bottleneck, inbreeding, understanding all that about so that you can understand not just to preserve the species, but understand the health of the species, right? And so that you have kind of this living Noah’s Ark 2.0, right? And then the third is a de-extinction toolkit, right? Where you could either clone

08:41
endangered species, clone extinct species if you had cells like uh a recent extinction or rebuild an entire extinct species like the woolly mammoth or the dodo. And so those three things together we felt wasn’t represented in the world in any meaningful way. You hear this crazy stats about loss of biodiversity and climate change and all these ecosystem restoration projects that aren’t working. And you’re like, OK, maybe we can do something. And so that was how we kind of wanted to go tackle

09:11
this problem. Woolly Mammoth for example. Obviously there’s so much coolness and energy and I mean they’re just such like the coolest looking things ever. Yeah, there’s not like Facebook hate groups around Woolly Mammoth right now. As far as we know, yeah there probably is. There’s probably a handful but not many right compared to everything else. but what about in terms of climate in the environment? If let’s say there’s some Woolly Mammoths that are like back and like real living breathing things, what can that help do? That’s our plan.

09:38
Oh yeah, let’s assume that let’s assume success. We don’t even have to be hypothetical. It’s just assume success. And what’s interesting about all these projects is there’s opportunities for education. And to your point, there’s so many people that are excited and lean in. And literally every week we get hundreds of like letters from teachers and parents and kids and little drawings of mammoths and some of that, which is awesome. And it’s super rewarding, right? But it also leads to some questions, right? Like why do this? And which we talked a little bit about a second ago.

10:08
But it’s also like, weren’t made, you everyone’s seen like Ray Romano and like Ice Age, right? And so they’re all like, oh no, like it’s all just freezing. But what it also creates an opportunity to explain that, you know, right now we’re in the Holocene, but before that was the Pleistocene era when mammoths really thrived. And, you know, there were periods in that most people think of that as just Ice Age, right? Like the movie, but there were these interglacial periods were actually warmer than today. And if you look at migratory patterns of mammoths and the nature of those periods,

10:38
They were many manna species were also in warmer environments than today and had vast migratory patterns. And so what’s interesting is that the core ecosystem where we want to return them being the tundra, you know, which is a part of the Arctic Circle and then Circle Polar North, which is a little bit bigger from latitude perspective. That ecosystem still exists, but it’s massively degraded. And there’s been scientists all over the world that have done ecosystem restoration modeling to show that if you could reintroduce a cold tolerant

11:08
ah a species like a mammoth back into that environment at the right scale, the right numbers of sustainable biodiversity herds, well then you could actually have a meaningful impact on uh jump starting that kind of ancestral heartbeat of that ecosystem. And so we think that’s awesome and exciting. And that’s just one of the many reasons why we wanted to do the mammoth. I mean, it’s all pretty mind blowing to hear about, like the technology side of things, when in your mind was the world ready?

11:37
Or, mean, if it is for this type of thing and like de-extinction to happen in this scale. When we started the business, like the core technologies and discoveries uh had been made, right? Like you had things like AI, some access to compute discoveries like CRISPR and other genome engineering tools, right? But there’s still entire categories like assisted reproductive technologies for like elephants.

12:05
Like no one’s ever studied. But what’s interesting about the project from day one is that even with the technologies of yesterday, like four years ago, which seems like a lifetime from where we’re sitting, all the technologies existed. So it’s not like we needed to invent faster than travel or wait for quantum to eventually get here, scale where we could make this happen. Like all the technologies that we needed existed. Kind of like think about like the iPhone.

12:34
All the technologies existed. Now they innovated and they invented new technologies with the iPhone better, but things like the Palm Pilot and things like phones and Nokia and all those things existed before the iPhone. right. Software and software systems and app stores existed before. And it was really that innovation and invention and iteration on these things that made the iPhone the iPhone on day one. That’s a lot like colossal, right? And so with just the right expertise, the right technologies and the right

13:04
focus and funding, we knew we could be successful. What we have found though, and what we assume from day one, so we’re pretty happy that this has come true, is that with additional access to compute, with the proliferation of newer models in AI, with uh abilities to look at sequencing even deeper and faster, and as some of that democratization happens and gets cheaper, well, you get things that are cheaper and faster, right?

13:32
we are able to then push the boundaries of the most innovative technologies while we’re not having to spend as much time or money or focus on the technologies that are now just table stakes. That was an assumption we made from day one and we’re glad it’s proving true. So that curve of what is possible, you know, becomes exponential much faster than a linear model without kind of that exponential technology component. So I’m curious about the

14:02
scientific and tech side of it. I’m somebody who’s curious in everything. Oh, same, same. You think it is granular as you want and I’d still be interested, but I also probably wouldn’t understand it at all. we have- I’m not a scientist. So everything I know about science is because I have like really smart people around me that I get to ask questions to all the time. Yeah. So I guess like in its highest level to start, how does it work? Great question. Yeah. So the highest level process is

14:31
we have to go find ancient DNA. Sometimes researchers have already done it and they have to sequence, right? And they sequence that DNA. Sometimes we have to go work with museums. Sometimes we work with private collectors that have samples and bones, right? Sometimes we actually do expeditions or we work with partners like the Explorers Club that have a network of explorers that go out into the field, right? And you have to get samples, however you get those samples. And I kind of give it a few examples. Well, then…

14:58
You have to drill those samples, right? And you have to go through a process of like looking for ancient DNA. And what’s crazy about ancient DNA is DNA creates it very, very quickly. And so you can be drilling on a bone right here and get nothing. And then you can literally go like three inches over them because of the density and how the bone is positioned or whatever. You can like hit the jackpot and get great DNA. When you go through that process, right? You have to collect those samples. And then you have to sequence it, right? And the more…

15:26
DNA samples that we can get, the higher likelihood that we can build genome or near complete genome. so, you know, the more reads of the genome you can get and the more samples, the better, because it is a destructive sampling process. Once you get your ancient genomes, right, and you then do comparative genomics, one of the things that we continually find interesting is that some of the species like we think, oh, this species is closely related to this. It actually just isn’t.

15:53
We’re just wrong as humans and it’s okay, because it’s science, you can find new data, right? You look at the genetic, the comparative genomics to figure out which animals these are the closest living relatives to, and then do a lot of comparative genomics to understand how they’re similar, how they’re different. And then that gives you some ideas of where you wanna go deeper to do further analysis and testing so that you can then pick where you wanna edit. And then you use that closest living relatives uh cell, which is the genetic donor cell, right? Because you can’t,

16:22
clone from a non-living cell if you just have data, right? And then you take that computational analysis, you then use a combination of editing tools to make changes in the data. Sometimes it’s individual changes, sometimes it’s one change, sometimes it’s a big block of uh changes, sometimes you’re knocking something out of the DNA. So there’s all these different tools that people will use and that we use to deliver those edits to the cells. And then once you get that, there’s a lot of testing and verification that I’m skipping through, but once you get to those cells,

16:51
You do the process that, you know, made Dolly the sheep, which is called cloning, where you take the nucleus of one of those cells, put it into that of an egg cell, and then use assisted reproductive technologies like IVF to put that into that genetic donor’s surrogate. And if all goes well at whatever period of gestation that specific animal has, you get your animal. We also have a 17 person team working on artificial wombs. Everything from like avian artificial egg constructs to placental interfaces.

17:21
And so, yeah, so we have a separate, because our long-term goal from a productionization perspective endangered species uh is that we want to have artificial wombs so that you don’t even have to use the serigacy part. And then you can get mass scale, right? Because you can use a lot of donor cells for genetic donor. You can engineer in synthetic diversity into the cells themselves in addition to different genetic donor cell lines. And then you can grow them all at UNIRO.

17:49
So imagine a world where you’ve got like warehouse labs full of mammoths growing in artificial worms. And that’s our vision. Like that’s our vision, also it directly applies to, you know, some of the healthcare applications as well as for endangered species. Well, I guess to go back, like if somebody is looking high level at Colossal, so like I think the key term is like ancient DNA. It kind of all starts there and that’s so cool in itself.

18:16
I know you hear the Jurassic Park comparisons all the time. I’m not gonna hit you on the face of that. We have heard that. But I think it’s really cool that you’re living like there’s some severance in there. There’s some Indiana Jones or some Ross from Friends. It uh is definitely a mashup for sure. You guys made a ton of headlines with the dire wolf. Like how exactly similar is that dire wolf compared to you know, it’s

18:43
family or friends or cousin, whatever you want to call it from thousands of years ago. over 99 % the same as gray wolves. And many people thought they were closer related to jackals because they just have a lot of data at the time. And the data they had mapped closer to jackals. Then when we got more genomes, we actually showed, nope, that was incorrect. That’s okay. That’s science. They’re actually closer related to gray wolves. And they’re actually very, very closely related to gray wolves, right? And so, you over 99 % the same.

19:12
ah And then what we did is then we focused, we were very lucky to be honest because we had uh two genomes ah that we got great coverage on. We got a lot of the genome and they had 60,000 years of genetic divergence and they were from two completely different areas. And so what was amazing about that is there’s more time between our two dire wolf samples than our second sample in today’s wolves.

19:39
So it was really cool, right? Because that’s only 12,000, 13,000 years, and this was 60,000 years, which is pretty cool. And so we think it’s pretty cool at least. That allowed us to really hone in what were the genes that were conserved and that really made a dire wolf unique in that 60,000 years of genetic divergence, what was conserved and protected to keep them dire wolves, and then how closely did that map to that of the gray wolf? And what we found is, and we kind of assume this from

20:09
bones and morphology is that, you know, they’re 20 % bigger, therefore, and based on their bone density, we would assume they were heavier and stronger. You know, they were a Pleistocene wolf, and based on the different time periods that they existed, we thought they would probably be white. We assumed their fur would be a certain thickness, right? But we can’t, you don’t have any of that on the fossil record, right? And so, as we did further analysis on the genome, we actually

20:38
did understand that they were white. We did understand a lot of things. The genomes, I can tell you what the coat’s gonna feel like, right? Or what their babies are gonna look like. When they were born, they almost look like little baby pandas. They’re ridiculous and amazing. So we did all that work, and then we engineered in those core things that really made a direwolf a direwolf. And fast forward the clock, our two boys are over 125 pounds. They’re doing great. They’re now starting to hunt on their own, which is pretty awesome in that.

21:07
ecological preserve we have them in. yeah, it’s pretty great. Congrats on that. You already know you’re a proud father. Now know you’re proud father in many, many ways. Because I have a strange couple of puppies. Obviously, the big sounds funny in this context, but the white whale is the woolly mammoth. So what in your mind, what needs to happen? What’s the key thing that needs to unlock in order to, you know, de extinct and bring back the woolly mammoth?

21:37
So we’re in the process, right? And so there’s no science gates, right? And we try to parallel path things from a systems model perspective. So we try to work on all these different paths at the same time. So we’re in the editing phase. already done, we have over 100 mammoth genomes across 1.4 million years of genetic divergence. It’s informed our targeting from a computational biology perspective, our target editing, and then we’ve actually been editing the cell lines for…

22:05
a couple of different sell-outs for Asian elephants for now several years, which is great. And I’d say that we’re on track right now to have the editing wrapped up this year and have hopefully our embryos this year. then separately, we’ve been working on effective, think of it as like IVF in elephants. And in that, we want to have successful transfers of those embryos into sergots, right?

22:33
That’s a process that our animal operations and animal welfare team have been working on now for several years. Right. And so we don’t wait to get to a certain milestone before we continue. try, we try to parallel path everything. So everything’s known that we need to do. We’re just going through the motions right now. And we have about, the mammoth seems like 35 p-bites. It’s our largest single species team. But it’s our flagship project. Right. And so like.

23:01
We’ve got all these other cool things going on, some of which we’ve announced, some of which we haven’t. ah That’s definitely like, you know, for me and for George, it’s our biggest flagship project. And George Church for those who are wondering. Oh yeah. Or George Harrison. And I don’t think it’s our hardest project here. I think it’s a very hard project, but we have some other things that we’re working on that are older that I think are hard. Well, for my…

23:25
short time after college in the corporate world. remember the term big hairy audacious goals and you are you’re bringing new meaning to big hair. Yeah, we are. We have this big hair audacious goal to bring back the mammoth in the next few years. So yeah. Let’s wrap up with some rapid fire q &a real quick. You ready for it? Yeah, go for it. All right, let’s get wild and hairy and woolly. What is something that you’ve learned about genetics or just DNA in general that

23:53
most people would be shocked to hear. You know, it’s weird. I understand it’s not magic, it’s science, but it kind of feels like magic. Like these little individual, like, I mean, these typical, they want to work together. They, they’re, it’s like magnets. They like come back together. It’s not like you break something and then you’re just like, oh no, how do I put it back together? Right? Like I believe there’s a true intentionality even at the molecular level of life. And, and that’s pretty awesome. And I, and we see that in the lab, like,

24:23
You know, and you even see this in evolution where things like that are bad will kind of edit themselves out. It’s pretty magical. It is. And I’m laughing for those watching on a video. We’re trying to teach our daughter some, you know, and at daycare they’re trying to teach her some of the sign language now and the sign for more is what exactly what Ben just did with his hands about DNA. So, no, it’s really cool. It is magical. Let’s say all goes well with Woolly Mammoth. Really happy with everything. It’s kind of, you know, obviously crowning achievement as a company.

24:53
Is there any animal kind of beyond the woolly mammoth that you’re like that would be? There’s so many. People won’t think it’s as cool, but I think the stellar sea cow is beyond the mammoth. We can’t grow them because the babies are bigger than existing manatees or dugongs. But think of it like a whale-sized manatee. Sounds awesome. Sounds nice and awesome and docile. I think it’d be cool. But you can’t grow them because there’s nothing to gestate them in.

25:23
Oh my god. Yeah, we have a lot of pictures, Google link to look up after this. All right. And then last one. This is the hardest one you’ll ever answer. I saw you studied accounting in college. What would your college age, accounting studying self think of what you’re doing right now? ah Yeah, so was financing accounting and I think they would be like, thank God because you hated this shit in college. Yeah.

25:50
Yeah, a of people a lot of people have great careers in accounting and a lot of people. but it was wasn’t for me, right? Like, it taught me a lot about balance sheets and finance and investing, but it just wasn’t for me. Yeah, well, I appreciate that you made the jump you up to some pretty, pretty cool things. So Ben, thank you so much. I know if anybody wants to learn more about colossal, they can do so at colossal.com. Ben, you’re on LinkedIn. Anywhere else you want to shout out? I mean, we’re on X, we’re on everything. So whenever people want to follow us, we’re around. Awesome. And the last

26:20
Final words, just some final thoughts, close this down any way you want at this stage of yours. We’re in extinction crisis and a lot of times we get preached doom and gloom and we only hear about the negative on this 24 hour news cycle. But I’m a big optimist, I’m a believer in hope and we are seeing tremendous applications to our technologies today for conservation and it’s really the next generation. And I think we’re doing a lot to hopefully inspire them and do things.

26:46
the best way we can. We’re going to screw up a lot of things along the way, but we’re doing the best we can along, or at least trying. While you hear these extinction sats and whatnot, I’m very, very hopeful about the future because I do think that we can out-innovate what we’ve done. My oh my, thank you so much Ben and Colossal. Mind blowing stuff on mind blowing stuff. Thank you, Wild listeners, for tuning into another episode. Catch more episodes,

27:14
hitting follow or subscribe to Wild Business Growth on your favorite platforms. On YouTube, it’s @MaxBranstetter for the video versions. You can find all things about this podcast or about my podcast production business at MaxPodcasting.com, including the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!

00:00
Enjoy and really live in the moments.

00:16
Hello, welcome back to Wild Business Growth, the place where you might hear the one-year-old in the background. This is your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur turning wild ideas into wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter. This is episode 355, Schfifty-Five for those who remember the early days of the Internet. And today’s guest is Vy Nguyen. Vy is the co-CEO of Avocado Green Brands.

00:45
known for their avocado green mattress, America’s leading certified organic mattress brand. In this episode, we talk crafting a product your consumers will absolutely love, V’s approach for one minute naps, which I think I did earlier today before recording this, and V’s Recos for Vietnam. It is big V. Enjoy the show.

01:18
Already we are here with Vy Nguyen, co-CEO of Avocado Green Brands. ah You know them from their mattresses as well, which I have to say right off the bat, my wife Dana is allergic to avocado, not your mattresses, just actual avocado. So I have to get that out of the way. we can get her to listen for more than one minute of it, then this podcast is a win. So thanks for that. But V, thanks so much for all you do and making time today. How are doing today?

01:48
Thanks for having me. Great, great, great. Just enjoying the Southern California weather today. Yeah, as I’m freezing in New Jersey and living vicariously through you. So make sure to send some of that our way too. yeah, never gets sold by you, I’m sure. But we’re going to talk all things avocado and mattresses. Does it do with every guest? No, but before we get to that, so actually the whole mattress market is like a fascinating, fascinating area because there’s obviously so many brands.

02:18
Everybody needs one. always need somewhere comfy to sleep and there’s a lot of different approaches to it. if you go back to when you were a little kid or teenager or anything like in that ballpark, was there anything that hinted at I might do something with mattresses one day besides sleep? In my case, a little bit because my dad was in the furniture and then ended up being in the mattress business. there was hints of that along the way, guess.

02:46
What type of furniture stuff did your dad do? He did furniture retail and then him and his partners, they decided to start making mattresses for their own local retail. And it was sort of more of a sort of low end, know, value driven product and things like that. yeah, he did that. And growing up, I saw a little bit of that. And some of the summers I sort of

03:11
helped out in the factory and whatnot. nice. So what were some of the roles that you’re doing in the factory? Oh, man, in high school, you know, helping load the trucks, bagging the mattresses. General muscle help is kind of what they give you because you got no other skill. That sounds incredibly exhausting. Bagging the mattresses. What’s involved from like the physical sense of that? got to obviously lift the beds off the conveyor and get them on this little

03:40
contraction and we would sort of slide the bag on there. And back then I think you would actually like iron the bag shut instead of using tape and then, and then you got to load it in a truck. That’s actually was a harder part. gotta actually carry them and load them into all the trucks. So it was good work. mean, it was, it was, was a good, honest day’s pay. Is that the type of thing that people wear? The like back support harness? Yeah, exactly. So was there any elements of that?

04:10
not specifically like the physical lifting, but any elements of the furniture world from that age that you were like, hmm, this is like, could add some insights or kind of make a dent in this world. For me, a couple of worlds came together out of college. A bunch of friends, really close friends of mine started an internet company that I was involved in very early on and turned out myself and my father were sort of early investors in it. I worked there early on.

04:36
And it was a price comparison site and this was going back in 2000. And so oh what I saw was this convergence of lots of different items getting online. And in the beginning, was a lot of digital cameras, software, sort of memory drives, the real typical things you would think that are sort of early adopters sort of type of items. But then as we sort of built the business, we started to have clothes being sold online.

05:04
And little by little, you saw bigger items being sold online. I think that, and then my sort of family experience, we started to put the things together that, at some point, even large ticket items like mattresses and furniture, there’s going to be a certain segment of the market that would want to do the research online, discover the brands, and even just purchase it uh if you sort of provide the right product and make sure that you create a uh

05:34
shopping experience that was seamless and they felt comfortable getting the product, being able to return it, all those sort of things. So those two worlds came together. And in 2010, when my dad was set to retire, I ended up buying his little factory from him, really with the intent to start building an online brand. He really was just a small local producer. So around 2010, we executed that and that’s how it came about.

06:01
This is hitting really close to home. I didn’t expect this because my wife’s side, so her grandpa used to have a factory in North Carolina that was used for like textiles and sort of that sort of manufacturing, you know, it’s in North Carolina is huge furniture. It’s still made for that less. So yeah, when maybe think of that is my father in law, so his son, I’m really bad with these mental family trees. He ended up buying the factory from him when he started his business.

06:29
that’s more about like swatches and manufacturing like that. So I think there’s something really cool when you can kind of keep, even if it’s a different business, if you can keep some sort of big asset like that in the family um and use it for, to create more good and solve problems for more people. That’s just a really cool thing. I think also it’s, what you see is the same asset, like you said, different generations that evolved the business model. And sometimes it takes a new generation to be able to do it because you know, obviously

06:59
If you’ve been doing it one way and you’re successful at it, you’re not going to try it. You’re less apt to just pivot and try something completely new. So sometimes it does take a new crop of leaders to come and say, hey, maybe there’s a different way to do this. And so was that that, I guess, your family business, was that Brentwood Home or is that separate? That was separate. So when we started, when we bought it in 2010, that’s when probably about a year or two later, we spent time ideating about what we wanted to do. And then we launched Brentwood Home.

07:28
you know, in about a year or two years later with really intent to bring it online, uh, direct to consumer brand. And that’s what we did for the, you know, for the first, I guess, five years or something. then about 2016, the, the, the group of guys that were starting up Avocado came to us via a consultant that they had met. The consultant recommended us as a sort of quality producers. And so, yeah, we sat down with them and really worked on ideating a product.

07:58
They had lots of ideas about wanting to create a really high quality product, using as much natural components as possible. And so yeah, we worked with them for probably close to a year, just coming up with prototypes and testing out different materials. And then finally got a product together towards the end of uh 2016, I take it. And then I think that’s when we finally launched the product, the last month or so in 2016.

08:26
Avocado and I promise not going to make any guac references. I’m sure you guys hear it like crazy, but really, really cool brand. as you just alluded to, really huge focus on being like organic and great for consumers and also, you know, doing good for the world as well. So pretty cool. Like I think it goes a lot deeper than what people typically think of when they think of mattresses historically.

08:55
What were some of the core pillars that you and the team, know, when developing Avocado and like getting this out into the world, thought were like, these are non-negotiables, we need to make sure we deliver on these. First and foremost, we wanted to create a very high quality product. Another pillar was using all natural materials and organic certified materials where possible. And when we first launched it, I mean, the supply chain within the industry wasn’t fully developed. mean,

09:24
in terms of getting non-chemical fire retardant layers, in terms of getting certified organic latex. Like lot of these things, we had to really work hard at building up a supply chain. There was some elements of it, sometimes for other industries and things that we could utilize, but it wasn’t up to the scale that was going to allow us to grow the business. So lot of the work in the first few years was really making sure that we could build the infrastructure in place with the supply chain to scale it.

09:53
So yeah, really high product quality. And I think oh using all natural materials, but then the other third one was really making sure there was real authenticity to the brand, a real voice to the brand that consumers can come to trust. And that goes really deep. I we never sort of talk about, we’re bad mouth competitors. We really just focus on talking about our product, our quality.

10:22
We do a lot of third party certifications so that it can be trusted. It’s not just our word. We seek a lot of third party validation just so that consumers out there know these things are being tested by a third party. We publish all of that stuff. We’re very transparent in how we make the beds, what components are being used. We share test results. And a lot of that stuff wasn’t really being done within the mattress industry. It’s an industry where there’s a lot of obfuscations uh in terms of how it’s made, what’s in there.

10:52
There’s a lot of, you know, they throw out a lot of buzzwords. And so I think we set the change that quite a bit. I mean, you have and I think transparency, authenticity is obviously a great pillar to build any business around, but especially when it’s something that like people are trusting to sleep on every night or to relax on or to be in their home. People take mattresses and furniture very, very seriously. And so I think that the fact that you kind of open the door for a great connection there just

11:20
makes your consumer base that much more diehard. What about on the whole material side of things? So that’s obviously a huge focus. How do you kind of do the balance of like, let’s make sure these are like as organic and quote unquote healthy material. I don’t know if you say that for a bit. Healthy materials. You know, we would think about it like, how do we find the most natural material versus, you know, sort of synthetic and sort of chemical free material? Yeah, this is

11:49
I’m gonna go ahead and say that you can say this, you can describe this better than me. But so natural materials, think historically, there’s kind of like been a back and forth just across any industry of just like natural materials versus providing like high quality or comfort there. How are you able to deliver both? Well, I think there’s two ways to think about that. I think, you know, going back many, many decades, mattresses were

12:18
were generally made of all natural materials. And I think as the advent of petroleum-based products and synthetic products, was created so that it was a substitute to be able to do things quicker, faster, cheaper. And so what we’re using is really products that end up costing us on average more than substitute components, but it’s a longer process to make. uh

12:46
like a rubber foam pad, our latex foam pads. mean, that’s made basically 95 % of that is made from the sap of a rubber tree. They collect the sap every day. And once they have enough, they heat it up and then it vulcanizes it turns into like a rubber sheet. And that’s a long process. You got to grow the rubber trees. You got to collect the sap every day. And each day, each tree only gives you, know, half a cup of sap. So you got to collect thousands of trees and make, you know, to make a single sheet.

13:14
Now, if you substitute that with foam, foam is, you throw two chemicals together, there’s a sort of thermal reaction, and you create foam. Now, over time, people have created different grades of foam and different fields and things like that. But I think what we think about is how do we go back to things that nature made and things that have been around for a long time that over time have gotten substituted out because of convenience and cost. And I think that’s what we work towards.

13:43
doing it as we build up the supply chain. The supply chain is a huge part of it. Breaking through anything from like a marketing sense is seemingly more and more impossibly hard as in the modern digital world. How so far have you guys been able to break through and like establish, get this brand out there in like such a crowded mattress and furniture space? Yeah, no, that’s a great question. mean, one, you we weren’t like VC funded. So was it like Casper where we had, you know, hundreds of… You were V funded. Yeah, exactly. oh

14:11
oh You know, family and friends funded basically. I think there’s a couple of things. I mean, when we talk about the brand pillars, you know, like sort of authenticity and transparency that didn’t exist in the industry. And I think that really resonated with consumers. think, you know, we we wrote a huge wave of consumers wanting to move towards more natural organic materials in their life. I consumers have graduated beyond

14:40
hey, I should eat organic. They start thinking about what about the things and the products I’m consuming around me? Are things releasing chemicals? How are things made? How are things constructed? And obviously, if you’re getting a good night’s sleep, you’re on your bed eight hours a day. And so I think there’s a lot of that. obviously, we caught a sort of wave of consumers’ sentiment shifting in that way. And I think that’s helped propel it. And I think really, we’ve stayed true with the brand from the beginning to now.

15:08
where what you see in a lot of the mattress industry is, you know, the brand comes out with one thing and then, you know, another sort of type of product becomes hot. Then they make another, you know, they sort of jump all over the place because they’re always trying to chase the latest sort of fad. And we just haven’t done that. You know, we’ve stayed really true to the brand ethos and the things that we believe in. And over time, that builds a lot of consumer confidence. And the word of mouth is amazing. mean, our customer base, the repeat order base that we have is probably industry.

15:38
uh We get about 30 to 40 percent of our consumers come back and buy another product from us within 18 months. Most mattress companies, it’s a five to seven year purchase cycle and we just don’t have that. We have consumers that really, once they’ve come to trust the brand, there’s a whole plethora of products that we could offer them. And as we have evolved the business too, we’re servicing the needs of first the master bedroom and then now we have kids, the EcoKids mattress, we have crib mattresses.

16:08
the sheets, the pillows. So there’s a whole environment that we could create that they feel safe about to sleep on. terms of that environment, how do you create that? Like seemingly with open arms to make sure that, hey, we’re here for your repeat customers. Like we have a lot to offer here. Yeah. I think that’s really understanding the customer and their needs and understanding that the customer isn’t just the parents in the master bedroom. If anything,

16:36
you know, one of our core products that they really drive people to us is our like organic crib mattresses. When they start there, especially when it’s new parents, they are very uh conscious about, you know, what the baby’s consuming. Your baby’s probably more likely to chew on your mattress and sleep on it face down. And there’s all kinds of stuff, but also just first time mothers are very, they’re very fanatical about making sure they find the right products.

17:03
So if they find us through that channel and they trust our crib mattress, as a child gets older, we offer a kid’s mattress. And I think over time, if they come to trust the brand, they’ll see we have a great product that addresses the sort of master bedroom. Or sometimes the journey starts the other way. They’re looking for that mattress that fulfills what the master bedroom is. And then as they had children and as the family evolves and grows, they come back to us for all those other.

17:33
you did it again, that hits extra close to home as well. At the time of this recording, our daughter Jamie is almost one year old. She’s like, she’s at that phase where she puts literally everything in her mouth, like something on the floor, she’ll anyway, she’s just from the parent mindset, like Dana and I are totally both from like, want to make sure that like whatever she uses, or, you know, spends time with is like high quality.

18:00
certified if you will so can totally see why like a huge amount of like your growing customer base is that as well. What about on the unlike your day to day so co CEO I think CEO in general there’s like you know a million different jobs to do it’s like obviously very tough prestigious but tough job no matter what you do your co CEO as well multiple CEOs like

18:25
Can you just share, at least at the time of this recording, what your priorities are and how you start to tackle your work plan? No, that’s a good way, especially where time is recording, we’re in January. So we set out our budget for the year. And part of our budget planning process is we set out what we call ROCs, essentially what are the major initiatives we want to tackle this year.

18:48
Is this EOS related by the way? so we have implemented EOS. Gotcha. I’ve heard of those big rocks. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, so I think a lot of my focus is how to make sure we keep driving those big rocks, following up with the teams that are executing those things, trying to break through where there’s bottlenecks, where there’s sort of progress that’s being stalled, trying to figure out why. And then on top of that, I mean, I think on an everyday basis, I’m pretty heavily involved in sort of the manufacturing operations side just because

19:18
my background lends to that. And then just dealing with the finance side and making sure budgets are staying on pace and making sure we’re sort of executing to our sort of financial plans. So you never deal with numbers at all, sounds like. No, mean, kind of zooming out, like where in your life did you really get your chops as well as being like uh in tune with like numbers and the financial side of the business?

19:46
Yeah, well, I studied finance in college, I had a fine. It doesn’t hurt. Yeah, that helped a lot. know, so obviously they taught me how to build spreadsheets and how to model out different things and how to do financial analysis. And so, yeah, I got some background on that. And I don’t know, I think even from a very young age, I’ve always had a little more aptitude towards that than let’s say the creative side. And it’s funny because I have two girls and they’re just, I think, 14, 15 months apart.

20:16
And I see it in them. uh One has much more creative aptitude and the other one is just likes to deal with numbers and likes to go to math class and likes to problem solve and likes number riddles. So I think some of that is probably innate in us. Yeah, it’s so fascinating. And there’s such a variety. I just invented the word variety. Wide variety with kids too. But that’s something

20:46
there’s there’s such a wide range to in terms of in terms of becoming like sounds very basic, but a business professional, some people are so averse to numbers. And some people are all in it. And I think as like, as an executive or CEO, obviously, it’s something that you have to have at least a pretty darn good understanding of. Yeah. I think I think in general, be successful in the in the business world, it probably helps to have some basic understanding of, you know, finance and

21:15
some understanding of accounting and how a sort of P &L or income statement and balance sheet works. So I think if people want to go down that route, they probably could study that a little earlier. And some of that stuff you could study, but then until you sort of, you know, get your beak wet dealing with it and stumbling over it a few times, you have to go through the messy process of ingesting what you’ve learned and making some mistakes along the way to really absorb it, right?

21:43
Shout out Godfather 2 just enough to wet my beak a little bit. So thank you. You said it. But what about on the flip side of that? So you mentioned that like you weren’t naturally all in on like the creative side and that thing. Like you kind of gravitated towards numbers. What have you learned in the avocado world, we’ll call it. What have you learned or what’s impressed you about the world of like marketing and creativity? Yeah, you know, I what I really learned, uh especially with like one of our co-founders, our CMO, I really I think what I’ve learned from

22:13
this journey over the last 10 years with avocados is really the power of storytelling. I think the power of the narrative, the power of having a brand resonate with the consumer, how powerful that is, where you basically are creating consumers that are advocates for you, that are out there basically selling your product for you. It’s a very powerful thing and it’s probably easier said than done, but that’s the magic of building the brand. If you can build a brand,

22:43
where the story resonates with your consumers and you sort of catch the product market fit at the right time. There’s sort of a magical effect that happens and it starts to multiply on itself. So if you were to put in like one line, what’s the story that Avocado has told that you think just like hits a home run with the consumers? You can have a product that you could trust, that you can…

23:10
sleep on knowing that it’s chemical free, that you can trust for your kids to yourself. And I think that’s a big part of what consumers were really, really wanting out there. Because quite frankly, the traditional mattress companies really didn’t want to tell you what was in their bed. And for us, we were very transparent about this is what we make it out of. We’ll tell you where our latex supplier is based out of. We’ll tell you where the fabric is made out of.

23:36
And it just wasn’t that way in the industry. It was a lot of, you know, lot of smoke and mirrors, as I would say.

23:46
Well, I trust that you’re ready to switch it up. I’ve grilled you enough about all your all your numbers. So let’s switch it up a little bit. I call this the unusual. So this is a few questions just more about you personally doesn’t need to tie it to the business at all. But more just to like, I always like learning about the guest is, you know, who they are on the personal side as well. So let’s talk quirks. First thing course, what’s something your your family, your daughter’s family, kids, somebody calls your team calls you out for and it’s a little quirky about your personality, but it’s who you are.

24:16
It makes you you. Sometimes I mean, if I get tired in the moment, I will take a 30 second nap or one minute nap in the middle of anything. mean, in the middle of a meeting in the middle of a car. that why like five minutes ago you were asleep for a minute? I will. I I’ve been in the conference room and in sort of the middle of meeting, I’ll sort of my head back and doze off for like, you know, it’s normally like a minute or so, but then then I just hop right back to it.

24:45
I’m so jealous of that. love napping, it definitely takes me a long time to actually fall asleep. What’s a trick you have for falling asleep quickly? Napping, yeah, know, what I learned one time is I read something um not to ever fight when your body starts to feel that it’s coming down and you’re starting to get tired. And so before I would fight it, whether you could cough or you try to power through it and you end up being sort of groggy the rest of the day. And so now when I’m feeling that come over, I just…

25:13
just embrace it and just allow it to come over. if I my eyes for a minute, then so be it. And so I think that’s the main thing is not to fight it and sort of embrace it. Because once you embrace it, you take a five minute nap, the rest of your day is amazing. Yeah, it has an amazing recharging quality. But that sounds so simple. I love the way you put it, when you’re tired, nap. If you put it in that sense, obviously you can’t always do it.

25:40
it in theory is much easier to fall asleep if your body is already telling you to fall asleep. But I think if people start embracing it, I think you’d be surprised on how often you could do it. Like I said, like sometimes I excuse myself out of meeting, I’ll do it or in the middle of meeting, I just like, hey, I need a minute. I’m sure you’re familiar with Jocko Willink or the Jocko podcast. He’s like a retired Navy SEAL who’s got a huge podcast and podcast empire now, but he tells lots of stories, you know, both from his time in action and outside and business world and stuff too. But he said,

26:11
like when they were serving him and his squadron would like always they were big on the six minute nap. They’re like, you know, if you just got a little bit of time, just find six minutes, six to eight minutes, like that’s all you need. So you’ve kind of taken that to the extreme. You’ve taken extreme ownership of his approach. No. All right. What about pet peeves? What’s something that just kind of ticks you off a little bit, but like in the grand scheme of life, it really isn’t a big deal. It’s just a little like daily thing. Right now I got a little pet peeves at home where they, it bothers me when I,

26:41
the kids or the wife, take stuff out of the fridge and they don’t put it back. They just leave it on the counter. And I feel like I’m running around putting stuff back in the fridge all day. So it’s not that difficult. And yeah, so right now, at least that’s sort of a family pet peeve of mine. We’re totally in the same boat. Not as much as with the fridge. I mean, I sometimes forget stuff with the fridge too, but fortunately not too much. But I’m definitely a neat freak in the sense of like,

27:08
I don’t like clutter like when stuff is out too long or like when infamously when like, you know, cupboards are open, stuff like that. But what we realized recently is, oh, when you have a baby and they start to play with toys everywhere, the baby doesn’t clean up after them. So I’m like, the guy now is like every night before bed, like, all right, let’s clean up all these pieces, get all that. And so that’s like a new constant effort for us to wait a little bit more. Your baby’s going to they go through a phase where they get fascinated by

27:37
covered doors and all you want to do is open and close them and open them close. Made some major baby proofing coming up soon. All right. And then how about I call them weird talent. So what’s a weird talent or party trick? Just something that like you have a knack for, but it’s just a silly thing. get semi juggle. mean, juggle three balls can’t juggle. Semi juggle. I’ll call that full juggle three balls. How’d you learn to do that? When I played tennis, sometimes you have a lot of downtime. So you just kind of mess with the balls and they say it helps with the eye hand coordination. So

28:07
I spent the better part of a summer just doing that as a kid, just all the time, just practicing, practicing, and somehow I caught it.

28:18
We’re gonna semi-juggle our way to wrap up with rapid fire Q and A. You ready for it? Sure. All right, we got three questions in the air. No, maybe some more, but let’s get wild. This again, doesn’t need to tie back to the business at all. It’s kind of random all over the place. USC, what is your all time favorite memory tied to your time at USC? Oh man, seems like so long ago, but my all time It was a year or two ago, you’re good. You know, do I have great fond memories there?

28:47
Or maybe you don’t, that’s an answer too. I mean, it’s not that I had a horrible time. I will say this, you know, I, in high school, I started to sort of be in the wrong crowd and get in lot of trouble. And so when I finally got my act together, when I got to college, was a very serious student. And so I sort of plowed through college, uh you know, with my head down and got my act together. And so oh I did enjoy, I worked at the computer lab.

29:16
while I was in college, the business school computer lab and learned a lot from there. I mean, I taught, you that’s when I was teaching MBA students how to use Word and how to use Excel and PowerPoint and actually learned quite a bit from that whole experience. that was a worthwhile experience. Yeah. That’s an amazing story. Real quick on that note, what do you think made the difference in you being from like hanging with the wrong crowd, as you said, to being someone who’s like a disciplined student and has a job and all that?

29:46
I think there’s sort of maturity, but when I was a junior, I guess, in high school, I started to see a lot of friends getting into a lot of trouble. mean, whether it’s getting expelled and going to juvie and things like that. And I think I just had a wake up call. said, look, if I don’t sort of get out of here and get away from this group of people that I know, then I’m going to end up in the same boat. And so that’s sort of when I put my head down and decided, let’s focus on getting to college.

30:16
and sort of escaping this circle of people and influence that you’re in. And so it wasn’t one particular moment, but I think it was just, it crystallized by seeing a lot of people around me get into a lot of big trouble. Well, you were mature beyond your years, still are, I would argue. What’s something about the furniture business in general that you think the average person would be shocked to hear? Well, I think the average person would probably be shocked to know there’s probably hundreds of mattresses

30:46
companies and factories in the country. Most people probably can name off two or three only. So I think that that would be something that the average consumer would know. And I think the average consumer, I have no idea if they really realize the size of the market. We estimate it to be about a 20, $30 billion mattress market. And people sleep on it every day, but I think people forget about it a lot of times. They buy it once and they sort of forget how important it is. I think the market’s also

31:15
It’s king size, it’s California king size, it’s a queen size. No, I’m just kidding. People probably don’t really realize there’s two kings. That’s a quirk in the whole sizing convention. Somehow California got its own size. Just a few miles from California, to your family’s Vietnamese descent. recently, we had never had Vietnamese cuisine. Well, we’ve had Vietnamese cuisine from Jersey.

31:45
We haven’t been to Vietnam, but not until recently. And we realized how much we love pho. Am I saying it right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our famous soup. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s, so that’s really good. But then we also made the mistake of ordering the, it was like the chef special pho, which had everything in there. Yeah. It had a lot more in there than we, uh, than we bargained for the tension and the tripe and the meat. Yeah. We should have had this interview beforehand and known what some of those, you didn’t like all the different cuts of

32:13
I thought it was all pretty good. It was just definitely kind of bizarre from a texture standpoint. My wife Dana was very much not a fan of all the different shapes and textures there. we’ll see. So we’ll probably go with the regular one last time. But next time. But anyway, it’s really good. So anyway, what’s your I’m going to say besides pho and banh mi. Those are the two famous ones. What’s the Vietnamese dish that you’re like this like you got to try it if you haven’t had it.

32:42
I like boomba way, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s a pork-based soup. So it’s really spicy with lemongrass. It’s a little bit more pungent than fowl, so you gotta be ready for it. My wife doesn’t like it when I ordered it at the house because she says it stinks. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I’ll have to try that out. And what’s your spice tolerance? Like, is that really spicy? No, it’s not really spicy, but I get tolerated a decent amount, but it’s just on the spicy side.

33:12
not like Chinese hot pot. And then last one has you like you were your family do you ever travel to Vietnam? Yeah, yeah, we have been there a bunch of times we took our kids there we haven’t been in about three years but yeah. Okay, we’ll give you some slack three years that’s still pretty recent but what’s an area or like a city or town in Vietnam that would that is like first time going to the country you have to check this out.

33:39
You know, Hoi is a really nice area. It’s up in the center uh of the country. It’s sort of their cultural artists area. It’s a really nice place. I think, you obviously there’s the big cities of uh Ho Chi Minh or Saigon and then uh Hanoi, the two, the capital. But Hoi An is a great place to visit if you’re going to go and to make sure you get a more of a country vibe and sort of the outside of the city feeling of the country.

34:07
Well, I’m excited to visit. I’m excited to try the the punch and soup you mentioned. But thank you so much. This was a blast and really appreciate your insights and all you guys do at Avocado. Really, really cool, impressive brand. Where’s the best place for people to if they want to check out Avocado or buy something from Avocado as well as they want to connect with you online? Yeah, I mean, obviously our website, uh Avocado green mattress.com is a great place to uh shop for the items and really read about the company and really

34:37
do all the research and find whatever they like. uh If people want to get a hold of directly of me, then feel free to. It’s uh V at avocadogreenbrands.com and that’s VY at avocadogreenbrands. Awesome. V, VY. V, thank you so much. Last thing, final thoughts. It could be a quote, just kind of a few words to live by, whatever you want, send us home here. Yeah, you got to really go and enjoy the, enjoy and really live in the moment. So I think that’s

35:05
Part of what we do every day is making sure we enjoy the process and enjoy the journey.

35:13
I enjoyed the V. Thank you so much Vy for coming on Wild Business Growth, sharing the outstanding avocado story. And thank you Wild Listeners for tuning into another episode. You can learn all things about Wild Business Growth and MaxPodcasting and the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, which sounded robotic when I said it at MaxPodcasting.com. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild.

35:43
Bring on the Bongos!!

00:00
Whatever the category is doing, do the opposite.

00:19
Hi, welcome back to Wild Business Growth. This is your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur turning wild ideas into wild growth every Wednesday. And I’m your host Max Brandstetter. You can learn more at maxpodcasting.com. Today’s guest for episode 354 is Dr. Kathrin Hamm. Kathrin is the Founder & CEO of Bearaby, the maker of

00:49
unbelievably comfortable weighted blankets and a whole assortment of other home wellness products. In this episode, we talk naps, including the best nap of Kathrin’s life. And we talk hugs, naps and hugs and spaetzle. It is Kathrin. Enjoyyyyyyy the showwwwwww!

01:22
Alrighty, we are here with Dr. Kathrin Hamm, Founder & CEO of Bearaby. This is one of the most comfortable interviews and coziest and snuggliest interviews that you’ll ever hear. Kathrin, so excited to talk to you and learn all things weighted blankets and beyond. Thanks so much for joining. How are doing today? Thanks for having me. Doing well. Of course. Of course. So we’re all recording this draped in our Bearaby bl- no, I’m just kidding.

01:51
Before we get to what the company is today and the story behind that, can you share the story of the best nap of your life? That life-changing nap you had? Yeah, happy to share that because I’m actually usually not a good sleeper at all. I was even as a child waking up at night or just a light sleeper overall.

02:18
when you have this like, you know, there’s this visual of the bear coming out, like, you don’t know where, you are, where you are, how long you slept. So I was actually back in India then. I was working for the World Bank and I was traveling a lot to different places and kind of being always a light sleeper that like really had put me over the edge. Kind of you are, you are flying into Bangladesh and then you’re five hours on the road and you’re flying back.

02:46
And you just like not only jet lag, but you have chronic insomnia. So that’s when I was looking for like different products that are in the market and tried really everything. And then I came across weighted blankets at that point, like no one heard about it, knew about it. It was like a medical product that I found in a German pharmacy. So it took six weeks to arrive in my like little apartment that I had in Mumbai. And I got this like orange bean bag, like

03:15
orange blue filled with like these loud beats. And I’m like, that’s a awful thing. Why would you even like sleep under something like this? But then I’m like, why don’t I just try it on and kind of act, it was like 15 pounds, like really heavy. So Saturday afternoon, I didn’t have anything on my schedule. After lunch, I just put it on and I literally pass out and I slept for four hours. And it’s one of those naps where you literally

03:44
You wake up and you don’t know who you are and like, where am I? It was such a good deep sleep, but I never had that before. And I was like, okay, that’s the solution for like all my sleep problems. just need this heavy bean bag and I just need to put weight on my body and kind of that’s, was this a ha moment where I’m like, I want to have such a product or this is like where I’m like, okay, there’s something really like special about it.

04:10
That was probably like the best nap. think I still had like a couple of good naps, but I think looking back, that’s probably been one of the best naps of my life. This is hitting way too close to home because I need a four hour nap today. Our daughter, Jamie, at the time of this recording is fighting an ear infection and she’d been pretty good, but last night she had us up from like 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. and it was just one of those nights where like every time you put her down, it’s like, nope.

04:40
That nap sounds pretty damn good right now. How did it feel? Like when you woke up from that nap, what was going through your mind when you kind of finally got that sleep that your body so needed? Yeah, I think what a lot of people who like sleep through the night, including my husband, like don’t understand is how it feels when you wake up, like it’s 2 a.m. and then…

05:04
You know, you look at the watch at 3 a.m. and then you’re getting stressed out. It’s like, I need to sleep. need to sleep. So it’s a constant stressor in your life. And then it’s like 4 a.m. and you’re like, okay, now I can just stay up. And you’re just kind of you’re like, I don’t know if you sleep track, if you have a sleep tracker, but if you’re kind of your body kind of sleep scores like 30, 40, and it’s just like, you feel like in a fog the whole day and just starts affecting you. I mean, like

05:32
good night of sleep, changes everything, right? It’s just like life changing. It’s you wake up, you have energy, you kind of can, you hear what your other person, the other person opposite of you is actually saying, you can listen. Yeah, I mean, it was like this, and I didn’t have like such a good sleep for a long time. It was a big, big difference. Just kind of not only sleeping through the night being like, okay, I don’t have to worry. It’s like another thing is like you already,

05:58
always say like you’re stressed out going to sleep, you know, it’s hitting 10pm and you’re like, Oh my God, it’s gonna be a rough one. I wish it would have already been morning. I don’t know if you know, like these, these nights when you’re trying to like sleep, but you know, no matter what you do, you will have a terrible night. And then like, it’s a big, yeah, it’s such, it’s a relief relief for me. you hit that’s I think one of the biggest stressors of the whole thing is what you said about the whole

06:25
I think when I struggle sleeping at night, I try not to look at the clock that often. Because every time you do, you’re right. It’s like an hour goes by, two hours goes by. And then there’s that moment of like, at what point are we just up? Yeah, exactly. If you take your phone out, then you’re kind of like scrolling, and then your brain is fully awake, and it’s kind of ruined already.

06:51
Well, let’s talk about the opposite of Roond, let’s talk about something that improves the lives of people on a daily basis. So let’s get to your company, Barabee. There’s a little foreshadowing there, because obviously that nap was pretty foundational and the realization of what these weighted blankets can do. But how did you take that jump from like, wow, these are really cool blankets to actually, this could be like a product we sell to people and make a company around.

07:16
Yeah, I mean, took a while because I grew up in Germany, so I had like studied, had like my master’s degree, had my PhD. And then I had just landed like a job at the World Bank that I liked. And I was just like four years in and I was in my mid thirties. And it’s not something when you kind of like studied a lot, where you kind of say, oh yeah, it’s just jump off and try something, you know, without like money or like.

07:43
of any prospect. was like, first, this is a cool product, but I’m not the type of, I wouldn’t like being an entrepreneur. I mean, I had worked for my job at the World Bank with a lot of entrepreneurs. So I saw people like how hard it is that there’s never like security also, like, I mean, it was like, had a good year and then the next year there was no financing and then the company was gone. So I’m like, okay, I’m having a good, safe job.

08:10
I’m not like going anywhere, but I was intrigued by the product and I just started doing research on the side after kind of like, is there like, why has no one invented anything? Why is this still like the same bean bag that came out 30 years ago? And there were lots of medical studies and I’m like, interesting, like all the people and like you went to all these forums and people are raving about it. changed their life, sleeping, oh but they had the same issue that I had. It just made them really hot.

08:39
And I couldn’t find any product that was like not a bean bag and that had like these plastic beads that just, you know, if you have 15 pounds of plastic beads on top of you, it’s just like a sweaty, sweaty situation. And then kind of, I worked on a prototype and I actually had my mom who’s a really good knitter who also, when I grew up, all my homework and house projects that I had to do in German school. You have to do all these knitting projects. And then she said like, why don’t we try something with cotton?

09:08
Like where you just take a roll of cotton and you will also get to 15, 20 pounds and we knit like these heavy yarns together. And then we had like a small mini blanket. And as soon as I had like this mini blanket, I went to my, my boss and asked her like, I could take a year off just to try get it off the ground. And she actually really liked the idea and said, like, look, if it doesn’t work out, you just come back and we make a case study for the world bank out of it, how not to do it.

09:37
And then I’m like, okay, it doesn’t feel like too much of a risk. like, yeah, obviously I took all my retirement savings. It was like $120,000. Um, and I’m like, okay, I have to probably retire later. If this doesn’t work out to get that money back. But it was like, now has a risk I’m willing to take. And that’s kind of how it started. That’s entrepreneurship in a nutshell. talk about, like, I think if you look up the definition of entrepreneur, it’s like a, like a business owner who’s willing to take a risk, something like that. And.

10:07
Man, retirement savings, that’d be a really tough decision. How did you, um I guess, how’d you get yourself mentally to be comfortable with quote unquote delaying your retirement? So I think what’s important is that you set yourself like a time limit. So for me, it was always a year. And in that year, I wouldn’t make any decisions. wouldn’t kind of, if things would go bad, I would go back or like maybe things wouldn’t have worked out one year in and kind of.

10:37
Oh yeah, it’s five years in, I still haven’t made any profit and I’m still here. That’s important to have like, okay, how much does the money actually last that you have? Kind of what’s the, maybe have a plan B after that one year. And for me, plan B was okay, I can go back to my old job. So it’s not like something where I’m like, you know, living under a bridge eventually. I knew it would be a change in lifestyle because then it’s a time when, you know, like all your friends making major.

11:07
progress in their career, like they’re getting the promotions and it’s kind of where people start, you know, going to nice holidays, having nice cars and then you kind of back almost into like pre-college time when you’re eating mac and cheese and you can’t go to dinners anymore and you’re not having any fancy vacations. In fact, you don’t have actually vacations at all because it’s just like working nonstop to get, because you’re working against the clock, right? You need to get the product out, your money is shrinking.

11:35
You need a proof of concept. So I think just being like mentally, and I think I wasn’t, I knew it would be tough, but I think also the first year was, I never thought how tough it really would be to get the first prototype out. I made tons of mistakes, almost went back to my job because I’m like, I’m not cut out for this. I think just being mentally prepared that it’s not easy. It’s a rough patch and people will also think you’re crazy.

12:04
I mean, was mid thirties, I had a good job and people are like, what? You’re heavy blankets on the internet. What happened? What’s wrong with you? So there were definitely a lot of questions that I got from family, from friends. Even now friends are coming and said, I didn’t want to say it in your face back then, but we thought you’re completely cuckoo. Like moving everything, like just quitting from one day to the other to do something that

12:31
No one even knew about what a weighted blanket was back in the day. Well, it’s got to make you feel good when your friends call you cuckoo and uh say, what’s wrong with you? It’s pretty ironic if you kind of zoom out because you’re working on creating a product at the time that is like stress relieving, stress reducing, yet it’s causing you so much stress in creating it. oh

12:52
Yeah, I mean, there’s always this thinking like I’m an entrepreneur, I’m and sitting in a cool coffee shop. have like flexibility. I can work from anywhere in the world and I’m on the beach somewhere. I thought a lot of people have like that thinking. I think at the end you need to like just be prepared to probably like the first couple of years. If you are already stressed, it’s probably not the right path to go down. But then I think afterwards it gets easier.

13:20
And there a lot of other things obviously that are really rewarding that keep you going. But yeah, it’s pretty ironic that I actually slept less definitely than when I was working full time. You were just doing kind of like your own research of like your own focus group of like, here’s somebody who needs more sleep. How did you start? mean, you mentioned your mom has been good at knitting.

13:50
What did it look like coming up with the first prototypes and then the first product that you were like actually proud about selling to the public? So the initial iteration really was in the kitchen, my mom’s kitchen table where we just laid out and kind of tried to do different prototypes with my mom’s sewing machine. And we tried to kind of get the yarn into like the right weight and like make it chunky, make it heavy, but also make it breathable. So you’re trying like different fabrics.

14:18
So it’s very hands-on. And then the next step is when my mom is like, okay, I’m out. Here’s the mini blanket. Now do your thing. And that’s when I was like, okay, I’m calling a manufacturer. And I’m like, I have this idea. I have this heavy blanket. It’s made out of Jersey yarn, Jersey, single Jersey knit yarn. They’re like, never heard about this before. We try to make blankets, bed blankets to be light and breathable and airy. We don’t want to make them heavy.

14:48
and we don’t have that type of fabric. And I think I got like 50 nos along the way where people are like, we don’t know who you are and what this product is. And that’s also when I realized, okay, I need to get to a certain level on my own. So we rented a small garage and we had our own knitting machine. So I started with two knitting machines and five knitters and we made 800 blankets for the launch. And I thought like these 800 blankets, they would last a year. That was in my calculation.

15:18
should get us through. But we got to like a prototype. Like when we launched those, was really where I’m like, okay, we did so many iterations. And like, right then we had built our own machines, where you knew like, there’s so much knowledge that goes into it, that like, I could like sleep at night and knew exactly how I would knit the blankets and like what goes into each, each and every size. But yeah, we sold out within like two weeks.

15:45
And that’s kind of when I already realized, okay, how do we get the next 800 blankets? just took us like a year to build these 800. Yeah, we had immediate success and people loved it and wanted to order more. And yeah, we had sold out in two weeks. Well, congrats. That’s a phenomenal two weeks. What do you think led to that such a quick and impressive great sales of those 800? By that time, people, especially like in wellness and health conscious people had heard about weighted blankets.

16:15
And so when we came to the market, which was like end of 2018, we wouldn’t have to explain everyone like the basics anymore. Like, okay, this is what a weighted blanket does. Yes, we still had customers, but we had a lot of these first customers who wanted to upgrade to like a blanket. They already were convinced. Okay. When I’m sleeping on a weighted blanket, I sleep deeper. sleep longer, but I’m getting hot. And we came and we solved an issue that all the people who had weighted blankets wanted to solve.

16:45
So that was, think, just coming up with a better product. And then I think the look of it also mattered because before people were like, oh, this medical gray weighted blankets, they should be in a pharmacy, but they’re not in a Nordstrom or they’re not in a West Elm. But when we launched it and we had all these beautiful colors, home interior colors, really poppy colors, like just within five months, like one morning I woke up and had an email from West Elm in my inbox. We’re like, oh, we want to come to your showroom.

17:14
We were looking into weighted blankets and yours are really beautiful. So I think the functionality and like just the visual, like, oh, something like this we’ve never seen before. And it looks actually pretty and still is functional was like what a lot of people were waiting for. came in the right time to the market. Yeah. That’s something that I think gets overlooked with startups and entrepreneurs. Like we had a lot of fellow entrepreneurs on the show talk about, you know, like a wide, wide range of products. And like, it always goes back to like.

17:44
hands down first, like you need to really high quality product. Like you need a product that is people, you know, can’t wait to get their hands on and can’t wait to buy. And so that was obviously essential for you as well. Now getting, you know, West Elm, email from West Elm so quickly is amazing. Like that’s an amazing thing for the business. But on the, on the flip side of that, like you mentioned going from kind of doing these by hand and the initial 800 and you thought it was going to last you a year.

18:11
And then you have to get into like scale mode really quick. So there was some serious, I’m sure like growing pains at the business that you had to figure out quick. How did you do that and kind of move to that next level, right? You know, so quickly. wasn’t quickly. mean, I think now it feels maybe that, but the struggle definitely was okay. First getting into the garage and how do we get out of the garage and scale. And the next round, when we tried to find an external manufacturer.

18:39
I could at least say like, sold 800 blankets in two weeks and I can actually place a bigger order with you right up front versus like, I’m developing this prototype, but don’t know yet. There’s nothing out there. We don’t have a website. So by that stage, when I went back to the manufacturers, we already kind of looked at least from the outside. think that’s also like when West Ham thought we had a showroom, we didn’t have a showroom. were like two people still in a garage, but like it looked kind of like that we have proper business.

19:08
So I think then like that helps to get like the credibility where people are taking on a big offer risk to say like, okay, we’re investing in some of these new machines and we’re training people to bring a new product that only is your line. It’s not like sheets where we already making sheets, we can like slap your label on, here you go. But it’s really an investment that the manufacturer also had to take. So that initial proof of concept point, we like, we can place a bigger order definitely helped uh to get like these uh scaling issues. I mean,

19:38
I made a lot of mistakes. I went from point to point where I’m like, okay, now I need to figure out warehouse and we need to find a bigger warehouse. So sometimes I was just calling up people I knew and say, do you have a referral? em Or I could email people and you’re surprised how many people actually come back and entrepreneurs helping, willing to lend a hand and say, look, I work with this supplier. But I think you just need to be really open to be vulnerable and say, you get a lot of no’s, you get a lot of rejection.

20:07
and being okay with it and just kind of doing it anyways and better like fail fast than not failing at all and never doing anything and looking back and saying like, I wish I had done that. Speaking of being vulnerable, you’re in a product space that I think was, I mean, it seems like it was kind of starting to gain momentum, but like you really went all in on a space where obviously historically everybody knows blankets, but weighted blankets, maybe not as much.

20:36
How did you carve a name for yourself and like really be, you know, become like the leader in such a specific space like that? I think it was definitely like having a different product, a differentiated product. And then I also knew that when we didn’t have any external funding, I bootstrapped the company. And I also knew if like a bigger company would come and like we would be very quickly, like no one would remember Bearaby, but everyone would remember the bigger company.

21:04
So what we did is like, tried to have marketing that is like, I don’t know if you can call it guerrilla style marketing, but for example, one of the things I did is like finding Netflix designers. Like there are always a handful of people and these are the same people who designed the sets of each Netflix show. And they’re always looking for product. There’s product placement, which is very expensive. If you see Coke or Pepsi, they paid a lot of money to have those in these shows.

21:31
But when you go and say like, you need a blanket in that color whenever you need it, I send you one for free. And then you don’t have anything to say where the product will be placed. But we got lucky in like a couple of those who were like in the sequel of Sex and the City where the blanket was with used with Cynthia Nixon. And then we had murders in the house with Steve Martin having a whole scene around it. So I think very quickly, like people started associating the product and then like.

21:59
I in 2019, I knew that was like Oprah’s favorite things, where in June, everyone stands in the line and hands their product in hopes that like they’re, you know, it put a nice letter in and put the best packaging you can find on it. And then we also made the list. So we really tried to find like ways that didn’t cost us much, but where it’s harder that, you know, for the second, like, it’s always harder for the second to get like a placement. So when you’re the first mover in the market, you need to really move fast.

22:27
so that someone who has more resources can’t like overtake you. And we try to really find these right spots and occupy like these niches with relatively less budget. That’s brilliant. Yeah. I never heard of that. Netflix marketing. Yeah. It’s like guerrilla marketing. It’s really smart PR. Like, yeah, you’re way ahead of the curve in terms of being in those places that obviously, you know, people watch and see all the time now and have huge audiences. So it’s really smart in the partnering sense. If you were to…

22:56
zoom out and look back now, you know, besides having a great product and being a first mover, what else would you say is just kind of like a big driver of the success Barrett B has had through today? Like for us, kind of just thinking like whatever the category is doing, the opposite. And you’re imagining also things that haven’t existed in the past. So all the blankets were great and they’re very medically positioned.

23:24
So we were very loud. did exactly like the opposite. didn’t position medical. We just put like design, like something that you want to have on your couch. And then we’re like thinking like all the markets that put a product in the bedroom because where the blankets are in the bed. we’re like, okay, what if we make them couch worthy and you actually position the product outside of the bed. So I think like just leaning in and seeing like, is everyone doing right now? And then you just do exactly the opposite and you really lean in and then

23:54
Hope for the best. In our case, it worked out. Hope for the best. Words to the entrepreneur by.

24:04
So I’m gonna throw the opposite at you, keep you on your toes here. I’m curious, like, you know, somebody probably like many when they first heard about weighted blankets, they’re kind of like, that’s interesting, but like, what’s, you know, what’s it actually do? But I’d love to hear like, you know, you can get as medical or non-medical as you want, but I’m curious overall, just like the benefits of having like the weighted aspect to a blanket as opposed to traditional blankets. Nowadays, people are much more familiar with cortisol and high cortisol levels than like,

24:33
probably when I started five years ago and people are overall, I think, more health conscious and hormone conscious. But we have studies that show when you sleep under 10 % of your body weight, your nighttime cortisol gets reduced faster. And that’s also what basically translates into deeper sleep. So people that track their sleep, they see up to 30, 40 % increase in deep sleep phases.

25:00
And that’s directly related to cortisol level. And the faster you can get your cortisol level reduced, ideally before midnight, that’s because when the deep sleep is uh setting in, when you have most of your deep sleep and REM sleep phases. But I think just to make it a bit like more, and maybe easier to describe, it’s the feeling of a hug. like the nervous system, like when the nervous system feels safe, that’s kind of when deep sleep kicks in.

25:29
And like most people, like, I mean, all of us, not only entrepreneurs are like stressed, like we’re constantly on our phones. There’s always like new information, new things going on. there’s like, there’s very few like people who really have a fully regulated nervous system. So we need these extra things that like, that help to bring the nervous system calm. Obviously there are many things that you can do, but weighted blankets are one of them. So when you put yourself into that cocoon and your body feels like these extra weights.

25:57
oh The nervous system can relax, it’s relaxing faster and triggers the cortisol release. I like that a lot. You found a way to put a hug into a product form. Yeah. Even just hearing the word hug has such a positive feeling to it and it’s relaxing to think about. What about on the, going back to the very start, on the nap side of things, what’s the benefit of actually having like an effective nap? You should nap for four hours because you… uh

26:27
every day, morning and night. Most people cannot sleep after like a four hour nap. But what’s really good for you is like a 20 minute nap. Again, it’s about like the sleep pressure that builds up during the day. And then there’s like this around like 2pm, it’s just naturally in our cycles that we have like a low period. It’s like where you’re not productive. Most people like when you have at your desk, you’re just sitting there, but you know, like, okay, I’m actually not my brain is not there. So like,

26:57
A nap is also like something that just regulates your nervous system and kind of gets you into like the blue zone if you’re sleep tracking. then afterwards, I mean, when you wake up after a nap, if it’s a good nap, you should be relaxed. You should have a clear mind. Actually, your mood should also improve um because you’re resetting through sleep. So if you can squeeze in like these naps, like 20, 40 minutes a day, you have a happy life. Yeah, naps are happy. Hugs are happy.

27:26
It’s pretty cool. Mind blowing in the best way, thinking about like all you’ve built with Bearby and kind of your expertise in this, in this topic now, and then think of like your previous career at World Bank and, you know, as an economist and like, it’s such a different world. I guess, how did you like go all in and decide like, look, I’m going to learn, you know, like the benefits of napping and benefits of weighted blankets and that side of thing. Like how did you go all in on such a different space?

27:53
It’s like I’ve always been curious. I like to learn. And I think as an entrepreneur, you have to learn a lot. now also, in the first year, I’m customer service, I’m quality control, I’m manufacturing, I’m marketing, I’m everything. So you really learn a lot. it’s something I really enjoy. And I think now even that I’m not like the one who’s like doing customer service, at least not like all the time.

28:21
I can still have like the flexibility to decide like what are the things I want to bring into the market? Like who are the people I want to work with? How do we want to design our office? How do we want to decide our hours? How we’re working as a group? It kind of gives you a lot of like freedom to decide. And when I was like an employee, I think I had a great job. I was traveling a lot. I saw a lot of countries, but it’s still different. Like I’m still reporting to someone.

28:49
There are some external goals that are given that maybe are sometimes slow and I don’t have that much impact if we reach the goal or if we don’t. I think there were a lot of things that drew me into the thing of just making something happen and then you see you have an idea in your head and a year later you have the finished product in front of you and then people using it and loving it. I think that’s the best feeling that you can have.

29:16
something I never experienced in the same way when I was like an employee. Yeah, that learning and that curiosity. I always think back to my freshman year of college, we took one of the classes had us take like strengths, strengths finders, or one of those personality tests. The results I got back were like, like you’re a learner, like you like learning. Like I was always pretty good at school, so it made sense, but I was kind of like, huh, okay, what does that mean for like

29:43
life and career then if you just like, like, you know, it’s like, am I just going to like read and be curious all the time? Spoiler alert, I should read way more than I do. But yeah, think that sometimes like, they’re always like the people who are good at math and then like they go like a certain path just like that is like relatively like safe that you’re having a good career. But then like, when I did one of the tests, like someone said, you’re good at putting concepts together. You’re like the one in the group who connected the dots.

30:11
But I’m like, what career is that? know, what do I? A dot connector, a professional dot connector. A professional dot connector. But like just much later, now that I’m kind of like in a role where we’re developing new products, are we looking at campaigns and concepts? And then I’m like, oh yeah, I’m seeing, talking with the different people. like, let’s talk to this person. Let’s, I have an idea here. And like, I’m kind of connecting the dots, which I think are entrepreneurs at the end is, someone as a glorified dot connector at the end.

30:42
But like when you are 18, you’re just in high school and you’re like good at kind of bringing things together. You don’t really know what type of career that is. And it only makes, it’s not a red line, if that makes sense. It’s just something that you’ll realize later, which is not as straightforward as math, for example. Or if I got a dot connector, if I could pronounce it right. GDC, we’ll coin that. GDC, yeah.

31:10
Well, speaking of personality and personality tests, we’re gonna wrap up with a couple quick segments, a little bit goofier. These are more just to kind of to get to know you as a person and more about your personality. Certainly doesn’t have to tie back to the business at all, but you’re welcome to. First one I call the unusual, pet peeves, quirks, weird talents. We’ll start with weird talents. What’s like a, I call them weird talents, but it’s like a party trick or something that you’re good at, but it really doesn’t impact your job at all. It’s just like a little like talent you have.

31:40
I make like little puppets by hand and I make like little puppet shows for like not for kids, but for adults. So whenever friends are coming over, I have like little shows with puppets and I make like stories up for like before like a party gets started. Oh my God. That’s amazing. That’s one of the most creative things I’ve ever heard. Up to you how, you know, in depth you want to go.

32:05
We are rated explicit, but you say puppet show for adults, know, mine is going a certain direction. Can you give us an example? No, I have like, it’s actually like it’s little animals and I have like characters for them and they have like their own also social profiles and they would like take pictures of like parties or then they would post pictures. It’s more like a satire comedy where it’s, you know, you make fun of some people where, know, like their pet peeves and kind of like, then.

32:34
I worked as in a little show and then later on I post those on like the Instagram or make like a funny comment on it. It started more like, you know, between friends. And then I had like all these fake profiles with the rabbit and the rabbit was like doing all these different things that like the person did in real life. So they were at a coffee shop and then the bunny was at the coffee shop. And um so yeah, it became like a little account that I made and kind of like with friends. Now, unfortunately don’t do it as much anymore, but I still do my puppet shows.

33:05
Oh my God, congrats on that. That’s the best side hustle I’ve ever heard. It’s my next, like my next job will be like just becoming a puppet creator. All right. You mentioned pet peeves. What’s a pet peeve you have? Something that kind of ticks you off, but really it’s not a big deal in life. I think as a uh German, I like structure and order. So like, think I get ticked off when like people are not waiting in line or when kind of like things aren’t chaos. I like things organized.

33:34
So yeah, I’ve had like, like a couple of times and like people are just like, for example, I was just in Japan and it’s such a blessing when people are like in the metro and it’s like, there’s just people are waiting and one by one goes and it’s not someone like where you have to press and you have to push. Like when I’m, for example, in India or like in China and it’s just like everything is like people are pressing and at the airport, it’s all chaos. So yeah, I like my structure and order.

34:03
That’s a great one. I like things organized as well. Since you said it on the German stereotype, if you will, of liking things organized and structured. The first time I was in Berlin and the first time I looked at the map of the metro and all the different stuff, I’m like, this is the most organized symmetrical thing I’ve ever seen. Now I couldn’t pronounce any of the words, but… I think we’re trying. I think Berlin is pretty organized when it comes to the metro. Almost like London.

34:35
All right, so let’s wrap up with some rapid fire Q &A. You ready for it? Yeah. All right, let’s get wild. I’m to ask your puppet rabbit to answer the… No, I’m just kidding. What is a tip you have or you got from your mom about knitting? Knitting itself is so predictable.

34:57
em I don’t think there’s anything like on knitting you can change. mean, like definitely what I learned from my mom is how you can like take regular knitting with like a very thin yarn and suddenly like blow it up or make it like in a huge uh heavy yarn and then turn this into actually knitting. So I think thinking outside of the box when you think about a very tiny yarn that you usually knit a sock or like a uh piece of clothing.

35:24
And then like how this can turn into like a completely different product and having like the idea and experimentation around that. right. What is something from the world of like the World Bank or being an economist that you think the average person would be shocked to know? Like how uh little funding like small and medium sized enterprises are getting and also women entrepreneurs, it’s less than 2%.

35:54
in the developing world and it has been ever since. I think that’s something that at least surprised me how difficult it is for small and medium sized businesses to get access to that funding and how hard it is to actually get that going for people to get access to loans to grow their businesses. Yeah, that’s a dark but true one. Yeah, it’s like some stats have been…

36:20
improved over the years and then other areas it’s like we still have so far to go. that’s an important one. All right. So you have traveled pretty much everywhere around the world and to Mars and back into Pluto. uh What’s your best like travel hack? First of all, bring your own pillow. Now I have even a customized pillow that I take everywhere.

36:44
weighted blanket, I sometimes bring my weighted blanket, but it’s a heavy one. So it’s not too easy to take across if you’re flying for like multiple segments. And then I always like to have a magnesium, like especially when you have jet lag, you take like a bit of magnesium and glycine and you won’t have jet lag. That’s good to know. Cause yeah, those long flights, the jet lag. I don’t know. Like if you never experienced jet lag and then the first time you do, it’s just like

37:13
Wow, this is great. Like, I don’t know if my circadian rhythm is ever going to get back. So that’s good to know. All right. And then last one. I mean, I’m a sucker for German food and food in general. So I always ask about food, but in your case and upbringing, I’m curious. What’s like a German food you must try that’s maybe, maybe doesn’t get as much of the spotlight as like bratwurst and potatoes and schnitzel and all that.

37:43
is like a specific like pancake with like a plum compote. ah That’s a good one. And then if you like the potatoes, also go for the potato salad, especially like in South of Germany, potato salad is really good. yeah. It’s so good. And it makes you think, don’t, I mean, sometimes, you know, like even like the grocery stores here and the States, you’ll see like German potato salad, but it’s, I wonder how close it is to actual German potato. It’s not, it’s not the same. It’s a, it’s like,

38:12
In the U.S. it’s made with mayonnaise and in uh Germany it’s made with vinegar and bone broth and oil and different herbs so it has a very different taste. My family fell in love a…one of the big German and Prague trip we did as a family. My family fell in love with a…how do you say it? Spezel? Spezel. Yeah.

38:36
In Frankfurt, they said it was like the best they ever had. Oh my God, yeah, I forgot about that. Spätzle is even my number one. Yeah. I I totally forgot because that’s also from my area where I come from. My mom makes amazing Spätzle. All right. Well, now I’m not only craving a four-hour nap, but I’m craving homemade Spätzle as well. So, Kathrin, thank you so much. This has been an absolute blast. I really appreciate your time and all you do and helping people nap and sleep and feel hugged more.

39:05
So that’s a pretty cool mission you’re behind. um I know if anybody wants to learn more, they can do so at bearaby.com. And I know you’re on LinkedIn. Is there anywhere else that you wanna shout out if they wanna connect with you online? mean, LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. And then if you wanna learn more about Bearaby, our Instagram is mybearaby and the website is bearaby.com. So that’s great. Awesome, thank you. A virtual hug all around. Last thing.

39:35
Final thoughts, could be a quote or just kind of words to live by just one line, send us home here. If you’re on a verge of like, and you’re asking yourself, should I start a business? Or should I hold on to the job? Just imagine you’re 70 and you look back at your life. And would you still ask yourself the question? What, would have been if I would have done it? And if you think you cannot let go of it and give it a try. That give it a try philosophy.

40:03
is a great approach for naps as well. Kathrin, thank you so much. Thank you, Bearaby. Thank you, Wild Listeners for tuning in. I don’t know about you, but I am so excited to go take a nap. And I hope you enjoy your nap too. And maybe you’ll dream sweet dreams of MaxPodcasting.com as you close your eyes. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…

40:33
Bring on the Bongos!!

[00:00:00] I’m a nightmare.

[00:00:16] We are back.

[00:00:19] I promised myself I would not do like a corny voice here, but here we are. We’re back. I have to just apologize right off the bat here. It has been so long. It has been a minute. I thought heading into the holidays, looking at potential guest lined up, it was. Like, maybe, you know, I’d take a, a week or two off over the holidays, spend more time with family.

[00:00:45] Then we go into January and by then there was three different cancellations due to the flu. Jamie got a little sick. We had some big client launches. We had, and this is the the best excuse in the world, Indiana won a national championship in football and we went to the game. Anybody wants to talk? To me about that.

[00:01:05] Oh, we’ll talk about that forever. Anyway, next, you know, and it turns into like almost a two month hiatus, which is not cool at all. That sucked. So thanks for hanging in there. I’m so sorry it’s been so long and I am so excited to be back. I cannot wait to share the wild entrepreneurs that we have for you this week and coming up.

[00:01:26] So without further ado. Welcome back to Wild Business Growth. It’s your place to hear from a new wild entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning. I, I know, I know asterisk there recently, turning wild ideas into wild growth. And this is episode 353, and today’s guest is Dylan McDonnell. Dylan is the founder and CEO of Foodini, the dietary intelligence platform.

[00:01:52] Now that sounds really cool. Really intelligent. What they actually do is think customizable menus for restaurants and even at stadiums for when you’re somebody who is gluten-free or has celiac disease like Dylan does, or any number. Of allergies. It makes things so simple from the restaurant, from the vendor side, as well as for the end consumer side as well.

[00:02:18] In this episode, we talk Harry Houdini, we talk Houdini, we talk what it’s actually like to have celiac disease and even in a foreign country and start a business from that experience and all the travel and food recommendations and drink recommendations you could ever ask for. It is the big D. Enjoy the show.

[00:02:48] All righty. We are here with Dylan McDonnell, the man who goes by dmac. No, I’m just kidding. Has anybody ever called you that? They have actually, funnily enough, yeah. Yeah. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that one. Dmac, the famous, uh, NBA star turned, uh, FINI, the man behind Houdini, founder and CEO of Fini.

[00:03:06] Super, super cool company. Dylan, I won’t call you DMAC the entire time, but now I have to call you that, uh, to start this off here. Dylan, thanks so much for joining. How you doing today? I’m great. Thanks a million for having me on. Of course, of course. And thank you for making it this far. You’ve, you’ve made it farther than most, but, uh, before we get into Houdini and all things about your awesome journey, so something that jumped out to me about your journey is like, you, it, it’s such a business that has a personal tie to your, your personal story and your health story.

[00:03:33] And shout out, uh, one of my best friends, Jason has celiac disease and so. Through his journey, I’ve come to learn a little bit, you know, about that experience and a day in the life from the eating lens. I guess you can call it that. But for starters, can you just kind of ground us here by sharing like, in the simplest terms or simplest way to look at like what is celiac disease and what does it actually mean for your body?

[00:03:55] I suppose there’s a slight delineation between like a food allergy and celiac disease. So celiac disease, uh, essentially is where your body negatively reacts to gluten. The problem with continuing to eat gluten is when you have celiac disease, it actually continues to e away at the VII in your intestine.

[00:04:12] And so the damage it actually does to you can can have quite long-term ramifications. And there are celiacs who are completely asymptomatic and don’t even know they’re celiac, and there are Celiacs who, if they have a cru. Of, or you know, of cross contact, you know, could get violently ill, but in both cases the damage is being done to the gut regardless if you have celiac disease.

[00:04:34] Um, so that’s kind of how I would carve it out versus a food allergy where it tends to be more just you get sick or slash going to anaphylactic when you die, but the longer term ramifications are a bit different. Yeah. And there’s many types of. Gluten free these days, and we’ll talk about, obviously it’s becoming more and more popular.

[00:04:51] Some people even choose that route as kind of a, a health choice when needing, but it’s a bit more serious on the, the celiac side. You said, you mentioned the term vi I, what are, what’s vi i the easiest way, the way it’s always been described to me. I’m a non-medical professional, by the way. You sound great though.

[00:05:04] I sign me up. I’m a lawyer by trade. Uh, but, uh, VI are the. They’re described to me as like these things in your intestines that absorb all the good from your food. So they’re what takes, if you’re eating healthy food and nutritious food, those are the things that bring the good into your body. And again, if you have celiac disease and you keep eating gluten, they get shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter to the point that then they.

[00:05:27] Disappear and they can’t grow back. And so then no matter how, what quality of food you’re eating, you essentially can’t absorb the good from healthy food. So that’s kind of how it’s been articulated to me. And for those of you just listening on audio, imagine jazz hands or jazz fingers as the embodiment of Exactly, yeah.

[00:05:46] I just, the visual demonstration. So that’s a great rundown. What’s been your personal experience with finding, even finding out that you had celiac disease in the first place? Quick history as you, the accent portrays Irish. I was born in Philly though, so I’m a sneaky American. Yeah, I knew it was a Philly accent.

[00:06:03] Ah, yeah. Well listen, it’s been a rough few weeks for us and the world, unfortunately, so I’m not shouting it from the rooftops, but uh, yeah, no, uh, so moved back home when I was five and then between like ages five and 10 was just quite sick all the time and my parents couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

[00:06:20] This is in an era, you know, 20 plus years ago where. Gluten-free celiac disease. These were not words that were commonly, you know, known or used. Um, it took, yeah, four or five years of, of a lot of different doctors and, and health people to even trigger maybe it is that, and to test me for it. So finally, anyway, when I was around 10, they, they figured it out and, and I got diagnosed Celiac.

[00:06:42] And the good since then is obviously I stopped eating gluten and so I stopped getting sick. The food back then was way worse. Always like. It was honestly really horrible stuff, like, uh, but it’s, a lot of innovation has happened and now the products are far, far improved. But I think the difference has been that, like eating at home now is pretty okay.

[00:07:01] You can go to the grocery store, you can find the stuff, you can prepare your stuff, it’s fine. But it’s been, dining out is, has been always the biggest problem. But in terms of trying to figure out where you can go, but equally when you do get anywhere, like trying to get that transparency on. Is it gluten-free?

[00:07:18] And again, we talk to, I talk to gluten a lot ’cause it’s the one that impacts me, but obviously there is a whole range of hundred, you know, different allergies that people are, are, are allergic to and a lot of different diets people follow. And for all of us, it’s the same problem in terms of where is the information and transparency as to what is in this food so I can understand if it’s safe for me.

[00:07:37] That was, I suppose, the inspiration point or the, or the problem point that, uh, I kind of set off to solve for. Well, you’re not kidding how much it’s changed over the years. Like, um, there’s a place by us that is a gluten-free bakery, which I think if you hear gluten-free bakery, if you heard that 20 years ago, you get that’s like an oxymoron or something like there, there’s no way.

[00:07:56] Um, and it’s like an amazing place with great views and has gluten-free poptarts, which are delicious. But what was going through your mind and your family’s mind, your parents’ mind when you were like, you were constantly sick and, and no one knew why I mean that? That’s horrifying. I think like I remember my poor mother was like baking me like the most healthy.

[00:08:17] Homemade brown bread. You can imagine like they’re thinking like, how can we give them good nutritious food? And like you would consider, well if I put all these great ingredients into this like lovely homemade, homemade bread, like this will surely help. Irony of irony being, it was like literally the worst thing I could have been being fed, but no one knew or no one could know, um, at that point in time.

[00:08:36] So. Uh, I think for me, again, I was young. Right. You’re, you’re still young. Hold onto to that still. Thank you. Thank you for the reminder. I appreciate. I think we’re probably around the same age, so I can definitely say that. Yeah. Yeah. I, alright. I could, so yeah. Well, let’s, let’s take young. I like that. Uh, I was very young.

[00:08:51] Obviously. I do remember it being a challenging time and being really frustrated and, and. Not understanding why this was happening. I think my parents were very much in the same boat. I don’t think any parent liked seeing their, their, their child sick. Yeah. I would, I would say there was, it was a big, it was a challenge to try and figure out what was the cause and then probably a lot of relief once there was like a, just a, a line in the sand diagnosis and then it was just.

[00:09:14] Navigating the challenge from there on in terms of, okay, we know what the problem is now we just need to find a way to live with it. I think that’s probably how I would articulate that.

[00:09:25] So let’s get to Fini. Are you a huge Harry Houdini fan? Uh, I am now. It’s it’s a brilliant name, just a visual that goes with it. And I mean, what a what a what A strong image, but Houdini, so super awesome. Cool Company ties back to the story that you were just saying. What was the, the point that in your mind, it went from like, there should be a solution out there to, I’m, I’m gonna be the guide to get the ball rolling on this.

[00:09:53] I think the point was when I realized how big the market was. So the problem I articulated is when I lived with all my life, but you kind of assume that it’s just you and a few others. You know, you come across the odd person, this and that, but it’s not like I was seeking it out or, or, or looking for the other people to just, I was like, I’m just trying to get by myself.

[00:10:10] You know? Uh, and I assumed it was a very small cohort of people who had the small, had the same problem. And then I started doing, when I kind of. Was thinking more and more on this. I did some research into just how big the market is and was just completely blown away. Like in the US you have 33 million Americans with a diagnosed food allergy, one in 10 diagnosed, right?

[00:10:30] You have another nearly 50 million who have a food intolerance, meaning. They’re dairy intolerant, they’re lactose intolerant. They’re whatever they, they, if when they eat a certain food, it disagrees with them and they have a negative reaction, but it’s not an allergy per se. And then you have another 70 million Americans who follow a lifestyle diet.

[00:10:47] Your vegans, your vegetarians, your keto, your low fodmap, your low carb, you name it, seed oils, da, da, da. A huge, huge, huge proportion of people that need this information. And there was a complete lack of this information. And so I think I realized. There was a big problem. There was a big market, and then having had no tech background, no medical background, no nutrition background, I decided that naively that I was gonna be the right person to solve for it and, uh, set off to the races and no background as in a, a famous or infamous escape artist as well.

[00:11:19] So you brushed up on all that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Although I’ve got out of one or two pines in my day, so maybe, yeah. Not to brag. The, the concept is really cool. There’s clearly a lot of people that need help with it. But it’s also, at least at that point, it’s pretty abstract of like, how do we actually help people here?

[00:11:34] So how, how did you start to put together your, I dunno if you call it a platform or app, but your solution, uh, on the tech side. What did that start to look like? Yeah, we started ’cause there’s been genesis of the approach we’ve taken, right? Yeah. Shout out Phil Collins. Sorry, go ahead. We started very much through the consumer lens, right?

[00:11:54] It was like, I’m a consumer, I have a problem. How do I solve for this? I want an app that’ll show me where I can eat and what I can eat when I get there. So started by working with some restaurants, getting the information I needed from them. Structure it in our backend and then having this consumer discovery app that a consumer could download and be like, ah, I’m gluten-free and vegan and I have a peanut allergy save.

[00:12:14] Here is where I can eat in this city. And, and crucially what I can eat when, when you get there, because there were already apps that like pointed you in the right direction. Like, like think of it as Yelp for food allergy. Someone would leave a review and said, I went to this restaurant and they had a gluten-free option, but.

[00:12:31] For me, it was like that wasn’t enough. It’s like, I wanna know specifically, there’s a hundred items on this menu, which 15 of them are in fact gluten free, which which can be modified to be Meg gluten free, which are not like I, that was the level of detail that I felt was required. In particular, again, for anyone who has an allergy, where again, if there is even one ounce of of error here, that person could, could be on the ground and, and be in a bad situation if they don’t get their EpiPen.

[00:12:57] So that was kind of the phase one, let’s call it. But go on. You have a question on that? I’m, I’m curious what it actually looked like, uh, you know, if you were to use this in the early days, like what, what value people are getting from it. So you, you started talking about the different. I guess allergy qualifications of food items from that standpoint.

[00:13:13] But what was, what was your strategy to get something that like appeals to restaurants and other vendors that you’re working with? That’s a perfect follow on question because the re I have to say, you, you teed me up perfectly. Yeah. Well, because what we realized is that the feedback from the consumer was unbelievably positive.

[00:13:30] They were like, this is exactly what the tool we need in the, in the way we need it. Like amazing. And we were like, great, now let’s just go and get more restaurant data. The problem was getting the restaurant data. So to your exact point, we weren’t big enough at that point in time to be like, we have 10 million people on an app that are looking to discover you.

[00:13:49] Like we were in early store, we were like, how do we convince these restaurants? They should work with us to give us the data we need to provide the service to the consumers. So what we realized was that for restaurants, the biggest pain point was mainly in their own ecosystem. Customer walks in the door of a restaurant and says, ah, is in the line, and they have a shellfish and a sesame allergy, and they’re about to get to the top of the line to talk to a 16-year-old wait staff person who started yesterday, who hasn’t the first iota.

[00:14:16] About what a food allergy is. Not in mind the menu or allergy makeup of this venue’s menu. And so we realized that we needed a solution to solve the problem in situ in for restaurants. And so we launched a web app solution, which essentially allows for, if you’re walking to restaurant, there’s a QR code on the physical menu or on the menu board or, or depending on the experience saying allergies, dietary needs scan.

[00:14:38] Here you scan web app. So no app to download, create dietary profile. Vegan, gluten-free. We have 150 options. So pick your mix of whatever, uh, uh, for you save. And instantly that restaurant’s menu ought to customizes to the consumer. Here’s what we can eat. Here’s what we can eat with a modifier. And what that modifier is.

[00:14:58] Here’s what we can’t eat, so that the interaction with the server becomes, hi, I am, I’m Celiac, and I would like to order. This versus, hi, I’m Celiac. What can I eat on the menu? Uh, because nearly all mistakes happen in that human interaction, where unfortunately, staff true a lot of the time, no fault of their own, just don’t have access to that information or haven’t been trained on it.

[00:15:21] And again, I keep using gluten as the, as the easy example. But you can imagine how complicated this gets when people are talking about sesame and soy and every sort of different allergen you can imagine. And so, yeah, that’s kind of primarily our, our, our main product today is that kind of in-venue, QR solution.

[00:15:35] We also integrate in their website. So where you, like nearly every person with a dietary need will. We’ll look at a menu before they make the decision to go to the restaurant in the first place. So where they have their normal menu, we will put an allergy dietary menu and when someone clicks that, it generates the exact same experience as in venue.

[00:15:51] So again, that consumer has has that transparency in advance. And so yeah, we’re primarily today a B2B company ’cause we focus on working with restaurants and food service partners who want to be able to communicate this information in an accurate and, and personalized and, and best. Class way to their guests.

[00:16:10] Yeah. That’s super cool. Uh, it also sounds, at least at the start, like a super big learning curve. If there’s, if there’s, you know, 150 different options and you know, you have to train, you know, each restaurant, each customer that you have, you have to train them on that. So how have you simplified that whole, like of the process?

[00:16:28] Well, we started with just, there was nine, and then every day we’d get emails from consumers being, I’m allergic to strawberry, I’m allergic to kiwi, I’m following a keto diet, dah, dah, dah, dah. It became kind of clear to us that to truly solve the consumer problem, we needed to have the full breadth of all the different requirements that the consumers have in terms of the good for us, and what we figured out is.

[00:16:52] We don’t need to train the restaurants on and how we had to build our system. You talk about the earnings, we don’t need to train the restaurants on all of those things. All we need from restaurants. Accurate menu and recipe and product information. Send us your menu, send us your recipes. Send us the products that you buy from your supplier.

[00:17:11] And we do all of that tagging work. So we then essentially tag everything at the ingredient level for the 150 different things, and then it just automatically. Customizes again to the consumer based on their preferences. So the restaurant doesn’t need to figure out whether there’s sesame in the sauce or not.

[00:17:26] We do that for them, and that’s how we came around it. We have to do it for them. This is something I’m probably gonna say on every podcast from here on out, but, uh, at the time of this recording out, just got back from, uh, Indiana’s National Championship game in Miami, uh, and went to iu, big IU family. The reason I’m saying that, otherwise, thank you.

[00:17:44] The reason otherwise, just to celebrate over and over again is that. I noticed on your website that it’s not just restaurants that you’re working with, that actually you have solutions for stadiums and events too. And it just thinking back to like. Monday night at Hard Rock Stadium, you forget if you haven’t been to a stadium in a while.

[00:18:01] Just like how integral food is to like that experience. And you know, we got in there well before the game started and we’re sitting there and everybody’s got different foods and you know, like my parents wanted nachos, I wanted a chicken sandwich also, sorts of thing like that. And on your site there’s some like really, really cool solutions that you have for large scale venues like that.

[00:18:19] Can you share what you, what you guys have whipped up in that kitchen? It’s funny, I, I’m a massive sports fan as well. Too many sports, too many teams, but. For me, that has been a massive pain point. The amount of times I’ve been in stadiums and you have these like limited pockets of time, halftime, or between innings or between quarters, whatever it might be, where you’re, you’re gonna go get food and there is a massive stadium, there’s a hundred concession stands, they’re all over.

[00:18:45] There’s a line already at all of them, and I’m just trying to figure out like which one has the thing for me. A lot of times I’d have to line up, get to the top, ask the question. Someone would go running ho in best case scenario for a binder or something where this information might exist. Hopefully. No, actually you can’t have anything here.

[00:19:02] Okay, great. Now half of halftime is gone. Let me try and walk another mile down the road and see if there’s, so this kept like this was a real pain point. And for stadiums in particular, I’m a nightmare because. There’s again, for them, there’s limited amount of time to make money during in these rush times.

[00:19:20] And if Dylan the Celiac is at the top of the line asking the poor 16-year-old casual part-time person what he can eat and they don’t know, and we’re going through this back and forth, the line isn’t moving. And all of a sudden, half the back of that line are just gonna give up and go back. So there’s a real use case in particular in these high density environments for the, like, uh, the likes of a stadium.

[00:19:40] So anyway, what we essentially do at stadiums is it’s kind of like what we do for restaurants except on rides. In that we will take the hundred concession stands, we’ll map them all in the same way we would for a restaurant menu, recipe products, get that in our system. And then the only difference is before when a customer scans a.

[00:19:58] You know, let’s say on the, on the ballpark website, uh, allergies, dietary needs, we’ll actually map the whole stadium for them. So we will say, of the a hundred Concession You, and they create their profile, gluten-free, dairy free vegan, we’ll map the whole stadium and say, in descending order, Dylan’s takeaway stand is 10 options for you.

[00:20:16] John’s is nine, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, da, da, da, all the way down. And when they click on each one, they’ll see exactly what they can eat there as well. So think of it as like a discovery solution within the stadium. Showing them not just where there’s options, but specifically what they can eat at each one as well.

[00:20:31] Uh, and the use case there is it. Now Dylan knows, right? I’m gonna go straight to exit three 12 where I can see there is a stand that has this option for me. I don’t have to randomly wander and hook for the best that is, uh, game, pardon the pun, game changer. I think back to the game Monday and we.

[00:20:51] Obviously national championship’s a very unique case. Like you’re never gonna get into a stadium two hours before the game and have time to like walk around and see where things are. Like my mom, my Aunt Mindy and I, we did a, a lap around the entire stadium just because we had so much time before just to see like, alright, what food options are here, what food options are here, and when you don’t usually have that time window, I can just see how valuable that is to know exactly where the thing you exactly want is.

[00:21:16] Especially if it’s, you know, between quarters, between halves, uh, between periods, like you were saying before. I, I don’t think I’ve ever been early to, to anything. I, I, I’m the guy who’s hoping that he doesn’t miss the first few minutes. I’m, uh, the anthems are, are, are always, are always missed. It’s just, uh, yeah.

[00:21:32] Last minute. So anyway, I think that the main point there is that like, similar to pe like you guys got early and explore you at the time. Nearly everyone who has an allergy dietary will review what the food scenario and the place they’re going to is before, because if, if they can’t find it, they’re, they’re left with a choice.

[00:21:52] Do I go and chance it and hope for the best? Or maybe I’ll just eat at home before, maybe I won’t spend my money at the stadium. Let me just get dinner at the restaurant a mile away, or, you know, cook before I go. Like, these are the things that go through the minds of people who, where they get the wrong food, they’re gonna get very sick and it’s gonna ruin the entire experience for them.

[00:22:10] Just a different mindset. For someone who doesn’t experience it on a daily basis, you know? Yeah, and that’s a great look into the consumer mindset, like the final end consumer mindset. But for your customers like these restaurants and stadiums and venues like that, can you share a little bit about like why partnering with you?

[00:22:28] Like partnering with FINI is actually just a great thing for the business overall as well? No, it’s great question. Love this one. No, no problem. You fed me that one. No, I’m just kidding. Five main things, one, attracting customers. Like I said, either 173 million Americans have a food allergy dietary need. If they don’t know or can’t understand what they can eat on your menu, they’re most likely not gonna come in the first place, or they’re gonna walk out the door once they get in there.

[00:22:53] Show them the information, they will come and this is the most loyal consumer you’re ever gonna get. We find it so hard to find places that can cater to us and where we have a good experience that when we do, we keep going back again and again and again. I, in the same three lunch spots around here in Santa Monica every day because they’re the three that I’ve, of the 10 that took care of me and I keep going back.

[00:23:15] Two, um, then is. Operations, I mentioned the line management, blah, blah, blah. We see about a 60% reduction in the number of questions being asked to staff when they use our technology. That’s extremely significant in terms of like busy areas, but also the knock on impact of that is we see a massive reduction in mistakes.

[00:23:36] People now are referring to a single source of approved truth between our dietician team, uh, and you know, the kitchen instead of. Staff who have not been trained on this information. So we see a huge reduction in, in in risk data. We can tell a restaurant last month at X location, a thousand people used the platform.

[00:23:57] 40% were gluten-free, 25% were vegan, 10% were keto. You don’t have any keto options on your menu. Like you’re not, you don’t understand like your, your, your market or you didn’t have this understanding of your market. Here’s how you can optimize your menu, da, da or, or market to these consumers to attract more of them in.

[00:24:14] And then the last is, and it’s less of a. Benefit, it’s more of a, of a requirement is regulation is coming. So California has just passed a law mandating allergen labeling for any restaurant group with 20 more locations in the country where at least one is in California. Other states are now beginning to kick this off.

[00:24:32] Michigan just went. New York has had it in the process for a while. Europe has had this for a decade, where every restaurant you can’t open a hotdog stand without labeling for the major allergens. The US will get there over the next few years. It’s behind the times, but it’s going to happen. The California regulation was the first domino to fall.

[00:24:51] This is now going to become mandated in the majority of states in the next few years. Yeah. Well, it’s super exciting for your business and for consumers and everybody in your fini sphere as well. Looking back, you know, past few years, what would you say has been the biggest driver of Houdini’s growth?

[00:25:08] Other than a lot of hard work and grind, you can, you can say that. I’m wondering if any, anything else jumps into your head as well? I, I’m gonna give kind of two answers. Regulation in recent times is huge. We have now gone from being what some people unfortunately consider a nice to have ’cause maybe they don’t understand.

[00:25:28] Just the amount of risk they’re taking on by not doing this properly, but to something that is now a requirement in California. Thankfully a big state and soon to be in other places. So that’s been a big driver. But honestly, I think net net it’s like. The scale of the consumer problem, like we’ll get on calls.

[00:25:46] We’ll sometimes get on a call with a big restaurant group or with a tech partner or something, and you know, they don’t have an allergy, the family doesn’t have an allergy. They’re kind of coming along, but they don’t really get it. We’ll, come on another call and it’s a food allergy mom. The mom of a kid who has a peanut allergy and a tree nut allergy, and my God, they, they’re nearly pitching our business back to us by the end of the call.

[00:26:05] Like they’re so passionate about, they understand that literally this is a life and debt issue for their kid who maybe is nine years old, soon to be a teenager, soon to be a bit out of their reach and doing their, you know, outward friends and not in as controlled of an environment. And they’re terrified of like, what can happen if this child isn’t extremely diligent in, in minding themselves.

[00:26:26] And so. The scale of the genuine significance of the problem, I think has been the biggest driver. ’cause it’s real. It’s not bullshit. We’re not trying to save 10 cent for people on a banking transaction, like we are truly trying to protect people from something that could kill them or make them very sick and it’s widespread.

[00:26:47] The core of how important this is has been the thing that even when things ha, you know, there’s always rejection and nose along the way, but that. Truth, I think is what’s managed to keep the cart on the track, so to speak. Well, it’s a beautiful thing that so many, you know, more and more people with allergies or food related, uh, diseases like this are, the world is becoming much more, what’s the word, nav?

[00:27:10] Navi. Nable, edible. Yeah. Um, and there’s more and more options available and more and more tools like the genius one that you’ve created, um, to help navigate all of that. So, so thanks for all you’re doing for so many people. No problem. I’m, I’m solving my own problem at the same time, so I’m being selfish as well.

[00:27:27] I won’t take all, I won’t take too much credit.

[00:27:32] Well, you talked about the scale of the problem. I wanna switch gears a little bit and dive into the scale of your travels because, um, you know, so I like to dive into the, I call it inspiration, creativity, kinda the mound, the mind of the founder. Looking at your background, uh, it’s pretty cool. You said you’re born in Philly, grew up in Ireland.

[00:27:52] I know you spent some time in Australia now. Santa Monica, all incredibly far away places from each other. Um, so you got a couple frequent flyer miles under your belt, but too many from my liking at, uh, well, well, well, let’s talk about that. So how have you been able to adjust and kind of. Get up to speed and kind of run your life, get on your life and business after moving to a place that’s like so far apart from, you know, the previous place you’re at.

[00:28:21] One of, uh, a strength of mine is definitely, I’m very adaptable. I can fly by the seat of my pants when I need to. Uh, I think a lot of the earlier travel was, you know, moving to Australia in the first place was a lifestyle decision. Originally at that point in time, I was, I was still a lawyer, uh, still living in that world and.

[00:28:38] I went there to experience something new. I’d been, you know, obviously I’d, I’d spent a lot of time in the States, but I’d really lived properly and worked properly only in Ireland. A actually, it’s funny, the travel I did on the way to Australia, I took three months off on the way to Australia. I did a month in, in la Funnily, I did a month in Japan and I did a month in Bali, and I actually think it was in Japan that the seed for the idea.

[00:28:59] Kind of really took off because I was, I remember being in Japan and you can imagine how with a language barrier, trying to figure out, like trying to proactively ask people about gluten-free and Sure. Oh my, it was actually, it was actually comedy, uh, and through no fault of anyone’s just like a complete language block.

[00:29:16] And I remember being so frustrated, oh my God, I really am so easy. I’m not even a fussy celiac. I’m like, I’ll eat anything once I know I can eat it. And it just was so hard to navigate there specifically that by the time I got to Australia, I think that idea had been in my mind. But fast forward when, when I, I started the company in Australia, as you mentioned, more so just ’cause it was where I was living.

[00:29:38] But over the course of time I realized that if this was going to be a big company, it needed to be in the us. And once that truth permeated into my mind and I, I accepted it as fact. It was just a matter of, well, I gotta go. So now where am I gonna go? Okay. West Coast makes the most sense because a lot of our team are still in, in, in Australia.

[00:30:00] Okay, I’m gonna go there. I just made the decision and went with it. So I think to answer your question in short, again, I’m an adaptable person and you have to be, I just did what I have to do to, to make it work. So let’s get to the, uh, the sex, drugs and rock and roll of, uh, of those journeys. Uh, now what’s your, I mean, all very different places, obviously.

[00:30:19] California, Australia. There’s some similarities weather wise, but like what sticks out to you as maybe like a favorite place you’ve been and then maybe a place that you’re like, you know, I don’t miss that aspect as much. I, I’ll tell you this for a fact, Sydney, if you just wanted, like if you didn’t have family or friends around the world and you didn’t care geographically where you lived, I think Sydney as a city is the best.

[00:30:41] Work-life balance, lifestyle you could ask for. The weather is beautiful. The people are great. The beaches are amazing. If you’re like an outdoorsy person at all, like, it’s an amazing place to live. So I miss and I lived, uh, on EE Beach, which is just down from Bondi Beach. Uh, I lived there for, for two years and I loved it.

[00:30:59] Absolutely loved it. So I miss that a lot. That is so funny. You just described my friend to a T so shout out a good friend Mike Orden went to college with him, you know, big IU fan as well. I’m just gonna throw that in. But he actually, oh man, this was probably, oh, it was right before COVID started in the us.

[00:31:16] He applied just randomly for a job at Canva in, uh, Sydney. And he got it. And so he just moved from New York to Sydney and he was there for a few years and we’d always ask like. Like, man, like you’re really far away. Like it seems awesome. You’re really far away. Like, do you love it? Like, what’s it, he’s like, if my family and friends were over there with me, it would be the perfect place in the world.

[00:31:40] Like, that was exactly how he described it. It’s just over time, obviously if your family is somewhere else or your friends are somewhere else, then it, it wears on you now and then, but he, he lived right by Bondi as well, and Oh my God. Yeah. Same thing. If, if I could pick up Sydney and drop it into North America, that would be done.

[00:31:57] That’d be a pretty heavy lift, but yeah, it would. And just on Canva, what an amazing company. And Melanie Perkins, the founder. Extraordinarily impressive lady. Yeah, he got a good one there. Continue. Yeah, totally. She’s, she’s been on the bucket list for this podcast for a while. She’s, she’s, that company is unbelievable.

[00:32:12] She’s awesome. But, all right, so then the, the other side of it, what’s, what’s somewhere that you’ve lived, I’ll let you say travel too as well, that maybe didn’t live up to what you expected of it. Lived nowhere. Really? I, I like la, I like Sydney. I liked Dublin. Obviously I like Philly. Even though that was more as a kid.

[00:32:28] I’ll give you US City ’cause we did it a, a a a a, uh, and, sorry, this, maybe this is, I shouldn’t go down this. No, I’m very curious. I remember doing the Southern States road trip a few, uh, maybe seven or eight years ago. We flew from Ireland to six Irish guys. We did Dallas, Austin, Houston, new Orleans, Nashville.

[00:32:47] Memphis, Jackson, Jackson, Nashville, Atlanta, new Orleans was the one we’d been looking the most forward to. I think, and maybe it’s just ’cause it wasn’t Mardi Gras or whatever, but it didn’t meet the expectation I had for it. Austin loved Nashville, loved. Memphis was the dark horse. We expected nothing of Memphis and it was amazing.

[00:33:05] New Orleans came up a little short, and actually it’s one of the reasons why I’m like, I need to go back to Mardi Gras. ’cause so many people speak highly of it. And maybe it was just the days we were there. You know yourself. There’s a lot of reasons why, but. That was a place that disappointed me a little bit in the US at least.

[00:33:21] Yeah, that’s totally fair. Uh, so my family going back four generations is from New Orleans, but No, no, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m from Cleveland. I was scared. You were gonna say Cleveland without gonna have to have an argument. Don’t say anything but New Orleans. No, I, I could totally see that. I’ve only been.

[00:33:37] And it was from my buddy’s bachelor party. So like I got the full bachelor party experience and obviously we pretty much stayed on Bourbon Street the entire time. So like, it was awesome. But we also, you know, we’ve heard from other people it’s like you, like you really don’t want to venture too much outside of that area.

[00:33:51] And then there, I mean, we, we have friends that went to Tulane and like, they loved it and, and like it, no, it’s seems like an awesome city overall. But yeah, it’s definitely all you kind of see and hear about it is just focused on that. And the tourist trap thing. So, so I, so I get you on that, but what a trip you had.

[00:34:05] And I’m with you on Memphis too. ’cause uh, I mean obviously Beal Street Food’s amazing. And then Beal Street Live music, uh, unbelievable. Like, I’m personally someone who likes that music style, like the blues. I like that better than the Nashville country stuff. So like, I thought it was cooler than Nashville even.

[00:34:20] But yeah, really, really cool. Uh, and now we have your travel recos, but

[00:34:29] so have a couple quick. Goofy segments here. This one’s called the unusual, so pet peeves, quirks, weird talents, does not have to tie to Houdini at all. Quirks. What’s something a little bit quirky about your personality that maybe your friends, family team, somebody calls you out for, but it’s just who you are?

[00:34:44] It makes you, you. I’m a very, uh, nearly positive to a fault person, I think is, uh, I get, I get a lot of like. Quite smiley, quite like I, I’m, I think you need to be, honestly, as a founder anyway, like you need that kind of glass, glass half full mentality. But I think I maybe have it to a fault. Like I’m a, like we will find a solution to the problem.

[00:35:05] Like there it will all be okay. Like that is very much my mentality and my attitude and I think that’s both professionally and personally. So that’s one I, I get a bit from people in terms of that, like nearly too positive. Sometimes I’m in the same boat as that there like. Max, why are you like, why are you so po?

[00:35:23] Why are you so optimistic all the time? Like I, I don’t know, but I’d rather be optimistic than not. So that’s my attitude as well. Yeah. Yeah, positively. All right. What is a pet peeve? You have something that kind of ticks you off a little bit, but really it’s not a big deal. Being late, but I’m also bad at it myself.

[00:35:39] So, uh, it’s one of these weird ones where I’m like, I get a bit. I like that there’s that little bit of annoyed when people are running late, but then equally I run late, probably more than other people run late, so then I get annoyed at myself. So, yeah, let’s go with that. I’m realizing you and I are more and more the same person, so I I get shit for running late all the time too.

[00:35:57] But you’re, you’re right. Like when, if you’re on the other side of it, like you understand why people get upset, but also it’s, as an entrepreneur, it’s really hard to. Like, so many things go like up and down every day. There’s got so many things to manage. It’s really hard to, uh, be, you know, it’s like some people like to be 10 minutes early to everything.

[00:36:15] Like it’s just, yeah, it’s a lot. So, all right. And then weird talents or party tricks. What’s something that you’re, you’re good at, but it doesn’t impact your business at all. It’s just like, Hey, this is a cool thing I can do. Does drinking count? Sure. Yeah. Ties into my next question. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[00:36:31] How long have you been an alcoholic? No, Irish. We’re solid. We’re, we’re able to tuck away a few points and, uh, definitely social person and like to go out and socialize with, with friends. When I can find the time is probably the biggest blocker and barrier there. Yeah. Talent is definitely a talent too.

[00:36:47] I’m good at maximizing the spare time. I have to try and put some fun stuff in there. Like you work a lot of long hours. I don’t have all the time in the world to carve out, but when I do, I’m like, right, we’re doing something good. We’re doing something fun. We’re going to a game. We’re going out where I’m rarely found sitting on the couch doing nothing.

[00:37:06] All right, well you called it. Let’s wrap up with, uh, another drinking question, and then it’ll lead into rapid fire q and A. You ready for it? Go for it. All right, let’s get wild. Personally, I’m a big beer fan whenever I think of Ireland, and the one time I was in Dublin and well, you know, we did one of those paddy wagon tours that went all, all out around everywhere.

[00:37:22] Cliff to Mo and all that. Anyway, I think of beer and of course you think of Guinness and Guinness, you know, the tour and all that stuff. And I heard that you’re a big cider fan. What, what’s, what do you think is the best brand of cider in the world? It’s an interesting one. Yeah. ’cause to your point, I’m like that weird Irish man that can’t drink beer because the weird Irishman sounds like a series of novels or something.

[00:37:43] Yeah. Well listen, there’s plenty of weird Irish men. I can assure you that those would be some good novels. I, yeah. Cider was, I drank a lot of it when I was younger. Like ERs was a big brand at Home. Orchard Thieves Magners. Um, I drink less of it now. I think I just got sick of it. ’cause it was the only thing I could drink when I was younger.

[00:38:00] Honestly, seltzers, alcoholic seltzers, like the high Noons and Whitelaw were a game changer as a gluten-free person. ’cause it was finally like a widespread drink that was everywhere that wasn’t a whiskey cook, but wasn’t, you know, a glass of wine. It was like that kind of same strength as a beer that was widespread and easy.

[00:38:16] So that honestly has been a game changer. But I would say traditionally Buller uh, Buller’s was probably the main and my favorite brand of cider traditionally. To answer your question. Yeah, great point on that. What do they call the ready to drink category or whatever the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I rarely have cider, but we went a few months ago and I’ve actually mentioned on this podcast before, ’cause I loved it so much.

[00:38:36] There’s a place, uh, not too far from us in New Jersey. So if you’re ever in New Jersey looking for, to rekindle your love with cider, it’s a place called Burnt Mills Cidery. And they just have like, I mean, we’re there on like a nice autumn day. It was really cool. It was packed and they had, I don’t know, like 12 different varieties of cider and it was so good.

[00:38:54] And my favorite was like, uh. Cranberry chai flavor. Like it had like a spice to, it almost tastes like a strong Belgian beer. It was, it was so good. Oh, nice. Okay. So, you know, so next time you’re in the middle of, uh, New Jersey, that’s your place, but okay. Irish food. What, what do you think is the most like underrated Irish food?

[00:39:13] The fact that we just have potatoes and veg with everything. Like our dinners growing up were like meat potatoes, two veg. Fish, potatoes, two veg stew, potatoes, veg and meat in a pot and stew it Like that was what we, and I honestly create, like, I miss it in terms of like the quality of that kind of meal was, was very high.

[00:39:31] So that’s honestly the, the simplest answer you think like shepherd’s pie, um, that, you know, I’d rate highly and others, but I think if you think Irish food, you just gotta think a meat or fish. Potatoes and vegetables, but good quality. Oh yeah. Um, huge potato fan as well. Uh, we were, my dad was just joking about this over the weekend.

[00:39:49] My late grandpa Henry used to always, like, the potatoes were always the favorite part of any meal. And he had like this always kind of like this and it would be like that potatoes. And he’d, um, you know, as he got older that like, he loved it. He wasn’t even Irish, but a big, uh, big fan potatoes nonetheless, any meal of the day.

[00:40:06] So, other food question I’m wondering about is like. This doesn’t have to be tied to Irish food at all, but just in general, what do you think is the best, like gluten-free or gluten-free safe food out there? What’s the tastiest. Pasta or spaghetti by a mile. They’re like, oh, in terms of gluten-free alternative, well, it’s actually you took that a different direction, but that’s an even better question.

[00:40:29] I’ll answer both. Mexican is really good for, for gluten-free because corn, like once you just get the corn tortilla or whatever, so Mexican is good. High food is good. When you think cuisine. Japanese is pretty grand as well, like sushi itself for the most part. Well, you can’t have the soy sauce but the tamari sauce, but put them over there.

[00:40:48] But yeah, in terms of gluten-free alternatives, the bread has come a long way. The pizza base have come a long way. The burger bones have come a long way. But in terms of the closest to like what is the one you can most likely trick a non-gluten free person into thinking is not gluten. Is real is like non-gluten free would be the spaghetti, I think is the strongest alternative in terms of the r and d and how far the product has come.

[00:41:11] Yeah, that’s phenomenal. You, you added a question to my question and, and answered ’em both so, so thank you for that. You’re welcome. And there’s have to, in Jersey City there’s a gluten-free brewery. Oh, departed Souls is the name that my friend Jason, who I mentioned at the start. Loves their beer as well, like gluten free beer.

[00:41:27] And I, I’m ama like when I tried it side by side, like you would never guess. Um, so it’s pretty imp impressed stuff too. It’s departed Souls and Soul is S-O-L-E-S, so that’s in Jersey City. So anyway, I’m cur, I’m curating a whole travel trip to Jersey for you, but yeah, it sounds like, it sounds like Jersey.

[00:41:43] Last one you mentioned you’re a big sports fan as well. What’s your all time favorite sports memory? Paul, there’s a lot. Mate, this is a dirty question. This is the hardest question you’ve asked me. I’m going to go with. The Rider Cup in Paris in 2018. I dunno if you’re a golf fan, that’s the tournament between Yeah, the US and Europe.

[00:42:07] Every, every, uh, every two years. And I’ve been to like massive soccer man, United Games, you know, rugby, world Cups, tennis Open. Like, I, I, you know, I’ve been to a lot of, a lot of big games and events, but for whatever reason, this event was just incredible. It was the weather, it was the. The banter between the American fans and the European fans.

[00:42:31] It was the, the tournament itself and how it played out and, and beating them and beating them. Beat meaning Europe, beating the American. Oh, I’m familiar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just incredible. It was such an amazing event. I’m actually, I’m really looking forward to the, the Ryder Cup. The next one. We obviously won again.

[00:42:49] Uh, there. Uh, recently last September, but in, in New York. But the next one is on, in Ireland in Adair manner in, in September 20, 27. And I will be there if I have to tunnel in underground to get into, uh, really looking forward to, there you go. You’re gonna build the, the new channel that connects, uh, Santa Monica to Ireland.

[00:43:10] That would be an easy build if that’s what it takes. That’s what I’ll do. No, that’s, that’s awesome. Heard that the, the friendly trash talk at the Ryder Cup is unmatched. That’s really, really cool that you’ve been, and that, and that you’re going. So, Dylan dmac, the Celiac, as you said, that sounds like a superhero.

[00:43:27] You call, you said Dylan the Celiac. Uh, really, really just an absolute blast talking to you and learning from you. Big fan of what you’re doing. Thanks again for, for making time for this and for, for all you do. So, uh, I know if anybody wants to learn more, they can do so at Fini. Uh, which is spelled as you think it is, fini.co.

[00:43:44] And then I know you’re on LinkedIn. Is there anyone, anywhere else that you wanna. Shout out, people can connect with you. Yeah. The, the website and LinkedIn are definitely the two best places. I think in, in, in kind of closing love to, to, to connect and talk with people who either have the problem on the consumer side or, or also work in either restaurants or, uh, place that serve food or in food tech platforms that we partner with a lot.

[00:44:05] Uh uh, and ultimately, it’s funny, I think the team of our conversation as it went, whether we were talking about food or drinking it, it all comes back to, I think like. Being social and going out for food with your friends, going out for drinks, with your friends, for, with your family, with your coworkers. I think it’s such a like critical fabric to how we live as like human beings.

[00:44:24] I really think it’s like really important to us and our social development we’re, yeah. Ultimately for, for me, my, I think my biggest goal is just trying to take away the friction point between all the people today who might be a lot, who might be listening, who feel like they can’t engage. As they would like to because they’re scared or nervous or don’t have the information to just wanna find a way to make that thing that so many people take for granted accessible to, to everyone.

[00:44:51] Uh, and that like an allergy or a dietary shouldn’t hold someone back. So that’s kind of, I suppose how I would wrap, wrap up what we’ve talked about, given that it kind of seems to play in nicely. Once again as the common thread throughout the interview, uh, you read my mind about the questions because we typically wrap up with final thoughts and I don’t think you could wrap it up any better than that.

[00:45:09] So we’re gonna stop right there. But thanks so much, Len. Really appreciate it. That means a lot. Not at all. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the chat as well.

[00:45:19] Thank you, Dylan. Thank you Houdini. Thank you wild listeners for tuning in. If you wanna become a wild viewer, wild watcher, TBD name as well, you can watch these video episodes @MaxBranstetter on YouTube. That’s YouTube, the channels @MaxBranstetter If you wanna learn more about the podcast or max podcasting, anything in this ballpark, you can do so at MaxPodcasting.com.

[00:45:45] That’s MaxPodcasting.com for all things. End of sentence for all things. Until next time, let your business run wild. Bring on the bongos!!

00:00
Fun is a choice. So choose to have fun.

00:18
A sweet hello. Welcome back to Wild Business Growth. This is your place to hear from a wild entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning, turning wild ideas into wild growth. I’m Max Brandstetter from Max Podcasting, and this is episode 352. Today’s guest is Jason Liebig. He is someone you can call a candy historian, a brand historian, nostalgia historian. He is the man behind CollectingCandy.com, the social media handles.

00:48
@CollectingCandy and he’s consulted for hit shows like Stranger Things, Mad Men, The Queen’s Gambit, The Goldbergs, Young Sheldon. And you can even find him starring in The Foods That Built America, Hazardous History with Henry Winkler, and more shows on the History Channel. In this episode, we talk all the nostalgia you can stomach ranging from Fun Dip to Kit Kat Bars.

01:12
to the incredible entrepreneurial stories behind some of your favorite candy brands out there. It is the big. Enjoy the show.

01:30
Already we are here with Jason Liebig who knows just one or two more fun facts about candy than the rest of our guests. uh Somebody who’s able to call himself a nostalgia historian can teach me how to pronounce the word nostalgia as well as uh just absolute amazing candy collector and you can see him on TV. So you can see his candies all over TV that he’s touched. That doesn’t sound right.

01:58
Jason, thank you so much for joining. How you doing today? I’m doing great, Max. Thank you so much for that questionable intro. I love it. You know, this is a we’re over 350 episodes now. I think that’s the first time an intro has been called questionable. So we’re clearly moving in the right direction, but so excited to talk all things candy. And before that, you see it all the time on social media these days. You see it all the time on TV, the word nostalgia and anything nostalgic. It gives you literally that that warm fuzzy feeling.

02:28
in your chest, but it seems like every year, nostalgia becomes more more important. we’re like, younger generations are like yearning for the memories of stuff we grew up with. Why is it that you think nostalgia like leaves such a strong impression and creates such strong like buying power? think nostalgia, know, nostalgia has been looked upon different ways by different people. Certainly, you know, there is an aspect of

02:58
The great philosophers, existential thinkers have always talked about living in the now, right? The past is the past, the future is the future, live in the now. These are powerful ideas and I believe in them. But I also believe in the power of history, certainly, and how history can inform our way forward and how history can teach us and it can give us joy because it can inform the now. uh But why is nostalgia more and more important? I would say A, that in the internet age,

03:27
um Certainly, it’s never been more accessible to us. And that, think, makes it… I always say accessibility makes things nostalgic. And so, if you couldn’t listen to the songs you grew up with, it would be harder to be specifically nostalgic for them. You could still have a relationship to them. And working in the space that I do, Candy Snacks, these CPG brands, and the history of those…

03:56
and the nostalgia attached to those. Coming into it when I did 25 years ago, much of it wasn’t Google-able. You couldn’t Google images of like an old candy wrapper or an old snack package. So it was much harder to connect to that part of your personal nostalgia. In some cases, I still get these emails every week, can you help me remember what this was called? And when your nostalgia exists in mythology, it’s harder to connect to it. But because we live in an age where so much is documented, so much has been dug up,

04:26
You know, people are always searching for lost media, old commercials, old TV shows that aren’t currently online to try to rescue them from old VHS tapes, et cetera, et cetera. As that becomes more accessible, people then can then plug into it more, they can have a stronger relationship to it. And that is, I believe, one of the reasons why nostalgia has become more important. Certainly, if you wanna talk about the speeding up of change in our lives,

04:52
You know, I think, what was it? Future Shock was a book written in 1970 or 71. This seminal book about how life and society and technology was speeding up so rapidly. We weren’t biologically designed to keep up with it. And that was 1970. And the speed at which life changes in the 21st century is 10 times that. So I think there’s an aspect of it allows us, it’s almost like a sort of calming effect.

05:20
as the world is rapidly speeding you around you in a blur sometimes. But nostalgia is also just, it’s very personal. When people hear, oh my God, you’re a candy historian, you’re the nation’s foremost candy historian, you know a lot about food history or whatever, people always have a story they want to tell me. And here’s the thing, I am probably more excited to hear that story than they are excited to tell me about it. I love hearing these stories. Certainly where candy is concerned, specifically.

05:48
Those stories will almost always be connected to a person and a place that from their childhood filled with love, know, and filled with connection and filled with people. You know, when people say they’re nostalgic for some candy or whatever of their past or whatever it is, some potato chip flavor that doesn’t exist or the way McDonald’s used to look or the way Taco Bell used to look, I always like to say it’s not really about the Taco Bell.

06:16
It’s not really about the Crunchwrap Supreme or the flavor of Doritos. It’s about the people and the people that were there in your life at that moment and the times you had with them. Almost always, don’t get me wrong. Like you can really obsess over the thing, but that thing is almost always connected to the people that were around it at the time. And in the way that music can provide this sort of little time machine, it can take you back to a place and the people or a smell of a certain perfume.

06:43
Seeing a certain brand packaging can take you back to a place and it can trigger a part of your brain. Neuroscience teaches us this, right? It can take you back to a place in a memory in a profound way that can’t get you there any other way. Those beautifully said and I was thinking the whole time, I was going back through my Rolodex as we use when I was growing, no, I’m just kidding. But like going back through my memories of like candies and snacks that mean a lot to me and.

07:11
I have to shout out my mom because her like famous cookie and know, sweets recipe was Reese’s cookies. Or if you say Reese’s cookies, I know there’s a whole debate about that. Anyway, she like in like a muffin tray or cookie tray, whatever, whatever. What have the mini Reese’s cups around that is like cookie dough. And then so like when it bakes, especially when it’s fresh out of the oven, it’s like the chocolate is like melt in your mouth and there’s a chocolate chip cookie around it.

07:37
So good, shout out my college roommate Tyreek who was always craving those and always welcomed any gifts like those. so that’s like in our family, even though my brother’s allergic to peanut butter, she made Hershey Kiss versions too. That treat and that snack is like so close to home and yeah, full of love as you said. Yes, but to your other question, why do know, why do brands tap into this? Look, brands have very readily tapped into this idea that look, brands are just trying to connect to consumers.

08:03
If you can connect emotionally to a consumer, you connect your product emotionally to a consumer, that’s 70 % of the way to get them to buy it. In the capitalist enterprise, nostalgia is a very, very effective selling tool. it’s also, look, it’s just a great way to connect people. Look, Santa Claus was, the modern version of Santa Claus was kind of invented, you know, to create this nostalgic bond. So many big things in business. Like I think Disney parks almost exists entirely out of nostalgia.

08:32
When Walt Disney designed Main Street USA in Disneyland, he didn’t choose turn of the century America because, this is going to be quaint and provincial and won’t that be nice to have a park. That was his childhood, right? That’s what America looked like in his childhood. This sort of transition from the pre-industrial age to the industrial age. So the first cars, you so the old timey cars and the barber store quartets, that’s the world that Walt Disney grew up in.

08:58
And so that was, it was nostalgic for him. And now it’s nostalgic for generations of Americans because that to them is that place. So anytime you can get a shortcut, anytime you can connect and create a bond with consumers, it’s great. think, you know, look, I’m a big fast food fan. think McDonald’s has really taken their time to come around to realizing they’ve got all this valuable IP just literally sitting in a cabinet.

09:27
um For years, you know, they were still doing their licensing things, movies, cartoons, whatever license, trying to get people into the stores, you know, another, and they’re bringing back Monopoly, although now the Monopoly promo is nostalgic, right? It’s nostalgic for people from like the late 80s and the 90s. But they finally started tapping into their own repertoire of nostalgia. They really stayed away from the McDonaldland characters. They would rather get like a hip hop star or some music person to come in and do their meal.

09:55
But now they’re like, no, fuck it, let’s do a Grimace meal. You let’s do a Hamburglar promotion. Like that’s us. We did all that. That’s one of my favorite lines I’ve ever heard. Fuck it, let’s do a Grimace. Yes. No, but and when they did that, I mean, right now I think over in China, there’s a big Grimace promotion. I’m super jealous. Like I wish I was over there because there’s all this great Grimace stuff. Even in Australia, I think, and maybe part of Asia, like here in America, we’ve got the Grinch meal right now. It’s an adult happy meal, essentially.

10:25
The Grinch meal, what are the prize? You get socks, you get Grinch socks. Perfectly fine. I love Dr. Seuss, I love the Grinch. What do you get in Australia? You get snow globes with Grimace, Bertie and Hamburglar and the Grinch. I’m like, come on, give us the snow globes, American McDonald’s. We deserve them. To your point, nostalgia, it just works. It takes you to a place where you feel safe, you know, and a lot of people wanna feel safe when they’re buying a product. And you know, a neuroscientist,

10:54
could define it little better, but I do think there are multiple tracks of nostalgia. There’s literal nostalgia, and then there’s sort of nostalgic anchors that just make you feel like, oh, this reminds me of this. It’s not the exact thing, but it reminds me of that. So there are a lot of different ways that brands and companies can utilize nostalgia to try to use it as a tool for their brand, for their sales.

11:19
So let’s get to something you’re nostalgic about, and that’s your candy collection. Sure. As we always say on the show, no one becomes a candy historian overnight, let alone the first, know, the foremost candy historian. How did you, what was like the moment that inspired you to start collecting like candy packaging and things of that aura era? oh

11:42
lore. It’s a great question, Max. I did grow up being a collector. I collected comic books. I collected baseball cards, trading cards, Star Wars cards. ah I continued to collect comic books and read comic books up through high school and into college. I suppose I might have taken a couple years off in there, but when I was in college, things really took off. Comics were getting very mature. Things like Sandman, things like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen. These are very complex.

12:08
very mature storylines. you felt like, it didn’t have to be so embarrassing to read comic books, even though it’s still a little wise. After college, I came to New York to work in the comic book business, and I was successful. I got a job at DC Comics. I would be reading my com. I would be the only person reading comics in the train, but that’s OK in the subway. Then I got a job at Marvel Comics. My first job was a job in marketing, but my job at Marvel was in creative editorial. And so I got to work with all the artists, the designers.

12:38
the writers, and it was a fabulous time. And during that five year stretch that I worked at Marvel Comics, I spent a lot of time in the bullpen with our designers, laying out cover design. I had no formal design training, and I basically got a design education by sitting over the shoulder of people, asking questions, watching what they were doing, and listening, learned about, you know, I remember the first time I heard the term negative space, right? This was not a term I’d heard in my college experience or my high school or anything.

13:06
So I learned about those things. I learned about publishing terms. I learned about CYMK, know, publishing printing colors, not RGB, you know, all these other things. Trapping. Nobody was ever trapping anything right in the early days of digital comic book coloring. So all these interesting terms came into my lexicon. And about two years after I left the industry, I was shooting a film in Boston, Massachusetts, and I had a day off. And because it was 2002,

13:33
I didn’t have a smartphone because they did not exist. I did not have Instagram or TikTok to kill time. So I went down to a Barnes and Noble bookstore. I was a regular customer at Barnes and Noble. I was hanging out in the design section of the bookstore. And in the design section, I came across a book called Crazy Kids Food, Crazy Kids Food. And it was a small book, absolutely packed to the gills with photos of kids food packaging from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

14:01
That book written by Dan Goodsell, who’s now a very close friend of mine, and Steve Rodin, who unfortunately passed away a couple years ago, Steve and Dan had created this really awesome little digest book filled with all this colorful packaging of the past. I bought it, took it back to my hotel room, and I poured over it probably 20 times that night. It was very easy flip, you know, it very easy flip through not a lot of text. I, somewhere around then, and this was probably the inciting notion,

14:29
I had the notion, you know what, when I get back to New York, I wanna have three things for my office. I wanna have a Hot Tamales box from when I was a kid, a Marathon Bar chocolate bar wrapper from when I was a kid, and a Super Sugar Crisp cereal box from when I was a kid. And I wanna put them in the office, and won’t that be fun? Those will be like, that’s like my Star Wars poster or whatever that I have in the office. And that’ll be fun. And when I return to New York, I go to eBay, I look for these things, you can’t just find them on eBay.

14:58
um They were incredibly hard to curate. I think I got my first Marathon Bar rapper like seven years later. It took me, I think, two years to get my, first Hot Tamales box. That Hot Tamales box saved by a flight attendant because Ricky Henderson was on her flight and she got him to, it’s the only thing she had for him to autograph. So it had Ricky Henderson’s autograph on it. Oh my God. Yeah. And all I could think was, oh.

15:27
I wish this didn’t have that autograph on it. Even though I I love Ricky Henderson. He’s great. But I was like, oh, I kind of wanted just a clean He was known for stealing basses. So he stole the packaging too. That’s right. He did. But I got it. And that was, you know, and that was the beginning. And yet even then, the cereal box was far easier because there are a little more, there are a few more cereal boxes out there. Still not very many. But it took time. And I would eventually through a series of events,

15:54
find a collection, a collection sort of came to me from a guy that I’d bought a cereal box from online. And we were having a conversation. He goes, oh man, I see you share a lot of candy packages on your Flickr, which was where I was scanning things obsessively, sharing images. And he goes, you know, my dad, his dad, by the way, is like the nation’s number one tiki sculptor. His dad is a fairly famous tiki artist, right? I was going to guess. I could tell based on context clues. And so.

16:22
He said, yeah, my dad saved all of this candy packaging when he was like a kid back in the late 60s and early 70s and through the 70s and into the 80s. I was like, oh my God, would you be interested in it? And I was like, well, of course. As I acquired that, there was so much candy in there and candy as a category had not been documented well at all online. I will tell journalists that when I started back in 2002, if there had been a website where you could look at pictures of every candy package ever,

16:52
I wouldn’t have ever started collecting. I’d been like, great, I can spend like an hour of a day, an hour a day for the next month going through this website. And won’t that be fun? That’ll be great. And then I’ll move on with my life. As it turns out, there were maybe across all of the internet, a couple of hundred, maybe 300 images of old candy packages, almost every single one of them published by Dan Goodsell, the guy from that, co-wrote that book, and a lovely woman named Darlene Lacey, who runs a website called the Candy Wrapper Museum.

17:20
And aside from the work they had done in the space, there was really nothing out there. So because I have a bit of madness in me and probably had a good bit of OCD, well, when I got that big collection from the Tiki guy, I scanned and posted all 700 pieces of it. And I just kept doing that. And in the next decade, I would probably share about, I don’t know, anywhere from six to 10,000 pieces from my ever-growing collection.

17:50
And I always had a rule. I had this rule initially. I don’t have it so much anymore. But I said, if you could Google an image of this package, I’m not going to share it. Because why? Who cares? It’s already out there. Keep in mind, I’m now sharing 10,000 pieces that you couldn’t even see online before. And so, and unfortunately, because Pinterest didn’t exist, Instagram didn’t exist, Google image shirts I don’t think existed until a year or two after I started, I had no idea.

18:18
how important it would be to watermark anything. And so now, I occasionally get in arguments with people that’s like, that’s not your image. And I was like, it is, man, that’s my photo, I’m sorry. But yeah, but I watermark kind of like a jerk now, but that’s just because I shared like 20,000 things that are now that everybody takes ownership of. And that’s fine, it is what it is. ah It’d be nice to get credit, just credit, I’m not asking for a dollar.

18:42
But so, yeah, but so I think that collection that I bought, that would have been 2009, I think is when I fully leaned in on Kandy. Three years later, I would launch collectingcandy.com. That’s when I’d also launch my Instagram account, which I’m still very active on. And over the next decade, I would publish probably, I think 647 articles on that website, about 6,000 images all out of my own stuff, all things you couldn’t really Google before. It was just a massive amount of work and time.

19:10
And I wish I had that much time to devote to it still. Because I know you love this stuff. When you said that book, would you call it crazy crazy kids food with a K? Of course. When you said that the food that sparked into my head was when Heinz ketchup did the different colored ketchup. Easy squirts. Yeah, easy squirt. Yeah, because I remember that because like I was a kid at that time. Like you had to try it. So like I think I remember the green ones, the purple ones, obviously not the longest lasting.

19:40
product in history, but I’ll give them credit for being and being a crazy kid’s food. Heinz Easy Squirts, I do have a full collection of those bottles. I don’t like three-dimensional things, but my brother’s kids had the green one. And as like a collector and archivist, was like, listen, these are just too fun. And I finally completed, only like three months ago, I finally completed all the colors of the bottles in their regular format, like not with like a promotion on.

20:07
How many different colors were there? There was, let me see, was green, there was red, they did do a just a standard red color. Yeah, that was very clever though. let me see, green, red, purple, um blue, and then there’s like a mystery, which again now is just black. If you try to open this up now it’s just black goo. But the color of the bottle was sort of rainbow, it was not rainbow colored inside though, they just randomly give you whatever color. And then about two years ago, there was a uh weird discovery.

20:37
of a follow-up of Heinz Easy Squirt like pizza-flavored sauce. And yeah, there were three weird test-market things and a guy came up with a box of them. And so me and like three other collectors each got like a set of these and they’re wild. And they, believe because it was came out of Pittsburgh, which is where Heinz is located. We believe they test-marketed a later run extension of the brand, but it never went outside of a test market area. So anyway, yes, Heinz Easy Squirt’s fantastic.

21:05
I love weirdly colored things. think Pop Secret did like a multicolored popcorn. ORAIDA, I’d love to get a package for this. ORAIDA did like crazy fries, like different colored French fries. So they were like green French fries. That’s like the low-hanging fruit for for a kid’s product. Just like do it a different color and like, Oh my God, mom, we gotta, we gotta get the purple one. When I talk about innovation with brands or companies or people, I was like, listen, sometimes all you need to do.

21:33
is change the delivery system. Changing the delivery system can change everything. That’s not hyperbole and that is not exaggeration. And there are stories in the history of food and CPG brands where you change the delivery system and suddenly everybody’s super into it. I’ll just call you a hall of fame collector. You’re a fantastic collector. So many of us growing up collecting something for my family and I when I was younger. In addition to my dad’s baseball cards, we had

22:00
bobbleheads. like all the bobbleheads you get at sporting events, especially baseball games. So lots and lots of Cleveland bobbleheads in our basement growing up. Anyway, what have you learned about collecting over the years? Like what are some good ways, if you want to have an impressive collection of whatever, what are some ways to kind of have some shortcuts or tips there? Oh, that’s a, gosh, that’s a really good question. I’ve collected things my whole life. The last 20 years I’ve been, don’t get me wrong, all of the drives of a collector are in me.

22:28
Unfortunately, like I’m probably more of an archive. People always say, oh, can I come and look at the collection? I said, it’s really a working archive. I don’t have displays or anything like that. Shortcuts are, you know, unlimited money and unlimited space. I mean, that’s the best shortcut. If you can inherit a collection, that’s great. I don’t know, cause I know people, I know like a guy who’s built a tremendous collection by going around and buying other people’s collections. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve…

22:55
I’ve inherited massive collections of this material when I’ve been fortunate, and there’s not many out there, when I’ve been fortunate enough to find them. And again, I’m not an investor collector. know many great baseball card investor collectors. I approach this material a little differently. I understand that and I respect it. I approach this from the joy perspective, you know? And certainly as a historian, like look, I’m trying to unlock the histories of these brands, trying to build them together like puzzle pieces, like an archeologist. That’s really the work I do.

23:25
As a collector, I think, you know, you just follow your joy a little bit and try to put something together. And hopefully, every piece you have will tell a story. Before scrapbooking became an organized thing, when people would take road trips or vacations, they would save things from their hotel, you know? And so it’s not that they were obsessed with a Do Not Disturb sign or a key fob from a Holiday Inn or a matchbook.

23:52
they would look at that and it would remind them of a time. It really calls back to what I talked about. With candy, know, souvenirs and collecting things could help tell a story. That can easily, again, turn into like hoarding or just obsessive collecting. Like, oh, have to have every issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And as long as it brings you joy, good. You know, I mean, that’s my thing. If it brings you joy and no one’s getting hurt, great. um Do it, enjoy it. I think my journey in this category is so…

24:21
unique and insane, you know, and unmanageable, I think, for even myself at times. I don’t know. Like if someone wanted to say, oh, I want to start collecting comic books, I would say just, you know, well, hopefully just find a comic book you really like with a writer, with a creative team, you know, and build your experience from that. The thing about love, nerdy hobbies, and probably nerdy isn’t even fair to say anymore, people who are obsessed with craft beer or coffee or whatever,

24:49
Save things that will remind you of the, collect the things that will remind you of the thing that you love about that thing. And if you can do that, whether it’s records, whether it’s bobbleheads, know, souvenirs from vacations, you know, I, like I said, I love fast food stuff. I’ll have fast food items, you know, packaging. I was just showing a friend of mine, I have like an original 1968 Taco Bell sleeve that a taco burger might’ve come in or some taco, you know, so all that stuff.

25:18
because I’m obsessed with brands, those things are meaningful to me. But in your personal life, I don’t know, I don’t think you need to take a shortcut. think take the long road, it’s a better road. Words to collect by, think following joy is a good route, no matter what you’re doing. Exactly. And for you, like if you look at your career, it’s really cool, because you made, if you can call it that pivot, you made the pivot from comic books to candy and snacks. And somewhere along the way,

25:44
someone decided that you have enough credibility to put you on TV. That’s a pretty cool jump too. How did you brush up your chops enough to become a true historian and know enough about all these brands and this history to, well, one, be featured on TV yourself, but also to become a consultant for some amazing shows like Mad Men, Stranger Things, Young Shot, you name it, really, really cool projects.

26:06
You know, the thing that I realized early on, and I didn’t know the terminology, but a business guy told me, he goes, you really found a white space. Right? Wait, so you found a white space and a negative space. You’re like the king of spaces here. He says you really found a white space. And he’s right. Like, I found a place where no one was playing in that sandbox. And you know, the funny thing is, one of the reasons why, because I was collecting probably when I was a collector,

26:32
Early on, was probably collecting cereal boxes a little more because there were more out there to buy and find at the time. But then I was sort of like, oh, this is getting, there are too many other people collecting. I just want to go to a place that I can just call my own. And so when I found this collection, it opened me up to sort of like, okay, no one else is really collecting candy. I’ll just do that. But in so doing, through, again, nostalgia and just an interest in the fact that no one else had done it. Like I said, if someone else had done it, if all the stuff was known,

27:01
I don’t think there’s any way I’d be doing it. I don’t think I would have cared. If someone had already collected and set up a museum or set up a website or published a book with all this stuff in it, I’d be like, okay, good, someone did it. The fact that no one had done it, was like, well, this is kind of fun. Even today, this year I made multiple discoveries of things and brand extensions that I didn’t know existed that are fully undocumented. And so this sense of discovery is a big part of the journey.

27:29
The head of the art department from Mad Men, she gave me this great quote, which I’ve never published, but I always share with people. They were looking for stuff for an episode and they got to me. And then months later, they were looking for something very different and that path also got to me. And she said, wow, all the roads lead to Jason. And I suppose in an elegant way, that is one of the ways I made the jump. Certainly working with Mad Men.

27:59
It was, well, I had the stuff and no one else had the stuff. At least no one had published it. There may have been people with a full room of it, right? But they, you know, but the world didn’t know. When people went on and they started Googling looking for like an old FAO Schwartz shopping bag from 1968, the only image they found was mine. When Stranger Things Season One was being developed, you know, and they were in there, their props department was looking for a 1980s Eggo waffles box, the

28:27
only image of a 1980s Eggo waffle box on the entirety of the internet. Well, it was this one right here. This guy right here. This is the Eggo box that all of the Season 1 Eggo waffle boxes were made out of.

28:44
I want to flip it on its head a little bit because you, mean, as part of your research and as part of, you being an expert in what you’re an expert in, you’ve come across so many amazing stories of like candy entrepreneurship. So like how, how candy brands were started or invented. So I was wondering if you could just share, you know, a couple here, maybe just some, fascinating entrepreneurial story of how a candy came to be. One that comes to mind because it’s easy for me to tell.

29:12
is the story that I launched my website with. uh Now, like I said, I think I published 650 articles on my website over a period of like six or seven years principally. And so a lot of them I spending like a day on or a day or two on, having years of research behind me. But when I launched the website, I launched it with a feature on the history of Big League Chew. I did the biggest story of Big League Chew ever.

29:37
And I spent a year on that post, right? I’m gonna spend a year on the first post and then I’m gonna spend like six hours on every other post after that. But across that year, I interviewed Jim Boughton, who was the partner of Rob Nelson. Rob Nelson, it was his invention with help from Todd Field, the Batboy of the Portland Mavericks. But here’s a guy, great education, but he was a pitcher.

30:00
and he ended up at a certain point in his career out in Portland pitching for the Portland Mavericks and being a pitching coach for the Portland Mavericks. Jim Bouton, former New York Yankee, also out there. The Portland Mavericks in the 70s are best described as like the real life bad news bears. A little bit like what the Savannah Bananas are incredibly successful at doing. They basically took independent baseball at the Portland Mavericks in the 1970s and they turned it into a show, right? They really turned it into a show.

30:29
And so I think the Savannah bananas live in the shadow of the Portland Mavericks. But again, I’m not taking anything away from the Savannah bananas. They are amazing at what they do. And they deserve all the credit. So here’s Rob Nelson. And Rob Nelson will tell the story that, you know, he was seeing uh the bullpen and, you know, guys were spitting tobacco in their shiny new cleats, you know, and he was not a tobacco user. And he was like, ah, it’s too bad. There’s nothing else that, there’s not another option for us, right?

30:58
And there was a bat boy, Todd Field, who is now Oscar nominated Todd Field, famous director in Hollywood. But he was the bat boy of the Portland Mavericks. He had like cut up, I think, black licorice, put it in like a pouch. And so Rob was like, that’s a pretty good idea. I wonder if we could do that with bubble gum. So he ended up going with Todd Field. They went to Todd Field’s mom’s house. Todd Field’s mom is named Candy, Candy Field.

31:26
I mean, that’s just meant to be. Right? Yeah, it’s Kismet, as they say. And Rob, think, out of like some magazine, ordered a homemade bubblegum kit out of the back of some magazine and ordered it up and they fried up their first batch of bubblegum, cut it up into little strips, put it in a pouch. And that was the first test batch of what would become Big League Chew. Rob came up with the name, but he talked to Jim Bouton about it. Jim Bouton, former New York Yankee, former broadcaster.

31:54
author of the seminal behind the scenes book on baseball, Ball Four. The first really expose, know, very controversial expose on the behind the scenes of baseball. But Jim Bowen was an entrepreneur, lifelong entrepreneur, and he looked at that, he was like, hey, there’s something there, Rob. He goes, if we partner together, I’ll introduce you to the right people, I’ll invest some money into developing it. And they shopped it around to everybody, but they ended up at Wrigley, and they showed it to them, showed them the name.

32:23
And Wrigley was like, oh, we’re interested in this. One of our guys over at our Amaral Confections plant, over at Naperville, Illinois, he’s like a crazy mad scientist with all this stuff. He’s figured out how to shred gum, you know, like in a machine-wise. He’s figured out how do this. But we didn’t know what to do with it. This though, this format that you’ve got here, this is cool. Like we could go with this. So they’re like, what we’d like to do is we’d like to license the name and the branding from you. And you know, and we’ll give you a percentage of the sales or whatever. And what do you think?

32:53
And so they went with it. Now, here’s the part that I think all entrepreneurs should hear. First of all, I don’t think Wrigley had high hopes for Big League Chew. They had a lot of products coming out that they would come out for six months, two years. They were like, ah, this is probably no big deal. And if you look, and as a historian, I’ve looked back over internal, they’re an internal company magazine, the same year they came out with a product called Chewbops, which were little record-shaped slabs of gum, circular with a little, they looked like little mini records.

33:21
But they came in little record album sleeves and little LP sleeves that they got licensed for actual records that you could get at the record store. So they were spending all this money to get Aerosmith and, you know, all these famous bands, Blondie, Kiss, The Beatles. So there were all these things. They spent four pages talking about Chewbops in their company magazine. And then they spent like a little square talking about Big League Chew. Just a little paragraph. It was a little sort of an afterthought. And I think that’s definitely what they thought of Big League Chew. They didn’t think much of it initially.

33:50
Big Leecher in their first year sold like 16 million pouches. That’s how successful it was. And I think in a year or two, they did 16 million pouches. That netted Rob Nelson and Jim Brown a fair amount of money. uh More so than they could have possibly imagined. But here’s the crazy part. Rob Nelson tells me, he goes, you know, if they would have offered us a hundred grand to buy it outright, we would have sold it. And he goes, I would have paid off my parents’ mortgage.

34:15
and I would have gone back to being a teacher and wouldn’t have that have been great, right? Oh, look at that. But they had no confidence in it, so they just gave, they threw us a licensing amount, and I’ve become a bubblegum mogul over the last 45 years. And it’s true. And so don’t sell your ideas, people. Hold onto them. Unless you’ve built it up like a billion dollar brand and then do what you will. But, you know, or hold onto a piece of it because you just never know.

34:44
When you put it in the right hands, it can blow up. That’s that story. And I’ll tell you one other little story. Because Big League Chew is sort of this beautiful story. It’s an all-American story about a guy who developed a thing. But there was a company. Well, if you know what Fun Dip is, if you know what Sweet Tarts are, you know this company. They would be called Sunline in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the 1930s, they launched a product called Fru-tola, which became Fru-zola, because you couldn’t call it fruit.

35:13
It was basically almost like a little Kool-Aid in a little packet, little paper packet, and it was such a sugary powder. And they sold it out of a cart. And as business went on, it was very successful. They renamed it to a thing called Licomade. They were really trying to focus on it being a candy. They sound like AI-generated names. Yeah, Licomade. From an AI brainstormed Well, Licomade is actually the functional part of Fun Dip. If you know what Fun Dip is, little sticks. Yeah, the powder you’re dipping it in is Licomade powder.

35:42
pretty much unchanged since like 1938. And actually if you look on a package, even today, if you look on a pack of Fun Dip, you will see the word Lick-O-Made written on there, and small print around the logo. Unfortunately, Lick-O-Made by itself stopped being manufactured about two years after Fun Dip came out, because like, oh my God, the kids just like the sticks. So Lick-O-Made was selling very well, so much so that the founder’s son, guy named Menlo Smith, moved the company to St. Louis. They were now distributing Lick-O-Made across the country.

36:11
And here’s what I talked to, we talked about format earlier and they were doing well, but people still were, sometimes even the retailers were confused that it wasn’t a candy product because in the packet it looked too much like Kool-Aid. Is this for drinks? Is this a beverage? Where do we stock it? They said, you know what, gosh, we need a way to like communicate that this is candy. If that was your mission and you were like a grad student or whatever, you’re working on your management degree or something, it’s like, oh, can we change the marketing? Can we come up with a quick jingle?

36:38
Can we change the packaging? know, can we show a picture of kids enjoying it like candy? Yeah, you could do all that. What they did was they took the exact same product, that little sugary powder in multiple flavors, a little tart, a little sweet, and they put it in a paper straw, colorful paper straw, they bent off the ends of it, and they rebranded it into Pixie Stix. And when they did that, everybody immediately understood that it was candy, and sales went through the roof. And that’s why I say you just never know.

37:08
all you might need to do is change the delivery system. it changed, literally it changed their sales like by a margin of I think a factor of like five or 10. I had no idea those were cousins. No, they’re literally the same product in a different package. Now, if you want to get even crazier, if you want to get even crazier, that was like 1958, 1959. Pixie Sticks now are selling like gangbusters. They’re doing really well. So suddenly this company out of St. Louis is selling sugary powder.

37:37
to kids across America, right? Sugary powder is everywhere. Well, one of their research guys was like, listen, lot of parents have complaints out there. Like, they’re getting the sugary powder everywhere. It’s in the seat cushions, it’s in their bed, it’s on the floor, we’re ants, right? Nobody wants ants. They’re like, I wonder what we can do about that. And Menlo Smith himself, the son of the founder, now the head of the company, is like, okay, he happened, well, he was in St. Louis.

38:06
One of the other great products that came out of St. Louis is a product called Tums, the antacid. And Menlo Smith had developed a relationship with a guy from Tums. So he was like, listen, can I bring my Pixie Sticks powder down to your factory and can we see, can we take it from one of your old tablet making machines and see if we can press it into a tablet? And that’s what they did. And when they were done, it worked. So they got these pressed. They now took Lick-O-Made slash Pixie Sticks powder, pressed it together.

38:35
And what did they have? Well, they ended up inventing sweet tarts and that is sweet tarts. So sweet tarts are literally the exact same product as Pixie Stix and Lick-It-Made just in compressed dextrose format. Oh my God, that’s brilliant. It’s all the same. It makes me think of how like, I remember when I was college, we saw some video about this. It was about like being operationally efficient with your business and how Taco Bell is like.

39:01
Like they don’t use that many ingredients. Maybe they use more now, but they don’t use that many ingredients, but they, like you were talking about with, with packaging or distribution, they present things in different ways. So like it might be the same meat and all their different offerings, but like, know personally, I would love to eat a meat burrito, a ground beef burrito. I would love to eat a ground beef taco. I’d love to eat ground beef in a crunch wrap even like they’re so brilliant with that. And so it’s really cool to hear that in the candy space. do that as well.

39:26
No, I’ve made efforts to interview the people who used to work for the company. I’ve interviewed Menlo Smith. He is 98 years old and he is still alive. I actually spent two hours with him about a month ago. I flew myself at St. Louis, sat down, got him on camera, interviewed him to tell me that story personally, because I did hear it kind of two years earlier. But one of the things I heard from many employees of that company is like, listen, we really only made like three things and we just kept remixing different ways. We came up with

39:55
over 100 products out of those three ingredients, essentially. If you’ve ever heard of chewy sweet tarts, very chewy sweet tarts, they still make them. Chewy sweet tarts are just them taking tangy taffy, which is now branded as Laffy Taffy, but taking Laffy Taffy and mixing it in with the sweet tart material. And so you just mix the Lick-O-Made powder and a degree of tangy taffy, and that’s how you get chewy sweet tarts. Literally, it’s like three products remixed all together in 17 different ways. But yes, Taco Bell.

40:23
Again, very limited amount of ingredients, but the way you remix them is remarkable. And so that is, that’s a really fun way. I mean, it’s funny. When I was at Marvel Comics, had a president, there were many presidents of the company when I was there, but one of them said, basically all these books are the same. It’s just one guy fighting crime and like a leader and like five people in the team. was like, I get it. Like Daredevil’s kind of the same as Spider-Man, you know, but they are and they aren’t. But the way you remix them,

40:52
is amazing. But to me, again, like changing format of things, if you can find the right delivery system for the right product, it can be a complete game changer. I think when people are thinking about ways to innovate or ways to market, it’s a great way to consider differentiating things. An evolution of all that stuff, because believe it or not, I’m not gonna get into it, there’s a through line between sweet tarts and nerds. It’s a story. Without sweet tarts, nerds would not exist, I promise you. But I won’t tell the whole story.

41:22
But then nerds exist, you jump forward to 2020 and nerds gummy clusters, they didn’t just change the delivery system of nerds. There was a lot of formulation, the gummy, but the nerds gummy cluster has taken nerds from a $50 million a year brand in five years to a $900 million plus year brand. And that is a thousand percent increase in, no, that’s almost a 2000 % increase in sales.

41:51
in under five years. That’s a very dangerous game you just got into trying to do mental math on a podcast. Yes. Spelling and math are two things that don’t bode well in interviews.

42:06
Let’s remix our way. We’re going to wrap up. This is going to be a hybrid. We’re going to wrap up with rapid fire Q and A, but it’s also going to be a hybrid with segment. do sometimes called the unusual because there’s just so many unusual candies that I want to dive into here. So this is obviously candy focused. You couldn’t have seen that coming. All right. You ready for it? Let’s do it. All right. Let’s get wild. What would you say all time is like the most unusual candy ever created? Oh, well, we live in a world that

42:33
Unusual is like the rule, right? Weird brand collaborations, weird flavors. um But I’m gonna step back from the modern because there’s so many crazy things that are purposely crazy that I’m gonna step back and I’m gonna give you two. um And they are both from the same brand. They’re both from the Lifesavers brand. Lifesavers don’t seem so crazy and, you know, that they would do weird things. But in 1948, uh Lifesavers of America released a product called

43:01
You can say what I said, Pepo Mint, Spear O-Mint with the O meaning to… So everything that had an O-Mint. uh They released a product called Molass-O-Mint, which was the great flavor of molasses and mint. Which I thought was pretty crazy. In Australia, around the same time, the Australian Lifesavers Arm released a flavor of lifesavers called Musk. And Musk lifesavers are still made.

43:29
uh Musk is a flavor of confection in Australia and South Africa. If you’ve never had it, you know, and if you ever get the opportunity to try a Musk lifesaver, do it at your own peril. That said, someone had asked me what I thought of Musk flavored lifesavers and I said, it was akin to biting into my grandmother’s makeup. Oh, we can all relate to that. Very strange, right? It was like that. That’s the only way to describe it. There’s no other flavor profile that fits it.

43:59
So yeah, like it was just super weird super bizarre What was it? I just got the Oreo Thanksgiving dinner inspired Oreos, which was an online release uh And I there’s a turkey and stuffing flavor Oreo in that box and you can see it on my social media You can see me trying it. It’s terrible. It’s like a dog food food flavored Oreo I can’t believe well, I can’t believe that they made Thanksgiving Oreos. It’s just proof that anybody will will try anything

44:26
Especially candy historians. I’m with you. would would try that too. you have no matter how disgusting it is. All right. What? So category we haven’t really talked about, but chocolate. So like chocolate is obviously huge. One of the most beloved flavors or whatever you want to call it out there. What would you say is like one of the most creative uses of chocolate in history? Oh, I mean, look, we live in a really innovative time. People always ask me like

44:53
what’s the most innovative period in the history of confectioner chocolate or candy? And I would say there are really two periods. There are really the earlier part of the 20th century when everyone, like there was literally a chocolatier trying to create a brand in almost every town in America, or the last 20 years. The last 20 years, there’s been an explosion that has in some ways mirrored the explosion of coffee in this country, craft beer in this country, where you have a lot of centers of people doing in.

45:21
incredibly uh complex Formulations small batch bean to bar a lot of stuff happening here in Brooklyn in the Pacific Northwest Portland But there’s not an area of the country where someone isn’t doing something interesting with chocolate in the United States Gosh, there’s so many people like Mast brothers I mean people started putting you know hot peppers into chocolate probably 15 years ago Maybe even 20 years ago. So the flavor profiles of chocolate the levels of dark chocolate that we’re consuming

45:49
are at levels they’ve never been before. Certainly you have parallel development happening now over the cannabis industry, right? So there’s cannabis in, you know, that’s a parallel. I watch as closely as I can, but it’s harder to grab hold of that because it’s very segmented and balkanized a little bit because the lack of nationwide legality of it. So there’s just a lot of really interesting things happening. Because again, you can go into Whole Foods and you will find just a whole slew of $10, $15 chocolate bars.

46:19
and the range of ingredients, pineapple you’ll find in there, incredible high quality ingredients made with so much craft and care. know, it really is, if you want to become a wine connoisseur but for chocolate and you want to spend a lot of money on chocolate tasting, you’re living in the right period of time because it’s all out there. It’s glorious. It’s incredible. One of my favorite, and this is a little more pedestrian but still kind of exotic,

46:45
One of my favorite ways to consume wild flavors of chocolate and white cream chocolate or white chocolate, it’s not properly the term, but white cream, is through Japanese Kit Kats. I have probably tasted over 200 different flavors of Japanese Kit Kat, all manner of flavor profiles, and they’ve gotten purposely weird, but they’re always trying different things, different regional things. You know, everything from pineapple. There was a Kyoto grape Kit Kat, a dark chocolate Kit Kat.

47:14
And I thought, oh, this is gonna be interesting. It really tasted like a Hershey’s Dark had been soaked into a week old glass of wine for 48 hours. I was like, oh, this is fairly bad. But then I also tasted a ginger ale Kit Kat that was built on a white cream base and that ginger ale flavor popped in a way and worked in a way I would not have expected, but it was very much ginger ale. And so it very much worked really well. And so that has been a fun way for me to experience all these different kinds of things. But I just think…

47:43
Flood may not be the right word, the interests and the desire of people who really want to understand the craft of chocolate making, who really want to push the envelope, we are existing. It’s such a great time for that. There’s so much great work, so much great innovation, and so many interesting things being done in 2025 and beyond. It’s just an exciting time. You’ve clearly lots of history with TV and TV history. One of the most uh

48:11
It’s an episode we watched recently, but one of the most iconic candy related episodes of TV that anybody can think of is the Junior Mint from Seinfeld. And so I’m just curious a little like behind the scenes. like, like what is it about a particular in this, in this instance, it’s obviously Junior Mint, but what is it about a particular line of candy that is like iconic or unique enough to catch producers attention that like we could create a whole episode based off this.

48:41
I think certainly in my world, because I work almost exclusively on that side of it with period television, because that’s the only reason they have to, if you need to get something from contemporary candy story, just go down to Target or Walgreens and get it. But if you want something from the past, you come to me. And so I think a lot of times people are looking for that bit of novel nostalgia. The Goldbergs, for instance, it’s like, okay, this character is definitely the guy who would try to shove the whole pouch of Big League Chew in his mouth.

49:09
So that’s what we’ll have him do, that silly thing. And you know, and because the writers are nostalgic as well, so they want to touch upon that. At the same time, sometimes it’s something purposefully obscure. Something that will trigger a certain thing that is almost like an inside joke, right? Or like an obscure piece of music. Sometimes, yeah, you want to go with the known hits. But sometimes there’s this great song from 85, man, I want to include it. And it’ll evoke the right vibe without being so specific as to feel tired.

49:38
Without getting any spoilers, there is a brand, a snack brand, that is featured pretty prominently in this new front half of the final season of Stranger Things. I will not get into it because I don’t want to spoil it for people who have not seen it. But it’s something I talked about many, many years ago, and I was really delighted to see it mentioned. When I think about what they’re going for, they’re, yeah, they’re just going for, just they’re having fun with it and the weird nature of its name sometimes. You know, and the thing about, like, you take the Junior Mints episode. Junior Mints…

50:08
are old fashioned, they seem very harmless and staid, you know, they almost seem like something your grandmother would eat, you know, although they’re very good, like they’re still a great little product. So to involve them in a Seinfeld plot, you know, involving people’s bodies and things, I mean, it’s just, it’s a, you know, a body horror, I guess, you know, it is a fascinating conflict, right? And so it’s just like, okay, that’s gonna get your attention. I suspect if I told the story to the right writer, they could incorporate it into one of these shows.

50:38
There was a product very similar to Tic Tacs. They were really a knockoff of Tic Tacs. They were called Dinamins. Dinamins. And they came in a similar little plastic container. was wide instead of tall. And they were hot cinnamon dinamins. And I remember I was playing with a hot cinnamon dinamint, so shiny and red and colorful. And I was smelling it. I just wanted to see if it smelled like cinnamon without putting it in your mouth.

51:04
I accidentally snorted and it popped right up into my nose. I could see where that was going. No, yeah. And this is plot definitely for a sitcom. Pardon my language, trying to get that fucking dynamite out of my nose at like eight years old was not easy. And I was miserable. I had inhaled hot cinnamon. My entire sinuses were like revolting against me. Like my sinuses were just pouring out. And when it finally did come out, because it did finally come out of my nose.

51:33
but it was like a little white chip. had completely almost completely dissolved in my nose. But to your point, when is something useful? think it’s when, look, for nostalgia purposes, think you can use brands in television shows or movies to serve the same function, the hairstyles, the music, the clothing, you know, that the right cars do. It takes you to a place. It becomes part of the character, even if it’s subtle. It helps you establish time and place. But I also think it’s just, brands are fun to play with, you know.

52:03
especially if they’re a little goofy sometimes. What makes something good or bad for these purposes? I just think it’s whatever the writers come up with, you know, which is gonna make them giggle or make them think it lends itself to the thing. Like I said, without naming it, I think the Thing and Stranger Things season five is a brilliant use of a pretty obscure product, generally speaking. Not well remembered.

52:27
Well, clearly the more obscure and the more obscurely it’s used, the more memorable. in some ways, yeah. mean, look, I think the Eggo waffle thing was very, very good for them. But I think I think going obscure also has its time and its place. It’s almost like the more obscure, the more I mean, maybe there potentially is a smaller audience that’s nostalgic about it, but they’re like incredibly nostalgic about it. It’s like, oh, yeah. And it’s also it’s it’s it becomes more like an Easter egg.

52:56
You know, because we are, as consumers of entertainment and media, we are interested in learning more. So if there’s something, oh, you know what? I gotta Google that. Was that a real product? Was that a real thing? So that becomes the game you play, like a Taylor Swift album announcement. know? Why was she wearing the red shoes? Exactly. Like, I don’t know. All right, and then last one. This is the real hot seat, Jason.

53:22
If you could design a candy bar from scratch, what would the Jason candy bar have in it? I mean, look, this is something people ask me professionally all the time. Oh, you ought to come up with a guess. So think I can’t really answer that. What I would say is this. um If I was going to design a candy, I love wild design. I love color. I love wacky stuff. So if I had my druthers, I would create something right out of Willy Wonka, know, something that doesn’t make sense, that you almost can’t package.

53:50
There was a candy that the guy who invented Nerds Gaming Classes worked on for the Bazooka brand, like Bazooka Bubblegum. But it was kind of a chocolate bar. What the hell was that color? It was like Kazazzle, or it wasn’t Kazazzle, but it had a name like that. And it was like, literally, there were two different colors. One was like blue, but it had things that were like nerds of different colors. It literally looked like something like made up for a science fiction show. And I think that would be the kind of thing I would love to make up. know, just something weird that looked like…

54:18
looked like nothing that you should be eating, but that would be the fun of eating it. That’s the fun. Whether it’s different colored ketchup or kazoodle kazoodle, whatever. And something that if it’s successful when you’re done eating it, like your tongue turns purple, because that’s also fun. know that, and for it’s fine. I understand we don’t want to have a bunch of artificial colors in our food, but they are awfully fun for dyeing your tongue. They are. Well, Jason.

54:48
Thank you so much for sharing some of your historian and archivist background in the candy world. Really, really appreciate and just love the niche you’ve carved for yourself in this space, the delicious space. So thank you so much. And I know if anybody wants to learn more, they can do so at collectingcandy.com, collecting candy, your handle on social media. Is there anywhere else if somebody wants to learn more about you to connect online?

55:13
I mean, those are the best ways to see me online. You know, I think my at collecting candy is my most prevalent social media. I’m on LinkedIn. And then most Sundays, you can catch me on History Channel most days. I feel like I’m on all the time on Sundays anymore. I’m doing four shows in 2026 for them. So it’s very exciting. Yeah, I’ve got one new one coming up, but all my other shows are in like…

55:38
I think Food that Built America, got season seven, we got season four with mega brands, Hazardous History with Henry Winkler on season two. And the new one is uh History’s Greatest Picks with Mike Wolf from American Pickers. So yeah, that’s very collector based, which sort of I get to play in a different part of my passion, which is fun. Well, congrats on everything. Last thing, just one line, final thought, stage is yours. It could be a quote or a motto to live by as a candy connoisseur or whatever you want. Send us home here.

56:09
Ooh, I’m gonna steal a quote from Menlo Smith, the guy who invented sweet turds. You know, he isolated a sort of philosophical thing. He said, you know what, Jason? He said, is a choice. So choose to have fun.

56:25
I don’t know, Jason, that’s such a bummer, such a tough decision. Jason, thank you so much for sharing all you do, for collecting all you do. That makes sense, collecting all you do. And thank you, Wild listeners, for tuning into another episode. If you want to hear more wild stories like this one, make sure to follow Wild Business Growth on your favorite podcast platform and subscribe on YouTube. YouTube is at Max Branstetter for the video versions.

56:52
You can learn all things MaxPodcasting, the Podcasting to the Max newsletter every Thursday and about this podcast at MaxPodcasting.com Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!