February 21, 2024 • 47 mins
Sitting down with Ryan Deiss was a real blast. We covered it all - from my early days hustling FUBU to some new projects coming.
Your ego is not your amigo, and sometimes /i didn’t trust my gut. Ryan asked how I got endorsements before “influencer marketing” existed. Wait till you hear my tactic for getting LL Cool J!
Mentors have been huge for me. I love mentors who provide value without expecting anything in return. My daughters put me onto trends I need to know about - reverse mentors tell it like it is!
I gave the audience a sneak peek at my new financial literacy vision focused on young entrepreneurs. If we can make this happen, it really changes the whole game.
I started the Rise Nation Mastermind to surround myself with high performers solving real problems in real-time. I don’t play when it comes to getting complacent and lazy. Surround yourself with greatness.
Sitting down with Ryan, I know everyone soaked up the motivation and marketing gems they can take action on right away.
The key is doing it today, not waiting until tomorrow. Don’t just talk about it, be about it. Hustlers don't sleep, they put in the work 24/7. You’ll be amazed by what happens when you show up to your dreams and give 110% effort daily.
Now stop reading and start out there crushing it!
Host: Daymond John
Producers: Beau Dozier & Shanelle Collins; Ted Kingsbery, Chauncey Bell, & Taryn Loftus
For more info on how to take your life and business to the next level, check out DaymondJohn.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's no conspiracy against our children. It's just an old system.
When we were off of when we were at war,
they taught you how to be a great employee, you know,
and they taught you shop and skills like that. Kids
don't need to be a great employee. They need to
know how to run their businesses and they need to
know financial intelligence. But if our system is not teaching
the financial intelligence, what does taxes used for? What happens
(00:23):
with money and how you use it? And that at
sixteen years old, predatory people can market them credit cards
and school loans for the status today that a child
graduating today, fifty percent of those children will retire with
a job title that doesn't exist today. What if I
(00:43):
told you there was more to the story behind game
changing events? Get ready for my new podcast, That Moment
with Damon John will jump into the personal stories of
some of the most influential people on the planet, from
business mobiles and celebrities to athletes and artist.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
The hard part about this about interviewing you, y is
you and I have got to become let's say, pretty your friends.
Over the last year or so. I say that you don't, yeah,
not good great friends, and so One of the challenges
with this is making sure that I can ask questions
that benefit the audience and then you never heard before
(01:25):
an answer ideally yeah, as opposed to just coming up
here and telling inside jokes and you know, stupid nineties
movies quotes, because that's normally what we do when we
hang out. So I'm gonna endeavor next. I'm glad you
got that. By the way, So you were doing influencer
marketing before was a thing, right, I think so?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, in a sense, yes, and before it is what
people today look at.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, think about it and so and for those of
you who don't know, except don't because that was not
a that was a gap commercials and.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
They've spent thirty million dollars airing that, Yeah, it did.
Call You'll see a fool hat in there. They called him,
and he said listen because he felt disrespected in the
way that they spoke to him. He felt that they
didn't respect or value the community. They were kind of
just like, listen, just show up, shut up, show up.
Do this commercial. He said, I wear a custom made hack.
I got a funny shaped head. Can I wear this? Sure,
(02:18):
no problem whatever. But in that he did acapella any
before US bias and low. Now, if you like movies
like you and I do in Airplane, do you remember it?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Excuse me? Do you speak job? I speak jab He
spoke jobs.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But throughout that commercial what happened was and there was
no social So somebody may be saying, here now for
the younger people the audience, why didn't they just pull
that ad? There was no Internet at the time. There
were no cell phones at the time, not smartphones, cell phones.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
They couldn't pull the ad.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
They already when you were shoot an ad back then,
you would have to wait sixty to ninety days for
them to cut it, edit it, color it, and put
it out then program it within the system. And they
couldn't pull back the buy thirty million dollars. So what
happened is they fired everybody on the gap. But then
they hired their version of you. They hired a multicultural agency.
(03:21):
I'm not saying that you need to be multicultural, but
you're a specific person that hits a very specific target
that nobody knows your fucking people like you do. And
what they did is when they hired a multicolorsual agency
and said get rid of this. They said hold on it,
I'm from the hood. Let me tell you something. You're
(03:41):
looking at the data. You're looking at the wrong data.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Check this out.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
They looked at the data, they realized the target market
they were trying to hit increase three hundred percent because
the kids thought they can buy foobu.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
At the gap.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So they called this up we get which are the
big ol sloppy like kiss no Tongue, And they spent
another sixty million dollars re airing that ad.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Really yeah, I mean so that when I when I
think about because a lot of people want to want
to leverage influencers, I mean, as we've seen celebrity just
get more distributed. I mean, there's obviously still very very
famous people, but now the number of people who are
legit like internet famous, who have their own followings, the
number of influencers, they're massive, They're all over the place.
(04:28):
So again, you did it. You got l to come in.
I mean, but I know that you also a lot
of what you did was getting hip hop artists to
where you did product placement in music videos and things
like that, which is another type of influencer marketing. Where
do you see that today, Like it's come a long way.
(04:50):
Where do you see that today in terms of the
marketing stack and the influence that influencer marketing has on
marketing today?
Speaker 1 (04:57):
You know, I think the in marketing, no matter what
is needed, marketing, advertising, branding, right, But I think that
influencer marketing has always been where can you hack the
system and find the influencer that needs to prove themselves,
the influencer that has the most influence. Again, we're numbers people,
(05:19):
not that it has the most reached, that has the
most influence. And I know I'm not speaking a you know,
different language up here. These are these are the professionals
of this. But where can you get the influencer who
is the sub segment of the influencer who's being neglected?
You know? When I walked these three girls named the
Kardashians around Manhattan, and I remember I.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Was I had a brand called heatheret.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Paris Hilton showed up, and then the Danity Kane girl
showed up and there was this smoke and hot woman backstage.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
With them, and I was she said, oh Kim. I
was like, oh hey, that's kind of nice. Then what's up?
You know, who are you in? And she said, I'm
so for this song.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She said, meet my sister and Chloe and she became
like one of the boys. They were like, yo, we're
trying to do this reality show. And I think and
I went over their house and I said, wow, the
other girls they were.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I remember they were running around their the little onesies.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
They were hiding under the table, Kylie and all them.
And I saw them mother and I said, I talked
to her, and I remember her saying, hey, you know,
I'm going to do all the things that I tried
with myself earlier on in my career, but technology and
virus other things weren't where it is today. But my
husband is this guy, The stepfather is this guy. The
(06:39):
stepfather is this guy, and all this kind of stuff.
And I was like, well, the proof of concept is there.
These girls are really beautiful girls. The reality shows already greenlit.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Let me take them around town. I took them to
every single clothing brand.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
My buddies at Jordash were relaunching. Trust me.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I mean there were not the Jordash company, but the
guys there worth twenty billion dollars. They don't They're not
losing any sleep, all right, I said, these girls will
wear Jordash all of the girls and the mother will
wear them for the whole family word, every single episode
for seventy five thousand dollars. They said, no, oops, we
don't get it. So if you ever look at the
(07:20):
first three season of Kardashians, they're wearing my brand, Koujie,
a hip hop brand, because I said, girls, I don't
want to insult you. I can't get anybody else to
believe in you. But I've always been that edgy because
I realized that these girls were beautiful, They were super
super connected, the mother was super connected. They already had
a show, All the right things were in place. It's
just that people sometimes need this validation that somebody's great.
(07:42):
You don't need that validation. And meanwhile, so Joe called
me up probably about six six years ago, Hey damn,
I got seventy five thousand dollars for all the girls.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I can't get them on the phone for seventy five
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
But you know I did that too with Fubu. When
I had money for fifty shirts, I had fifty shirts.
I didn't give them to the young Kip kids with
the funny mustaches and the weird pants who you know
riding the riding skateboards. They're gonna wear it one two times.
They're gonna want to say I'm super trending. They're gonna,
you know, give it away. I gave it to the big,
(08:17):
big guys in the name. But I have fifty shirts
and I made fifty five x'es and six exes. Why simple.
Those guys only have their their their big guys. They
only have a very few choices Rochester, big and tall,
a big white shirt, big black shirt, or they gotta
make a lot. They gotta pay a lot for something
custom made. They wore my shirt and they didn't wear
(08:39):
it one time a month. They put that big buboo
on their chest. They wore it seven ten times a month.
You know where those guys were in front of the
red ropes at clubs, in front of the h in
front of run DMC and Salt and Pepper and llll
cool J. They were the big guys who nobody fucked with.
Those were the and then when the the rappers said
to them, hey man, you know, hook me up with
(08:59):
that with the little guy with the shirts, they will say, no, no, no,
I'm not fucking on my contact. You're gonna wear it
one time. I went to the sub segment of the
sub segment like it. Just to me, it's common sense
when you see a rabbit audience. And I'll give you
one last time. The first time I was gonna make
a first time I was gonna spend a million dollars. They said,
go to MTV. You know rap videos, right of music videos.
(09:20):
MTV was seven thousand dollars. A thirty second commercial bet
was five hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Why Nielsen rating, that's how they rate them. I ain't
never seen no Nielsen rating box in the projects. And
I know that one TV is servicing nineteen people in
that house. My damn, their own bet for a million dollars.
(09:50):
It's common sense sometimes that people don't think about it.
And then with the brilliant people's room, with that data,
you're not you're not digging for the right goal, sometimes
the right strain of goal.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I So what I heard there is if somebody is
going to pursue an influencer marketing campaign, you want to
have those relationships. Don't try to go for the person
at the top that supposedly everybody knows. Go for the
person that in the middle, that's sort of influencing within
a pocket that will then cause more of a ground
swell to happen. And then what I also heard you say,
which I think is important, go with the people who
(10:25):
are going to really go all in on your brand,
not somebody that's just going to treat it like a
transactional kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
I think, give it to you and dating dating lingo.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Go ugly.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Early one of my friends were glad of the night
and like, hey man, I'm cool. Yeah, two to ten
is a ten to two babe.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So are there any This is how exactly how this
gonna go down.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One of my other friends said, he you know when
I go, When I go on and the woman I like,
she with a group of girls, never talked to her.
I'll wait till she goes to the bathroom and I
go over to the other ones who are hanging out,
and I become the funniest guy. But they don't feel
like I'm trying to be anything towards them. He as
soon as that girl come back, Oh hey me, Derek,
(11:23):
Oh how you doing? You gotta find other angles.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
And I think what's important is if you're gonna do
this well, you need to know your market like every time.
I mean, what you saw with the gap at is
somebody simply trying to buy their way into an audience
that they don't know. And that was true back then
and it seems like it'd be even more true today.
Like the authenticity has to be essential, Like that's got
(11:49):
to be the buy in or you will utterly fail
at this particular endeavor. It does.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
But the hard part about that is and that's why
diverse the inclusion is important. However, you can't force diversity
inclusion because how do you know if the person you
believe is part of that community is speaking the right way?
You know?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I remember.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
A Christmas time I gave out a bunch of foodbu
to my employees, and I remember they came back the
holiday time it was not Christmas for everybody, and a
lot of the whites and Jewish people brought the fubu
back and I said why, they said, My kids said
they can't wear it in school, so why can't they
worry it in school? They said, because the African American
kids you know either you know. Got upset at them.
(12:37):
I said, I said, you know, when food was always
created for a community of hip hop who was spawned
off of a music made out of the love of
hip hop from African American young men in the South Bronx.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
But it's not. I realized I was becoming the.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Thing I was fighting against, and that I was always
told on my Jewish step father, be pro blas whenever
anti anything else, and always never become the thing you're
fighting against. And ninety five percent of this country has
more in common than we have against each other, and
it's only the five percent of these assholes that we
can't let rip us apart, right, And when I found
that these people, yeah, absolutely, And when I found that
(13:20):
my own community was so proud, I couldn't say, guys,
this is not for you, because it was, and it
was ninety percent of that community was wearing it.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
But it didn't mean that the ten percent couldn't.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Because the beauty of hip hop was allowing the world
to see the hardships and the challenges that we was
happening in our lives. Because hip hop, to me at
the time and still even to today, hip hop and
country are exactly the same, by the way. That's why
they're the top music's in the world, because they are
the voices of the have nots. And hip hop is
(13:52):
something you do not need to play an instrument, you
don't need to harmonize. But before the Instagram and tiktoks,
we didn't see what was going on in the streets
of Las Vegas on the six o'clock news, But the
kids were talking about police violence, political issues, and various
other things. What's the same with country, right, you know,
I lost my dog, my dog died. Hip hop is
where my dog's at, Snoop doggy dog.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
You know country is.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
You know, I got my truck back hip hop as
I got that dude back.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I mean, whatever it is, right, it's basically the same.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
But once I did that, I had to bring the
people that I respected in that love hip hop that
happened to have different plights. So basically I hired and
embraced the people in my company that thought like Eminem
mc search. You know, when these people and what happened
(14:42):
was that's how we grew. And then I did it
where it came to Asian and Asian American because hip
hop is huge in Asia. The bottom line is the
challenge all often becomes when you were trying to translate
something to another market. You can't just hire a white person,
hire a woman, hire a black person. How do you
get to vet that? That's the big issue.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
That's so how do you do so let's let's and
(15:25):
let's take it out of maybe influencer and those kind
of things. When you fund a deal on shark Tank, right,
you go out there, you do a deal on shark Tank,
or you do a deal outside of shark Tank, because
I know that you've got you know, you do lots
of business deals. One of the first things that that
you look to do is to align to a new partner.
But like, what's your process for doing that? Like, how
do you go through and figure out who are the
(15:47):
people that you should align this brand with?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
How many mistakes did they make for on the way
coming up? And how did they have the vigor to
figure it out? And what happens if you don't get
this deal. I don't do that much, so you know,
I string it out over a course of time.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Of what are your use of proceeds?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Well, if you tell me you're gonna go spend half
of the money on advertising, you're about to error an ABC,
Well how much advertise you're gonna get there?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
You're an idiot. I'm not investing in you? Why would
you do? You know?
Speaker 1 (16:21):
You know nothing is static. You know you get on
shark Tank. Well, then I have to I don't have
to do that.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
You know what I have to do.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I have to make sure I protect all the ips
because how many people are gonna try to People in
this room gonna go, oh, you're.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Not taking all this traffic? I got that. How am
I going to do that instead? Right?
Speaker 1 (16:40):
How am I going to be able to and not
let my ego get in the way and tell the
customer how I'm not gonna take all your money and
use inventory because you know what may happen. A snowstorm
may happen in New York or on the Eastern seaboard,
or an earthquake, and you get preempted, and now you've
got a garage filled of the product. How am I
gonna hold back for a second and say, hey, thank
you for being a customer. I'm a small business. If
(17:02):
you don't mind, you know, can you wait over the
course of this period of time and here's what I'll
do for you. Because if you think, well, I'm gonna
get rich over that first month of sales with NAT,
You're not in a business this is a marathon. I
want to see you solve problems.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And I'm not gonna give you the answers ahead of time.
So what is the thing when somebody walks out of
the set on Shark Tank? What do you see that
makes you think I'm gonna invest in this person?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
I see that during the course of the time of
I'm not sure, I'm busy. You know, may take a
month two months that they're not stressing and harass me.
There's no kind of feel of like, oh my god,
I'm like, why are you so desperate?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
What's going on? They're moving their business along without me.
Is there anything during the pitch process though, So when
they're goes through the pitch and they come out, is
there something you see where you're like, this person's got
they got it? Normally you see it.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You know, that's hard because the producers do it really
well where they say, don't just go out and tell
your sales and all that. The producers tell them how
to hold it back. So a lot but there's a
lot of times where I can I can smell with
something wrong.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Ooh what does that look like?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Well, it's when they start saying stuff like yeah, if
we only had This is a fifty billion dollar market.
If I only got this percent of the market. Okay,
these people like to assume. These people like to guests
when I see something like, oh, yeah and yeah, we
need you to do this.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I got a job. You need me to do what? Right?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
When I hear yeah, and then so and then we
and then this happened.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
This happened in this long, long stretch. So I'm looking.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
If it's a ten year stretch, you can do fifty
dollars on shar tank. And but if you did it
on on one day because you open your trunk, you
had something for a dollar and you sold fifty of them,
you got a big deal. You can do literally twenty
million dollars over ten years.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And I hear a bunch of other things go on here.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Now if it happens to be listen, I did the
deal my partner. This is unfortunately, this happened. We did
about seven million back then and then I opened it
up in boom. Yes, but if this keeps going on
like this, something's going on.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The most consistent variable in all your FAILT relationships is
still you. That's it. Yeah. So if they're coming out
and talking about.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
That that's a guy named rouped Me Daniels. Every single
rapper and music artist o them owes him a debt
of gratitude. He had a show probably I was on
a public access channel in New York City and he
had a show probably about five years before MTV. Raps
is the longest running show, and they well begged to
be on the out rauph show. I like, you know
(19:32):
this simple thing I have with thought process. Every Ralph
used to go around all the parties, hey, and you know,
people say who they are. But he did something in
Virginia or something where he did his event. I knew
I couldn't catch him in New York because everybody's going
after I drove down to Virginia and I think my
car broke down, and I begged him that could put
me on. But I did the same thing. I dressed
(19:54):
his and a couple of other bodyguards around him, and
I did it. I laid it low and I addressed
for about two years, and then he finally started saying, Hey,
I'm gonna do something called a little fashion show.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Do you want to be in it?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
And I say yeah, And we had already seeded kind
of so much that when he did the fashion show,
people went crazy and he said, I want to put
you on there, and that's pretty much how it happened.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, I love I love what you said there. Because
a lot of people who want to get access to famous,
important people, they they think that they need to just
try to like accustom like when they're out in public
or something like that, like that's what's going to make
it work. Or they want to be hypertropic. What can
I do for you? And they try to do this
stuff to to immediately go in You said you you
(20:40):
dressed them for two years before that.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I always I always used to try to basically, you know,
do things around the person to show my value without
addressing the person. As soon a later they said we
why aren't you talking to me?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah? And I think that's a good lesson for everybody,
because a lot of people said, like, how you know
people know we're you know, we got business and stuff
like that we do together. How'd you get to know Damon?
And there was the same thing, right, there was a
yeah it was a business thing, but like it started
off just paying you to come and speak at events
and then not being a freaking weirdo. I think a
lot of times people there are paid channels of access
(21:15):
for almost anybody you would want to get access to.
But if you when you go there, if you just
seek for ways to deliver value and that this isn't
obviously transactional, it's amazing what can happen because everybody it
almost always happened like that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
The hardest thing, though, to do with somebody is to
say to them, hey, give me something to do and
let me know what to do for you, because some
people's successful people. First of all, there's a burden that
comes of being successful that everybody thinks that you're taking
advantage of people. Also, if I knew what you could
do for me, I'll give that job to somebody else. Right,
(21:52):
You're supposed to do it, free, bake it, bring it in,
and I go, holy shit, I didn't even know I
needed it. Isn't that the same thing that you do
when you sell product services? Somebody didn't know they needed it.
They thought they were okay with this, They didn't know
they needed you until they realized how much goddamn better
you were because this was the only thing they had
to compare it to. And that's what generally happens with people.
(22:14):
You know, they don't know that Bomba Socks is going
to be great until they realize my other sock company
is not giving to.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Homeless they are. So you just save me time.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I don't have to go to the homeless shelter, but
I can brag at the dinner table that I gave
the homeless, you know. So it really is about how
do you surround like you said, and not be the
lack of a better word, thirsty.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, Oh I love yeah, I love that. I want
to go back to young damon. You got a time machine? Yeah, right,
you go back, and you go back in time and
you meet in the hallway this crew including you. Yeah,
they just lift that interview and you go there and
you go, hey, come here, what do you whisper in
(22:57):
your own ear? Back? Then we'll see. I should give
yourself if you go back in time. You know.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
But I'm a different person now, but I would think
i'd say, first of all, get rid of all the
people around.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You're not all of them. Get it with a tighter crew.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
It doesn't sound like you werehearse what was going to
be what you were going to say in that room,
and did you ask what was going to happen prior?
Did you prepare yourself for that room? Because you know
you may get into the room with somebody to pitch,
and the right questions often is why are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So what's in it for you?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
People are often in shar Tank, Well, damon, I want
you in here because you want You're in clothing in
clothing business. I got into shar Tank because it was
eight and when people weren't couldn't pay their mortgage and
know eight, the last thing they could do on was
buying clothing lines. I had ten clothing lines and eight
of them were dead. So what I realized was that
(23:52):
I wasn't a great designer. Putting a big fbing O
five on a shirt is not a great designer. I'm
a great manufacturing distributor, and I know and I have
a lot of celebrity contacts, so I have the pipes,
and I know the buyers at Macy's and JC Penny's
and what's in it for them? Well, if I can
acquire more brands such as clothing and plates, and I
mean women's and makeup and various other things electronics, I
(24:17):
can now because I'm a trusted vendor, I can then
deal with them, and they have to deal with that
many less new brands, brands that are proven because I've
acquired it. But they know that I'll take the goods back.
They know that I'm going to support them in advertising marketing.
You know what's gonna happen. They're gonna get to go
on vacation earlier with their family and they're not gonna
get yelled at by their boss. That's my value. I'm
(24:37):
going on a shark thing to buy everything else but clothing.
But you are pitching me clothing. Or you say you
take money from somebody and you go, well, you know,
how come you going to show up at work. I'm
investing money because I want fifteen percent or ten percent
on interest on my on my on my on my money.
I didn't tell you I was gonna show up. Or
my husband loves cars, and before I put a million
(24:59):
dollar in his business, I want him to work within
your business. So I realized that potentially is there something there,
Or I like what you're doing for philanthropy, but you
think I just want to give you money for the
wrong reason.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
You don't ask the right questions you made. I'm guessing
and I know this for a fact because you're an
entrepreneur and we talked about it. But I mean, you've
had You've made some really brilliant business moves, and you've
made some less brilliant business moves. What would you say
to yourself back then to avoid some of the less
good business moves? The less business the.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Business moves that were never great were due to either
my ego, not trusting my gut, or not doing it.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Because I loved it. Give me an example.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
My ego was I did a brand call Heather at
the one that I met Kim at. The two designers
were absolutely brilliant people, but they were couture designers. They
would they were the fooboo of their world for young
women between probably about fourteen to twenty four. But every
major brand like Jillett or this and that would give
(26:11):
them during fashion week, Hey take our runways. Naomi CAMPBELLI
walked the word way for free. They were the darling
and people would write about.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Them for free.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
So I said, listen, there's millions of dollars advertising here,
but they're not selling any ready to wear.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Let me, you know, buy the company.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I didn't know anything about women's wear, and if you
know anything about designing. You know, if a man where
if both of us wear whatever cases right, thirty two
thirty four to thirty six, there's thirty two long, there's
thirty two short, there's thirty two slim, thirty two baggy.
If a woman wears a size eight, there's twenty four
size eights. The gap back in the back, all right,
(26:52):
gaps in the back, thicker, thigh, center, thigh, is a stretch,
boot cut, flare cut, fly cut, crotch, all kind of
shit going on here, all right, Because it's getting tighter
to the body. And when a woman is under forty,
all she cares about is the way her heiny looks.
She doesn't care as long as her dairy air looks amazing.
When she gets over forty, generally it's the sleeves, how
(27:14):
the arms look right, and the tighter the garment gets
to the body, the more critical woman is. And as
I shared earlier, when a woman doesn't know a brand,
what does she do? She buys two sizes because she
buys one, and that sends out the back. I lost
six million dollars on that business because I didn't know
what I was doing in the ego of Damon John
Because I'm a manufacturer was the one that failed because
(27:37):
you know what happened the two partners, brilliant costume designers,
being a custom and costume designer putting Naomi Campbell, the
sexiest model in the world, on a runway with an
ace bandage just over the important parts and a garbage
fail on her head and the spray paint her red.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
And kick her out to the damn thing.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
You know that ain't something you could buy off the rack.
My ego got in the way. And so what happens
was my ego got in the way. So salespeople always
sell you boss. They would buy the line this season,
but you didn't make purple. Now they got themselves a
job for six more months.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
So that was my ego. And at the end of
the day, out of the ten decisions.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I made for businesses, eight of them, if I didn't
trust my gut, eight of them failed them. The two
that even I made money on or with some level
of success, I went like this, Thank God I got
out of it. I just didn't trust my ego, And
your ego is a direct line to your belly button
of you can't necessarily articulate why you don't want to
(28:36):
do it, But you don't have to articulate that.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Fuck that. That's your gut, it's nobody else's.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
And I don't care if the person looks good, the
number looks like I don't fucking like it. But there'll
be a lot of people right here.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No, no, on a Ryan, you're the man.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Because all they care about is what's in it for them.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So how do you balance that though, as an entrepreneur,
because obviously you need a strong ego as an entrepreneur.
If you don't have an ego, you're not gonna be
an entrepreneur because of an ego and what you do best. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
True entrepreneur is the most vulnerable people in the room
because they walk in the room and they say, I
know this, I don't know all this. You can help
me with this. I will bust my ass to help
you with that. And by the way, I'm gonna do
these ship regardless. So if you're helping me, it's fine.
If you're not, somebody else is and I'm gonna double
that return for them.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, I agree. Thank you. You've you've written a number
of books. I'll list a couple of them out if
you don't have them. By the way I'd get on
Amazon and get these display of power brand within Power Shift,
Rise and Grind. I know that one. There's a chapter
that's right with Ryan and there's yeah, I mean it's
it's it's obviously the best one. I'm phenomenal. I'm sorry,
(29:48):
actually make the wrong damn book. Power Broke is the
one that making a movie of that that that chapter,
and most recently Little Damon Learns to Earn. So I'm
just curious, Like this is a bit like asking you
which one of your kids is your favorite, but like
which one of your books Little Dame Lens earned, Yeah,
Little Damon Learns Earned. Yeah, I don't like it was quick.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I don't like adults anymore. You know, we're all jaded
by one way or another. And I'll write people, I'll
write these books, and I don't like writing books.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I'm just like sic.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I write books of the most commonly things I'm asked
all the time. And if I can't say going to
a Ryan's book, or go to a Lewis Howe or
Tim Ferriss or Damon John Tony Robbins, whatever the case is,
I write down goldie shit, and then after a while
I go let me write a book. I may do
one last book for adults, but adults, you know, we're
all who we are, right, I'll tell people all this
stuff and they think I'm holding back life from them,
(30:38):
or I'll give them and we are just all what
we are, what we are and when we are. And
(31:01):
so I'll write books and I'll go man. I wrote
a whole book on that, but when I am breaking
the system Now in America, off of Little Dama Learns
to Earn is the number one picture book in the
country the last two years. It is about entrepreneurship and
why I wrote it was the system is broken, and
(31:22):
I wanted to empower the system. And I want There's
many people way more brilliant than I who've met, who
made books like that, who made me not had the
public stage, and I want people to compete with me
now and see how good it was, and build and
do that, and let schools do that and break this system.
But when I sit and talk to these beautiful little
six year old, seven year old, eight years old, and
(31:44):
they mind starts to open up over this, whether that
little piece of information I gave them how to be
an entrepreneur they use it today or thirty years from now.
I have hope and I believe in our children. Children
are the you know, the most beautiful thing in this world.
I don't want to talk to another adult about that.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Ship company present company excluded.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah, but that that it's so passionate because you see
the little kids of these beautiful eyes going I'm gonna
do this, damon, and I'm just really passionate about it.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
So what's your vision behind that? What's your vision? Like,
what are you gonna do with that? Because you wrote
a book and you're gonna you know, I'm.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Gonna do more stuff behind it. But the bottom line
is we are living off of a broken school system.
That there is an unlike Cuban who's taking on a
real conspiracy and or situation. We're bringing and he's trying
to he's trying to bring affordable drugs and.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
So go to uh what is this thing called cast?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Cost plus cost plus dot com.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I keep telling him it's the stupidest name ever. Regular
regular people don't understand what costs plus means. That sounds dangerous, right,
But for an eighty dollar pillo, you can get it
from Cuban for two dollars. He's trying to break this
drug system them in this country. I don't have that issue.
There's no conspiracy against our children. It's just an old
(33:05):
system when we were off of when we were at war,
they taught you how to be a great employee, you know,
and they taught you shop and skills like that. Kids
don't need to be a great employee. They need to
know how to run their businesses and they need to
know financial intelligence. But if our system is not teaching
the financial intelligence, what does taxes used for?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
What happens with money and how you use it?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
And then at sixteen years old, predatory people can market
them credit cards and school loans for the status today
that a child graduating today. Fifty percent of those children
will retire with a job title that doesn't exist today.
That's like telling a kid twenty years ago they were
going to be a traffic and conversion pay per click expert,
(33:48):
a drone operator. So how are you going to go
and have seven hundred thousand dollars worth of student debt
for a career that you're not sure you want to have,
and then you're not going to pay it off into
your fifties Because what happens when you have a lack
of money, right, think about it, right for our children?
What happened when you have a lot of money. Domestic
(34:08):
violence goes up right, all gangs. It's hard to eat
clean in this country. And the cheapest things to make
in this country made of butter, sugar, and salt. And
then all of a sudden, now you have diabetes because
you have a bad diet because you.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Didn't have money.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And if we teach our kids this like little Dame
learns to earn a six, seven, eight, nine years old,
you think you need to teach them at twenty. You
teach your kid how to play sports at twenty, and
then put them on a field with some four hundred
pound line backer trying to eat their lunch. You teach
them how to play an instrument at twenty and put
them right in the orchestra. You teach them at six,
you teach them at seven.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
And that is my job.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
I'm gonna go to the goddamn grave breaking this system.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Love it, man, love it, love it, love it is.
It is truly a tragedy. My first business that I
that I ran, I got to where I I owed
a quarter million dollars to the irs because I didn't
pay taxes, which that's how you owe the Irs money,
by the way, you just don't pay them. You know,
(35:10):
I didn't pay them. I didn't know what I was
supposed to. Nobody's teaching this stuff. And when I think
about it, if this was a part of the curriculum,
if we were teaching the kids to basically be these
cogs in a machine, what if we taught them to
be the machine? You know how amazing would that would
that be?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I mean, if you don't and if you don't pay
taxes honestly, you know the irs if you if you pay,
if you pay your federal then you may get penalized
ten percent.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
The states will hit you at twenty something percent.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Your bill at forty thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars
will be three hundred thousand dollars in a matter of
no time.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
And then you have to go on the ground or
are you going to go to jail? And nobody's teaching
this kind of stuff the kids. Again, I plaud your efforts,
so I want to bring it up. And if you
have not bought how many on your have bought little
little damulers earn? If not enough man y'all need to
get out there and get that book, buy for every
child in your life.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
But you know, I don't want people to think about
this as us trying to sling books, because we're not.
I want you guys to all empower your children. And
you know what, because I'm gonna want I want you
all to be selfish. I'm gonna tell you something for
you to be really selfish about right now. The stat
is that your kids will take care of you two
times longer than you took care of them. So if
(36:24):
you don't want to sit outside of Pigley Wigy with
a shitty diaper, you better teach some some financial intelligence, homies.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
It isn't that right? And that really I should have
wont a little dave learner you want to eat that I.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Want to talk about I know in this kind of
and you imagine what we talk about on Shark thanking.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Whoa dude? Yes, because I've had the privilege of being there. Yeah,
that's right. And here's what you don't know. And most
of y'all, a lot of y'all stop stop drinking, but
they used to drink on set and they film all day.
So some of those, uh, some of those by the
end of the day.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Well, we didn't even start a committing Well, we would
come in a little extra crispy sometimes from hanging out
at night.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Now we shoot. We shoot two weeks in June, two
weeks in September, and we shoot ten hours straight in
average up.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
So we're up because schedules so tight. Get up in
the five o'clock in the morning, get in the chair,
you know, the shark tank chair. By the time I'm
in there at nine, I'm done in nine. I have
one hour during that day to answer all my emails,
you know, all the company business deals and how my
wife tell me I ain't shit for about ten minutes
and then which is their job?
Speaker 2 (37:33):
No, no, that's their job. Get back to that ego.
Thank Youeping up fair yet?
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So you don't want to be the ninety ninth pitch
coming in after two weeks and we're extra chrismy.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, yeah, they're hammered. I want to switching gears completely.
I want to talk about the role of mentors in
your life. Yes, you and I share a couple of mentors.
You've been a mentor of mine. I just want to
know what what are some of the mentors that have
been in your life, and like, how how is mentorship
(38:04):
in general like play a role in your development?
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Mentors have been huge, but you know, at the bottom
line and when business, mentors will at the end of
the day tell you three things. You know, don't take
him money too soon, don't scale too quick, and don't
spread yourself too thin. But mentors. I love mentors who
don't need me. You know that's you know, explain that well.
You know, it's so like I'm not a big real
(38:27):
estate guy myself, but my guys who are really big guys,
My money is pure crackhead money.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
To them, They're like, what am I doing with that?
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Can you put this to work? Why?
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Because your wife wants to open a lotion company? You
want to talk to there? Oh oh, so you want
to be in on this one.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
They don't need me, right, and I don't need them right.
So I love mentors like a Jay Abraham and things
of that nature. But even and we have a group
Rise Nation mastermind. The great thing about what we do
is when I see that people don't when we're in
the room and as you rolling and myself we're in
the room, as the advisors potentially but the members are
(39:10):
getting answers from other members so much. I love all
forms of mentorship. Even my daughters have a form of
reverse mentorship. When Chara Tank was starting to take off
and I had to have these acquisitions in all these
areas I used to go into.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
My daughter was right about seventeen. At that time, she
was in her room.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I started to notice TV's going away, you know, as
I think Gary Vee said TV was becoming radio. The
computer of the phone was becoming TV in a room
on her computer, skyping with her boyfriend on It was
Snapchat at the time, right, So she's an Apple computer
sniping Da Da da da. She's shopping on Amazon, and
she's doing her homework and lying to me all at
(39:49):
the same time. I bought every stock of what she
was doing. I bought Apple, I bought snap I bought Facebook,
I had Instagram whatever the case is. And Amazon, uh,
Amazon and Amazon. Look where I'm at today? Yeah, And
she was shopping on Shopify. I was Shopify thirty dollars.
I went up to nineteen hundred wolf.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
That was a good bye. I didn't have to call anybody,
I didn't have to look at any inventory.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I didn't have to do anything, and so she's a
mentor of mine instead of you know, Opparentsly said.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
What are you doing? I go no, no, no, no,
what are you doing? So what so you and you
mentioned it? We started a group rise mastermind. Yeah, why, like,
what why do you want to do that? Because you
said it before last I checked? You're doing okay financially, right,
I mean, and you joke before like you don't need
(40:41):
people to buy books. You know you don't. You're not
writing a book to get rich or to get famous. Yeah,
check and check. You want to start you know you came.
We're having a discussion about starting an entrepreneurial mastermind. That's
something that Frankly, again, if any all in the room,
I'm not talking about you, but there's a lot of
people out there who have started masterminds because let's be honest,
(41:02):
they don't actually know how to do real business, and
so they want to go out there and teach other
people how to do that because that's easier. And so
here you are. You made it. You could go and
hang up, you could go and chill. Why out of
all of the things that you could be doing, you
mentioned one of them that you're doing right now is
(41:23):
you got the book and you want to educate the future.
But why a mastermind? Why am I on Shark Tank?
Is the same thing?
Speaker 1 (41:31):
And why is people like And by the way, all
this Cuban leaving Shark Tank. Cuban said he was leaving
Shark Tank after season sixteen. That means by the time
he leaves and stops talking about Sharktank, he'll be twenty
twenty five. Why is Cuban on Shark Tank? Why is
Richard Branson on Shartank? Why are all the shots on shartank?
Because we get to lift up and look underneath the
(41:52):
hoods of groundbreaking people who will take no for a
fucking will. They will never take no for a fucking answer.
And we're looking at these people and you are getting
to see how they're operating, where things are going, and
we're seeing the ring doorbells, the scrub daddies and the
bomb of socks before anybody's ever seeing these things. And
we're seeing people with real time issues. You know, if
(42:13):
you go into a group of AA and you know
for smoking and various other things, and I have a
massive amount of respect for that, you need mental health,
But you keep telling somebody to start smoking.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
There's no real reason that they need to or not.
That is up to them.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
When you are in a business, you are either scaling
or you're done. You're done sooner or later. If you're
not scaling, you're done one year or five years, but
you're done. And when you have people in the room
doing five and ten and twenty million, they're solving real day,
real time issues. And when we are now in these
passing rooms the way we are, we're no longer next
(42:49):
to each other in office. We're all spread around the world.
We're not talking to each other. Well, we're on these
zooms where where our eyes are blazing over. We don't
want to interrupt everybody else. We've got to walk the
goddamn dog.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
If you don't have time to have these micro meetings,
but if you can meet with people three separate times
over two days enough in a year, you see they're
solving real problems. They I was saying it outside. They
can't tell these problems to somebody doing a million when
they're doing two million, because that person's been doing a
million and is only doing a million. They got million
dollar problems and they can't tell it to somebody doing
(43:21):
one hundred and two hundred three hundred million. These people,
so they're in the middle of this kind of fluctuation
of trying to grow and they need real answers, and
I get to see them solving those real answers. And
just like on Shark Tank, I get to sit with
you guys and we're seeing this and we're advising and
somehow we're going, oh shit, amazing. And it's also reinforcing something.
(43:45):
When you live in this ivory tower and you just
think and have your people tell you what's going on,
you almost never get the real data. That's how you
see most of these companies collapse because you know the
CEO shuts start showing up a day late to the
conference and leaving a day early, have your people talk
to my people, and you get lazy.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
I don't like it. I'm not getting lazy. So this
is about of staying in the game.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
This is about if I'm gonna be in the game.
I'm gonna stay in the game. If not, I let
my money work for me and I just will go home.
My wife will tell me to empty the garbage, you
moron every five hours, and I'll.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Just be sitting there going. I used to be damon John.
I love my wife, by the way a lot. So
the for everybody who's out there, I mean, would you
say that every entrepreneur should be in some type of community,
some type of mastermind. Of course you have to be
in some kind of community.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I mean you look at the Diamond District in New
York City. They're all on forty seventh Street for a reason,
best practices. They're seeing what's going on, what's hurting each other.
I mean, we are pack animals. We love communicating, and
you want to communicate the speed of light. But communicating
through screens just doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Man. You know, when you have fifty people in the room,
forget even mastermind, when you have fifty people in your office,
you know how many of these? Hey, you know what
that means? We really had I thought of something else. Talk.
You won't come back from month.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
That's having fifty times a day by fifty people.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
You're cutting that curve right Or I'm in the meeting
with ten people. Hey, so Forthy, Juliet, you'll work with Chauncey.
I can't see that on the zoom afterwards. Hey, he
had a problem. Chauncey doesn't everybody have rama Chauncy.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Chauncey's a real person by the way he is, and
that's how I feel about him.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
But it's about being you know, it is about being
together collectively, and that's how you get innovation. Innovation is
really people forcing themselves onto an idea. I mean that
tech innovation sye. Tech doesn't have a tech doesn't have
a personality, right, So you create the Apple Watch and
you create this and text us to merge because people say,
(45:51):
why can't I put it together? It's an easy answer,
but people are very complex and as we merge, and
that's why food will got to be so big because
go back to that story. Once I saw that interaction,
if that was on zoom, I wouldn't have known what
happened to those clothes.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Well, I thank you for your friendship. I think you
for your mentorship. I'm excited we could have spend twenty
twenty four hanging out at least a few times. We're
gonna be hanging out in back in Vegas. We're hanging
out in La La. Yeah. Might even be able to
get a little backstage tour of the Shark Tank sets
(46:30):
of those of you who join us. There and and
in your hometown of Miami, So Town, Miami.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
We had a We had a great I love the
fact that we we do opening parties for the Riding Mastermind.
Now why I just invite this like a room of
one hundred important people. Yeah, they may not even be
in the Mastermind. They just pop up and you know,
like David Grutman was the last one. Mark Anthony was there.
I don't know where he was. No, it was other Mark,
A bunch of people, Rohan Oza popped up, Nellie Galan.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
A lot of people just pop up. So we have
a good time. Yeah, well, I'll tell you if you
want to join us rizationmastermind dot com. Also if you
head by the Digital Marketer booth, we got members of
the of the team that are there. We'd love if
you're a high performance entrepreneur, I want to hang out
with some more. We'd love to hang out with you
in twenty twenty four. With that said, let's give this
man a big, big, big round of applause.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Dame of John, Ladies and gentlemen, That Moment with Damon
John is a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network.
For more podcasts from the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite show, and don't forget to subscribe to and
(47:38):
rate the show. And of course you didn't all connect
with me on any of my social media platforms. At
the Shark, Damon spelled like Raymond, but what a d
There's no conspiracy against our children. It's just an old system.
When we were off of when we were at war,
they taught you how to be a great employee, you know,
and they taught you shop and skills like that. Kids
don't need to be a great employee. They need to
know how to run their businesses and they need to
know financial intelligence. But if our system is not teaching
the financial intelligence, what does taxes used for? What happens
(00:23):
with money and how you use it? And that at
sixteen years old, predatory people can market them credit cards
and school loans for the status today that a child
graduating today, fifty percent of those children will retire with
a job title that doesn't exist today. What if I
(00:43):
told you there was more to the story behind game
changing events? Get ready for my new podcast, That Moment
with Damon John will jump into the personal stories of
some of the most influential people on the planet, from
business mobiles and celebrities to athletes and artist.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
The hard part about this about interviewing you, y is
you and I have got to become let's say, pretty your friends.
Over the last year or so. I say that you don't, yeah,
not good great friends, and so One of the challenges
with this is making sure that I can ask questions
that benefit the audience and then you never heard before
(01:25):
an answer ideally yeah, as opposed to just coming up
here and telling inside jokes and you know, stupid nineties
movies quotes, because that's normally what we do when we
hang out. So I'm gonna endeavor next. I'm glad you
got that. By the way, So you were doing influencer
marketing before was a thing, right, I think so?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, in a sense, yes, and before it is what
people today look at.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yeah, think about it and so and for those of
you who don't know, except don't because that was not
a that was a gap commercials and.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
They've spent thirty million dollars airing that, Yeah, it did.
Call You'll see a fool hat in there. They called him,
and he said listen because he felt disrespected in the
way that they spoke to him. He felt that they
didn't respect or value the community. They were kind of
just like, listen, just show up, shut up, show up.
Do this commercial. He said, I wear a custom made hack.
I got a funny shaped head. Can I wear this? Sure,
(02:18):
no problem whatever. But in that he did acapella any
before US bias and low. Now, if you like movies
like you and I do in Airplane, do you remember it?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Excuse me? Do you speak job? I speak jab He
spoke jobs.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But throughout that commercial what happened was and there was
no social So somebody may be saying, here now for
the younger people the audience, why didn't they just pull
that ad? There was no Internet at the time. There
were no cell phones at the time, not smartphones, cell phones.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
They couldn't pull the ad.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
They already when you were shoot an ad back then,
you would have to wait sixty to ninety days for
them to cut it, edit it, color it, and put
it out then program it within the system. And they
couldn't pull back the buy thirty million dollars. So what
happened is they fired everybody on the gap. But then
they hired their version of you. They hired a multicultural agency.
(03:21):
I'm not saying that you need to be multicultural, but
you're a specific person that hits a very specific target
that nobody knows your fucking people like you do. And
what they did is when they hired a multicolorsual agency
and said get rid of this. They said hold on it,
I'm from the hood. Let me tell you something. You're
(03:41):
looking at the data. You're looking at the wrong data.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Check this out.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
They looked at the data, they realized the target market
they were trying to hit increase three hundred percent because
the kids thought they can buy foobu.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
At the gap.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
So they called this up we get which are the
big ol sloppy like kiss no Tongue, And they spent
another sixty million dollars re airing that ad.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Really yeah, I mean so that when I when I
think about because a lot of people want to want
to leverage influencers, I mean, as we've seen celebrity just
get more distributed. I mean, there's obviously still very very
famous people, but now the number of people who are
legit like internet famous, who have their own followings, the
number of influencers, they're massive, They're all over the place.
(04:28):
So again, you did it. You got l to come in.
I mean, but I know that you also a lot
of what you did was getting hip hop artists to
where you did product placement in music videos and things
like that, which is another type of influencer marketing. Where
do you see that today, Like it's come a long way.
(04:50):
Where do you see that today in terms of the
marketing stack and the influence that influencer marketing has on
marketing today?
Speaker 1 (04:57):
You know, I think the in marketing, no matter what
is needed, marketing, advertising, branding, right, But I think that
influencer marketing has always been where can you hack the
system and find the influencer that needs to prove themselves,
the influencer that has the most influence. Again, we're numbers people,
(05:19):
not that it has the most reached, that has the
most influence. And I know I'm not speaking a you know,
different language up here. These are these are the professionals
of this. But where can you get the influencer who
is the sub segment of the influencer who's being neglected?
You know? When I walked these three girls named the
Kardashians around Manhattan, and I remember I.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
Was I had a brand called heatheret.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
Paris Hilton showed up, and then the Danity Kane girl
showed up and there was this smoke and hot woman backstage.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
With them, and I was she said, oh Kim. I
was like, oh hey, that's kind of nice. Then what's up?
You know, who are you in? And she said, I'm
so for this song.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
She said, meet my sister and Chloe and she became
like one of the boys. They were like, yo, we're
trying to do this reality show. And I think and
I went over their house and I said, wow, the
other girls they were.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
I remember they were running around their the little onesies.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
They were hiding under the table, Kylie and all them.
And I saw them mother and I said, I talked
to her, and I remember her saying, hey, you know,
I'm going to do all the things that I tried
with myself earlier on in my career, but technology and
virus other things weren't where it is today. But my
husband is this guy, The stepfather is this guy. The
(06:39):
stepfather is this guy, and all this kind of stuff.
And I was like, well, the proof of concept is there.
These girls are really beautiful girls. The reality shows already greenlit.
Speaker 2 (06:49):
Let me take them around town. I took them to
every single clothing brand.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
I know.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
My buddies at Jordash were relaunching. Trust me.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
I mean there were not the Jordash company, but the
guys there worth twenty billion dollars. They don't They're not
losing any sleep, all right, I said, these girls will
wear Jordash all of the girls and the mother will
wear them for the whole family word, every single episode
for seventy five thousand dollars. They said, no, oops, we
don't get it. So if you ever look at the
(07:20):
first three season of Kardashians, they're wearing my brand, Koujie,
a hip hop brand, because I said, girls, I don't
want to insult you. I can't get anybody else to
believe in you. But I've always been that edgy because
I realized that these girls were beautiful, They were super
super connected, the mother was super connected. They already had
a show, All the right things were in place. It's
just that people sometimes need this validation that somebody's great.
(07:42):
You don't need that validation. And meanwhile, so Joe called
me up probably about six six years ago, Hey damn,
I got seventy five thousand dollars for all the girls.
Speaker 2 (07:53):
I can't get them on the phone for seventy five
thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
But you know I did that too with Fubu. When
I had money for fifty shirts, I had fifty shirts.
I didn't give them to the young Kip kids with
the funny mustaches and the weird pants who you know
riding the riding skateboards. They're gonna wear it one two times.
They're gonna want to say I'm super trending. They're gonna,
you know, give it away. I gave it to the big,
(08:17):
big guys in the name. But I have fifty shirts
and I made fifty five x'es and six exes. Why simple.
Those guys only have their their their big guys. They
only have a very few choices Rochester, big and tall,
a big white shirt, big black shirt, or they gotta
make a lot. They gotta pay a lot for something
custom made. They wore my shirt and they didn't wear
(08:39):
it one time a month. They put that big buboo
on their chest. They wore it seven ten times a month.
You know where those guys were in front of the
red ropes at clubs, in front of the h in
front of run DMC and Salt and Pepper and llll
cool J. They were the big guys who nobody fucked with.
Those were the and then when the the rappers said
to them, hey man, you know, hook me up with
(08:59):
that with the little guy with the shirts, they will say, no, no, no,
I'm not fucking on my contact. You're gonna wear it
one time. I went to the sub segment of the
sub segment like it. Just to me, it's common sense
when you see a rabbit audience. And I'll give you
one last time. The first time I was gonna make
a first time I was gonna spend a million dollars. They said,
go to MTV. You know rap videos, right of music videos.
(09:20):
MTV was seven thousand dollars. A thirty second commercial bet
was five hundred dollars.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
Why Nielsen rating, that's how they rate them. I ain't
never seen no Nielsen rating box in the projects. And
I know that one TV is servicing nineteen people in
that house. My damn, their own bet for a million dollars.
(09:50):
It's common sense sometimes that people don't think about it.
And then with the brilliant people's room, with that data,
you're not you're not digging for the right goal, sometimes
the right strain of goal.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I So what I heard there is if somebody is
going to pursue an influencer marketing campaign, you want to
have those relationships. Don't try to go for the person
at the top that supposedly everybody knows. Go for the
person that in the middle, that's sort of influencing within
a pocket that will then cause more of a ground
swell to happen. And then what I also heard you say,
which I think is important, go with the people who
(10:25):
are going to really go all in on your brand,
not somebody that's just going to treat it like a
transactional kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
I think, give it to you and dating dating lingo.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
Go ugly.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Early one of my friends were glad of the night
and like, hey man, I'm cool. Yeah, two to ten
is a ten to two babe.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
So are there any This is how exactly how this
gonna go down.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
One of my other friends said, he you know when
I go, When I go on and the woman I like,
she with a group of girls, never talked to her.
I'll wait till she goes to the bathroom and I
go over to the other ones who are hanging out,
and I become the funniest guy. But they don't feel
like I'm trying to be anything towards them. He as
soon as that girl come back, Oh hey me, Derek,
(11:23):
Oh how you doing? You gotta find other angles.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
And I think what's important is if you're gonna do
this well, you need to know your market like every time.
I mean, what you saw with the gap at is
somebody simply trying to buy their way into an audience
that they don't know. And that was true back then
and it seems like it'd be even more true today.
Like the authenticity has to be essential, Like that's got
(11:49):
to be the buy in or you will utterly fail
at this particular endeavor. It does.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
But the hard part about that is and that's why
diverse the inclusion is important. However, you can't force diversity
inclusion because how do you know if the person you
believe is part of that community is speaking the right way?
You know?
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I remember.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
A Christmas time I gave out a bunch of foodbu
to my employees, and I remember they came back the
holiday time it was not Christmas for everybody, and a
lot of the whites and Jewish people brought the fubu
back and I said why, they said, My kids said
they can't wear it in school, so why can't they
worry it in school? They said, because the African American
kids you know either you know. Got upset at them.
(12:37):
I said, I said, you know, when food was always
created for a community of hip hop who was spawned
off of a music made out of the love of
hip hop from African American young men in the South Bronx.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
But it's not. I realized I was becoming the.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Thing I was fighting against, and that I was always
told on my Jewish step father, be pro blas whenever
anti anything else, and always never become the thing you're
fighting against. And ninety five percent of this country has
more in common than we have against each other, and
it's only the five percent of these assholes that we
can't let rip us apart, right, And when I found
that these people, yeah, absolutely, And when I found that
(13:20):
my own community was so proud, I couldn't say, guys,
this is not for you, because it was, and it
was ninety percent of that community was wearing it.
Speaker 2 (13:29):
But it didn't mean that the ten percent couldn't.
Speaker 1 (13:31):
Because the beauty of hip hop was allowing the world
to see the hardships and the challenges that we was
happening in our lives. Because hip hop, to me at
the time and still even to today, hip hop and
country are exactly the same, by the way. That's why
they're the top music's in the world, because they are
the voices of the have nots. And hip hop is
(13:52):
something you do not need to play an instrument, you
don't need to harmonize. But before the Instagram and tiktoks,
we didn't see what was going on in the streets
of Las Vegas on the six o'clock news, But the
kids were talking about police violence, political issues, and various
other things. What's the same with country, right, you know,
I lost my dog, my dog died. Hip hop is
where my dog's at, Snoop doggy dog.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
You know country is.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
You know, I got my truck back hip hop as
I got that dude back.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I mean, whatever it is, right, it's basically the same.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
But once I did that, I had to bring the
people that I respected in that love hip hop that
happened to have different plights. So basically I hired and
embraced the people in my company that thought like Eminem
mc search. You know, when these people and what happened
(14:42):
was that's how we grew. And then I did it
where it came to Asian and Asian American because hip
hop is huge in Asia. The bottom line is the
challenge all often becomes when you were trying to translate
something to another market. You can't just hire a white person,
hire a woman, hire a black person. How do you
get to vet that? That's the big issue.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
That's so how do you do so let's let's and
(15:25):
let's take it out of maybe influencer and those kind
of things. When you fund a deal on shark Tank, right,
you go out there, you do a deal on shark Tank,
or you do a deal outside of shark Tank, because
I know that you've got you know, you do lots
of business deals. One of the first things that that
you look to do is to align to a new partner.
But like, what's your process for doing that? Like, how
do you go through and figure out who are the
(15:47):
people that you should align this brand with?
Speaker 1 (15:49):
How many mistakes did they make for on the way
coming up? And how did they have the vigor to
figure it out? And what happens if you don't get
this deal. I don't do that much, so you know,
I string it out over a course of time.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
Of what are your use of proceeds?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Well, if you tell me you're gonna go spend half
of the money on advertising, you're about to error an ABC,
Well how much advertise you're gonna get there?
Speaker 2 (16:14):
You're an idiot. I'm not investing in you? Why would
you do? You know?
Speaker 1 (16:21):
You know nothing is static. You know you get on
shark Tank. Well, then I have to I don't have
to do that.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
You know what I have to do.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
I have to make sure I protect all the ips
because how many people are gonna try to People in
this room gonna go, oh, you're.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Not taking all this traffic? I got that. How am
I going to do that instead? Right?
Speaker 1 (16:40):
How am I going to be able to and not
let my ego get in the way and tell the
customer how I'm not gonna take all your money and
use inventory because you know what may happen. A snowstorm
may happen in New York or on the Eastern seaboard,
or an earthquake, and you get preempted, and now you've
got a garage filled of the product. How am I
gonna hold back for a second and say, hey, thank
you for being a customer. I'm a small business. If
(17:02):
you don't mind, you know, can you wait over the
course of this period of time and here's what I'll
do for you. Because if you think, well, I'm gonna
get rich over that first month of sales with NAT,
You're not in a business this is a marathon. I
want to see you solve problems.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
And I'm not gonna give you the answers ahead of time.
So what is the thing when somebody walks out of
the set on Shark Tank? What do you see that
makes you think I'm gonna invest in this person?
Speaker 1 (17:27):
I see that during the course of the time of
I'm not sure, I'm busy. You know, may take a
month two months that they're not stressing and harass me.
There's no kind of feel of like, oh my god,
I'm like, why are you so desperate?
Speaker 2 (17:39):
What's going on? They're moving their business along without me.
Is there anything during the pitch process though, So when
they're goes through the pitch and they come out, is
there something you see where you're like, this person's got
they got it? Normally you see it.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
You know, that's hard because the producers do it really
well where they say, don't just go out and tell
your sales and all that. The producers tell them how
to hold it back. So a lot but there's a
lot of times where I can I can smell with
something wrong.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Ooh what does that look like?
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Well, it's when they start saying stuff like yeah, if
we only had This is a fifty billion dollar market.
If I only got this percent of the market. Okay,
these people like to assume. These people like to guests
when I see something like, oh, yeah and yeah, we
need you to do this.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I got a job. You need me to do what? Right?
Speaker 1 (18:28):
When I hear yeah, and then so and then we
and then this happened.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
This happened in this long, long stretch. So I'm looking.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
If it's a ten year stretch, you can do fifty
dollars on shar tank. And but if you did it
on on one day because you open your trunk, you
had something for a dollar and you sold fifty of them,
you got a big deal. You can do literally twenty
million dollars over ten years.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
And I hear a bunch of other things go on here.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Now if it happens to be listen, I did the
deal my partner. This is unfortunately, this happened. We did
about seven million back then and then I opened it
up in boom. Yes, but if this keeps going on
like this, something's going on.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
The most consistent variable in all your FAILT relationships is
still you. That's it. Yeah. So if they're coming out
and talking about.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
That that's a guy named rouped Me Daniels. Every single
rapper and music artist o them owes him a debt
of gratitude. He had a show probably I was on
a public access channel in New York City and he
had a show probably about five years before MTV. Raps
is the longest running show, and they well begged to
be on the out rauph show. I like, you know
(19:32):
this simple thing I have with thought process. Every Ralph
used to go around all the parties, hey, and you know,
people say who they are. But he did something in
Virginia or something where he did his event. I knew
I couldn't catch him in New York because everybody's going
after I drove down to Virginia and I think my
car broke down, and I begged him that could put
me on. But I did the same thing. I dressed
(19:54):
his and a couple of other bodyguards around him, and
I did it. I laid it low and I addressed
for about two years, and then he finally started saying, Hey,
I'm gonna do something called a little fashion show.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Do you want to be in it?
Speaker 1 (20:07):
And I say yeah, And we had already seeded kind
of so much that when he did the fashion show,
people went crazy and he said, I want to put
you on there, and that's pretty much how it happened.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah, I love I love what you said there. Because
a lot of people who want to get access to famous,
important people, they they think that they need to just
try to like accustom like when they're out in public
or something like that, like that's what's going to make
it work. Or they want to be hypertropic. What can
I do for you? And they try to do this
stuff to to immediately go in You said you you
(20:40):
dressed them for two years before that.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
I always I always used to try to basically, you know,
do things around the person to show my value without
addressing the person. As soon a later they said we
why aren't you talking to me?
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah? And I think that's a good lesson for everybody,
because a lot of people said, like, how you know
people know we're you know, we got business and stuff
like that we do together. How'd you get to know Damon?
And there was the same thing, right, there was a
yeah it was a business thing, but like it started
off just paying you to come and speak at events
and then not being a freaking weirdo. I think a
lot of times people there are paid channels of access
(21:15):
for almost anybody you would want to get access to.
But if you when you go there, if you just
seek for ways to deliver value and that this isn't
obviously transactional, it's amazing what can happen because everybody it
almost always happened like that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
The hardest thing, though, to do with somebody is to
say to them, hey, give me something to do and
let me know what to do for you, because some
people's successful people. First of all, there's a burden that
comes of being successful that everybody thinks that you're taking
advantage of people. Also, if I knew what you could
do for me, I'll give that job to somebody else. Right,
(21:52):
You're supposed to do it, free, bake it, bring it in,
and I go, holy shit, I didn't even know I
needed it. Isn't that the same thing that you do
when you sell product services? Somebody didn't know they needed it.
They thought they were okay with this, They didn't know
they needed you until they realized how much goddamn better
you were because this was the only thing they had
to compare it to. And that's what generally happens with people.
(22:14):
You know, they don't know that Bomba Socks is going
to be great until they realize my other sock company
is not giving to.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Homeless they are. So you just save me time.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
I don't have to go to the homeless shelter, but
I can brag at the dinner table that I gave
the homeless, you know. So it really is about how
do you surround like you said, and not be the
lack of a better word, thirsty.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Yeah, Oh I love yeah, I love that. I want
to go back to young damon. You got a time machine? Yeah, right,
you go back, and you go back in time and
you meet in the hallway this crew including you. Yeah,
they just lift that interview and you go there and
you go, hey, come here, what do you whisper in
(22:57):
your own ear? Back? Then we'll see. I should give
yourself if you go back in time. You know.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
But I'm a different person now, but I would think
i'd say, first of all, get rid of all the
people around.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
You're not all of them. Get it with a tighter crew.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
It doesn't sound like you werehearse what was going to
be what you were going to say in that room,
and did you ask what was going to happen prior?
Did you prepare yourself for that room? Because you know
you may get into the room with somebody to pitch,
and the right questions often is why are you doing this?
Speaker 2 (23:29):
So what's in it for you?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
People are often in shar Tank, Well, damon, I want
you in here because you want You're in clothing in
clothing business. I got into shar Tank because it was
eight and when people weren't couldn't pay their mortgage and
know eight, the last thing they could do on was
buying clothing lines. I had ten clothing lines and eight
of them were dead. So what I realized was that
(23:52):
I wasn't a great designer. Putting a big fbing O
five on a shirt is not a great designer. I'm
a great manufacturing distributor, and I know and I have
a lot of celebrity contacts, so I have the pipes,
and I know the buyers at Macy's and JC Penny's
and what's in it for them? Well, if I can
acquire more brands such as clothing and plates, and I
mean women's and makeup and various other things electronics, I
(24:17):
can now because I'm a trusted vendor, I can then
deal with them, and they have to deal with that
many less new brands, brands that are proven because I've
acquired it. But they know that I'll take the goods back.
They know that I'm going to support them in advertising marketing.
You know what's gonna happen. They're gonna get to go
on vacation earlier with their family and they're not gonna
get yelled at by their boss. That's my value. I'm
(24:37):
going on a shark thing to buy everything else but clothing.
But you are pitching me clothing. Or you say you
take money from somebody and you go, well, you know,
how come you going to show up at work. I'm
investing money because I want fifteen percent or ten percent
on interest on my on my on my on my money.
I didn't tell you I was gonna show up. Or
my husband loves cars, and before I put a million
(24:59):
dollar in his business, I want him to work within
your business. So I realized that potentially is there something there,
Or I like what you're doing for philanthropy, but you
think I just want to give you money for the
wrong reason.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
You don't ask the right questions you made. I'm guessing
and I know this for a fact because you're an
entrepreneur and we talked about it. But I mean, you've
had You've made some really brilliant business moves, and you've
made some less brilliant business moves. What would you say
to yourself back then to avoid some of the less
good business moves? The less business the.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Business moves that were never great were due to either
my ego, not trusting my gut, or not doing it.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Because I loved it. Give me an example.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
My ego was I did a brand call Heather at
the one that I met Kim at. The two designers
were absolutely brilliant people, but they were couture designers. They
would they were the fooboo of their world for young
women between probably about fourteen to twenty four. But every
major brand like Jillett or this and that would give
(26:11):
them during fashion week, Hey take our runways. Naomi CAMPBELLI
walked the word way for free. They were the darling
and people would write about.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Them for free.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
So I said, listen, there's millions of dollars advertising here,
but they're not selling any ready to wear.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Let me, you know, buy the company.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
I didn't know anything about women's wear, and if you
know anything about designing. You know, if a man where
if both of us wear whatever cases right, thirty two
thirty four to thirty six, there's thirty two long, there's
thirty two short, there's thirty two slim, thirty two baggy.
If a woman wears a size eight, there's twenty four
size eights. The gap back in the back, all right,
(26:52):
gaps in the back, thicker, thigh, center, thigh, is a stretch,
boot cut, flare cut, fly cut, crotch, all kind of
shit going on here, all right, Because it's getting tighter
to the body. And when a woman is under forty,
all she cares about is the way her heiny looks.
She doesn't care as long as her dairy air looks amazing.
When she gets over forty, generally it's the sleeves, how
(27:14):
the arms look right, and the tighter the garment gets
to the body, the more critical woman is. And as
I shared earlier, when a woman doesn't know a brand,
what does she do? She buys two sizes because she
buys one, and that sends out the back. I lost
six million dollars on that business because I didn't know
what I was doing in the ego of Damon John
Because I'm a manufacturer was the one that failed because
(27:37):
you know what happened the two partners, brilliant costume designers,
being a custom and costume designer putting Naomi Campbell, the
sexiest model in the world, on a runway with an
ace bandage just over the important parts and a garbage
fail on her head and the spray paint her red.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
And kick her out to the damn thing.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
You know that ain't something you could buy off the rack.
My ego got in the way. And so what happens
was my ego got in the way. So salespeople always
sell you boss. They would buy the line this season,
but you didn't make purple. Now they got themselves a
job for six more months.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
So that was my ego. And at the end of
the day, out of the ten decisions.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
I made for businesses, eight of them, if I didn't
trust my gut, eight of them failed them. The two
that even I made money on or with some level
of success, I went like this, Thank God I got
out of it. I just didn't trust my ego, And
your ego is a direct line to your belly button
of you can't necessarily articulate why you don't want to
(28:36):
do it, But you don't have to articulate that.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Fuck that. That's your gut, it's nobody else's.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
And I don't care if the person looks good, the
number looks like I don't fucking like it. But there'll
be a lot of people right here.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
No, no, on a Ryan, you're the man.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Because all they care about is what's in it for them.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So how do you balance that though, as an entrepreneur,
because obviously you need a strong ego as an entrepreneur.
If you don't have an ego, you're not gonna be
an entrepreneur because of an ego and what you do best. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
True entrepreneur is the most vulnerable people in the room
because they walk in the room and they say, I
know this, I don't know all this. You can help
me with this. I will bust my ass to help
you with that. And by the way, I'm gonna do
these ship regardless. So if you're helping me, it's fine.
If you're not, somebody else is and I'm gonna double
that return for them.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Yeah, I agree. Thank you. You've you've written a number
of books. I'll list a couple of them out if
you don't have them. By the way I'd get on
Amazon and get these display of power brand within Power Shift,
Rise and Grind. I know that one. There's a chapter
that's right with Ryan and there's yeah, I mean it's
it's it's obviously the best one. I'm phenomenal. I'm sorry,
(29:48):
actually make the wrong damn book. Power Broke is the
one that making a movie of that that that chapter,
and most recently Little Damon Learns to Earn. So I'm
just curious, Like this is a bit like asking you
which one of your kids is your favorite, but like
which one of your books Little Dame Lens earned, Yeah,
Little Damon Learns Earned. Yeah, I don't like it was quick.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I don't like adults anymore. You know, we're all jaded
by one way or another. And I'll write people, I'll
write these books, and I don't like writing books.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I'm just like sic.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
I write books of the most commonly things I'm asked
all the time. And if I can't say going to
a Ryan's book, or go to a Lewis Howe or
Tim Ferriss or Damon John Tony Robbins, whatever the case is,
I write down goldie shit, and then after a while
I go let me write a book. I may do
one last book for adults, but adults, you know, we're
all who we are, right, I'll tell people all this
stuff and they think I'm holding back life from them,
(30:38):
or I'll give them and we are just all what
we are, what we are and when we are. And
(31:01):
so I'll write books and I'll go man. I wrote
a whole book on that, but when I am breaking
the system Now in America, off of Little Dama Learns
to Earn is the number one picture book in the
country the last two years. It is about entrepreneurship and
why I wrote it was the system is broken, and
(31:22):
I wanted to empower the system. And I want There's
many people way more brilliant than I who've met, who
made books like that, who made me not had the
public stage, and I want people to compete with me
now and see how good it was, and build and
do that, and let schools do that and break this system.
But when I sit and talk to these beautiful little
six year old, seven year old, eight years old, and
(31:44):
they mind starts to open up over this, whether that
little piece of information I gave them how to be
an entrepreneur they use it today or thirty years from now.
I have hope and I believe in our children. Children
are the you know, the most beautiful thing in this world.
I don't want to talk to another adult about that.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Ship company present company excluded.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Yeah, but that that it's so passionate because you see
the little kids of these beautiful eyes going I'm gonna
do this, damon, and I'm just really passionate about it.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
So what's your vision behind that? What's your vision? Like,
what are you gonna do with that? Because you wrote
a book and you're gonna you know, I'm.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Gonna do more stuff behind it. But the bottom line
is we are living off of a broken school system.
That there is an unlike Cuban who's taking on a
real conspiracy and or situation. We're bringing and he's trying
to he's trying to bring affordable drugs and.
Speaker 2 (32:36):
So go to uh what is this thing called cast?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Uh?
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Cost plus cost plus dot com.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
I keep telling him it's the stupidest name ever. Regular
regular people don't understand what costs plus means. That sounds dangerous, right,
But for an eighty dollar pillo, you can get it
from Cuban for two dollars. He's trying to break this
drug system them in this country. I don't have that issue.
There's no conspiracy against our children. It's just an old
(33:05):
system when we were off of when we were at war,
they taught you how to be a great employee, you know,
and they taught you shop and skills like that. Kids
don't need to be a great employee. They need to
know how to run their businesses and they need to
know financial intelligence. But if our system is not teaching
the financial intelligence, what does taxes used for?
Speaker 2 (33:25):
What happens with money and how you use it?
Speaker 1 (33:27):
And then at sixteen years old, predatory people can market
them credit cards and school loans for the status today
that a child graduating today. Fifty percent of those children
will retire with a job title that doesn't exist today.
That's like telling a kid twenty years ago they were
going to be a traffic and conversion pay per click expert,
(33:48):
a drone operator. So how are you going to go
and have seven hundred thousand dollars worth of student debt
for a career that you're not sure you want to have,
and then you're not going to pay it off into
your fifties Because what happens when you have a lack
of money, right, think about it, right for our children?
What happened when you have a lot of money. Domestic
(34:08):
violence goes up right, all gangs. It's hard to eat
clean in this country. And the cheapest things to make
in this country made of butter, sugar, and salt. And
then all of a sudden, now you have diabetes because
you have a bad diet because you.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Didn't have money.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
And if we teach our kids this like little Dame
learns to earn a six, seven, eight, nine years old,
you think you need to teach them at twenty. You
teach your kid how to play sports at twenty, and
then put them on a field with some four hundred
pound line backer trying to eat their lunch. You teach
them how to play an instrument at twenty and put
them right in the orchestra. You teach them at six,
you teach them at seven.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
And that is my job.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
I'm gonna go to the goddamn grave breaking this system.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Love it, man, love it, love it, love it is.
It is truly a tragedy. My first business that I
that I ran, I got to where I I owed
a quarter million dollars to the irs because I didn't
pay taxes, which that's how you owe the Irs money,
by the way, you just don't pay them. You know,
(35:10):
I didn't pay them. I didn't know what I was
supposed to. Nobody's teaching this stuff. And when I think
about it, if this was a part of the curriculum,
if we were teaching the kids to basically be these
cogs in a machine, what if we taught them to
be the machine? You know how amazing would that would
that be?
Speaker 1 (35:28):
I mean, if you don't and if you don't pay
taxes honestly, you know the irs if you if you pay,
if you pay your federal then you may get penalized
ten percent.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
The states will hit you at twenty something percent.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Your bill at forty thousand dollars or twenty thousand dollars
will be three hundred thousand dollars in a matter of
no time.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
And then you have to go on the ground or
are you going to go to jail? And nobody's teaching
this kind of stuff the kids. Again, I plaud your efforts,
so I want to bring it up. And if you
have not bought how many on your have bought little
little damulers earn? If not enough man y'all need to
get out there and get that book, buy for every
child in your life.
Speaker 1 (36:03):
But you know, I don't want people to think about
this as us trying to sling books, because we're not.
I want you guys to all empower your children. And
you know what, because I'm gonna want I want you
all to be selfish. I'm gonna tell you something for
you to be really selfish about right now. The stat
is that your kids will take care of you two
times longer than you took care of them. So if
(36:24):
you don't want to sit outside of Pigley Wigy with
a shitty diaper, you better teach some some financial intelligence, homies.
Speaker 2 (36:33):
It isn't that right? And that really I should have
wont a little dave learner you want to eat that I.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
Want to talk about I know in this kind of
and you imagine what we talk about on Shark thanking.
Speaker 2 (36:47):
Whoa dude? Yes, because I've had the privilege of being there. Yeah,
that's right. And here's what you don't know. And most
of y'all, a lot of y'all stop stop drinking, but
they used to drink on set and they film all day.
So some of those, uh, some of those by the
end of the day.
Speaker 1 (37:01):
Well, we didn't even start a committing Well, we would
come in a little extra crispy sometimes from hanging out
at night.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Now we shoot. We shoot two weeks in June, two
weeks in September, and we shoot ten hours straight in
average up.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
So we're up because schedules so tight. Get up in
the five o'clock in the morning, get in the chair,
you know, the shark tank chair. By the time I'm
in there at nine, I'm done in nine. I have
one hour during that day to answer all my emails,
you know, all the company business deals and how my
wife tell me I ain't shit for about ten minutes
and then which is their job?
Speaker 2 (37:33):
No, no, that's their job. Get back to that ego.
Thank Youeping up fair yet?
Speaker 1 (37:37):
So you don't want to be the ninety ninth pitch
coming in after two weeks and we're extra chrismy.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, yeah, they're hammered. I want to switching gears completely.
I want to talk about the role of mentors in
your life. Yes, you and I share a couple of mentors.
You've been a mentor of mine. I just want to
know what what are some of the mentors that have
been in your life, and like, how how is mentorship
(38:04):
in general like play a role in your development?
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Mentors have been huge, but you know, at the bottom
line and when business, mentors will at the end of
the day tell you three things. You know, don't take
him money too soon, don't scale too quick, and don't
spread yourself too thin. But mentors. I love mentors who
don't need me. You know that's you know, explain that well.
You know, it's so like I'm not a big real
(38:27):
estate guy myself, but my guys who are really big guys,
My money is pure crackhead money.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
To them, They're like, what am I doing with that?
Speaker 3 (38:36):
Well?
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Can you put this to work? Why?
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Because your wife wants to open a lotion company? You
want to talk to there? Oh oh, so you want
to be in on this one.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
They don't need me, right, and I don't need them right.
So I love mentors like a Jay Abraham and things
of that nature. But even and we have a group
Rise Nation mastermind. The great thing about what we do
is when I see that people don't when we're in
the room and as you rolling and myself we're in
the room, as the advisors potentially but the members are
(39:10):
getting answers from other members so much. I love all
forms of mentorship. Even my daughters have a form of
reverse mentorship. When Chara Tank was starting to take off
and I had to have these acquisitions in all these
areas I used to go into.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
My daughter was right about seventeen. At that time, she
was in her room.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
I started to notice TV's going away, you know, as
I think Gary Vee said TV was becoming radio. The
computer of the phone was becoming TV in a room
on her computer, skyping with her boyfriend on It was
Snapchat at the time, right, So she's an Apple computer
sniping Da Da da da. She's shopping on Amazon, and
she's doing her homework and lying to me all at
(39:49):
the same time. I bought every stock of what she
was doing. I bought Apple, I bought snap I bought Facebook,
I had Instagram whatever the case is. And Amazon, uh,
Amazon and Amazon. Look where I'm at today? Yeah, And
she was shopping on Shopify. I was Shopify thirty dollars.
I went up to nineteen hundred wolf.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
That was a good bye. I didn't have to call anybody,
I didn't have to look at any inventory.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I didn't have to do anything, and so she's a
mentor of mine instead of you know, Opparentsly said.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
What are you doing? I go no, no, no, no,
what are you doing? So what so you and you
mentioned it? We started a group rise mastermind. Yeah, why, like,
what why do you want to do that? Because you
said it before last I checked? You're doing okay financially, right,
I mean, and you joke before like you don't need
(40:41):
people to buy books. You know you don't. You're not
writing a book to get rich or to get famous. Yeah,
check and check. You want to start you know you came.
We're having a discussion about starting an entrepreneurial mastermind. That's
something that Frankly, again, if any all in the room,
I'm not talking about you, but there's a lot of
people out there who have started masterminds because let's be honest,
(41:02):
they don't actually know how to do real business, and
so they want to go out there and teach other
people how to do that because that's easier. And so
here you are. You made it. You could go and
hang up, you could go and chill. Why out of
all of the things that you could be doing, you
mentioned one of them that you're doing right now is
(41:23):
you got the book and you want to educate the future.
But why a mastermind? Why am I on Shark Tank?
Is the same thing?
Speaker 1 (41:31):
And why is people like And by the way, all
this Cuban leaving Shark Tank. Cuban said he was leaving
Shark Tank after season sixteen. That means by the time
he leaves and stops talking about Sharktank, he'll be twenty
twenty five. Why is Cuban on Shark Tank? Why is
Richard Branson on Shartank? Why are all the shots on shartank?
Because we get to lift up and look underneath the
(41:52):
hoods of groundbreaking people who will take no for a
fucking will. They will never take no for a fucking answer.
And we're looking at these people and you are getting
to see how they're operating, where things are going, and
we're seeing the ring doorbells, the scrub daddies and the
bomb of socks before anybody's ever seeing these things. And
we're seeing people with real time issues. You know, if
(42:13):
you go into a group of AA and you know
for smoking and various other things, and I have a
massive amount of respect for that, you need mental health,
But you keep telling somebody to start smoking.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
There's no real reason that they need to or not.
That is up to them.
Speaker 1 (42:26):
When you are in a business, you are either scaling
or you're done. You're done sooner or later. If you're
not scaling, you're done one year or five years, but
you're done. And when you have people in the room
doing five and ten and twenty million, they're solving real day,
real time issues. And when we are now in these
passing rooms the way we are, we're no longer next
(42:49):
to each other in office. We're all spread around the world.
We're not talking to each other. Well, we're on these
zooms where where our eyes are blazing over. We don't
want to interrupt everybody else. We've got to walk the
goddamn dog.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Right.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
If you don't have time to have these micro meetings,
but if you can meet with people three separate times
over two days enough in a year, you see they're
solving real problems. They I was saying it outside. They
can't tell these problems to somebody doing a million when
they're doing two million, because that person's been doing a
million and is only doing a million. They got million
dollar problems and they can't tell it to somebody doing
(43:21):
one hundred and two hundred three hundred million. These people,
so they're in the middle of this kind of fluctuation
of trying to grow and they need real answers, and
I get to see them solving those real answers. And
just like on Shark Tank, I get to sit with
you guys and we're seeing this and we're advising and
somehow we're going, oh shit, amazing. And it's also reinforcing something.
(43:45):
When you live in this ivory tower and you just
think and have your people tell you what's going on,
you almost never get the real data. That's how you
see most of these companies collapse because you know the
CEO shuts start showing up a day late to the
conference and leaving a day early, have your people talk
to my people, and you get lazy.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
I don't like it. I'm not getting lazy. So this
is about of staying in the game.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
This is about if I'm gonna be in the game.
I'm gonna stay in the game. If not, I let
my money work for me and I just will go home.
My wife will tell me to empty the garbage, you
moron every five hours, and I'll.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Just be sitting there going. I used to be damon John.
I love my wife, by the way a lot. So
the for everybody who's out there, I mean, would you
say that every entrepreneur should be in some type of community,
some type of mastermind. Of course you have to be
in some kind of community.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
I mean you look at the Diamond District in New
York City. They're all on forty seventh Street for a reason,
best practices. They're seeing what's going on, what's hurting each other.
I mean, we are pack animals. We love communicating, and
you want to communicate the speed of light. But communicating
through screens just doesn't work.
Speaker 2 (44:55):
Man. You know, when you have fifty people in the room,
forget even mastermind, when you have fifty people in your office,
you know how many of these? Hey, you know what
that means? We really had I thought of something else. Talk.
You won't come back from month.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
You know.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
That's having fifty times a day by fifty people.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
You're cutting that curve right Or I'm in the meeting
with ten people. Hey, so Forthy, Juliet, you'll work with Chauncey.
I can't see that on the zoom afterwards. Hey, he
had a problem. Chauncey doesn't everybody have rama Chauncy.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Chauncey's a real person by the way he is, and
that's how I feel about him.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
But it's about being you know, it is about being
together collectively, and that's how you get innovation. Innovation is
really people forcing themselves onto an idea. I mean that
tech innovation sye. Tech doesn't have a tech doesn't have
a personality, right, So you create the Apple Watch and
you create this and text us to merge because people say,
(45:51):
why can't I put it together? It's an easy answer,
but people are very complex and as we merge, and
that's why food will got to be so big because
go back to that story. Once I saw that interaction,
if that was on zoom, I wouldn't have known what
happened to those clothes.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Well, I thank you for your friendship. I think you
for your mentorship. I'm excited we could have spend twenty
twenty four hanging out at least a few times. We're
gonna be hanging out in back in Vegas. We're hanging
out in La La. Yeah. Might even be able to
get a little backstage tour of the Shark Tank sets
(46:30):
of those of you who join us. There and and
in your hometown of Miami, So Town, Miami.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
We had a We had a great I love the
fact that we we do opening parties for the Riding Mastermind.
Now why I just invite this like a room of
one hundred important people. Yeah, they may not even be
in the Mastermind. They just pop up and you know,
like David Grutman was the last one. Mark Anthony was there.
I don't know where he was. No, it was other Mark,
A bunch of people, Rohan Oza popped up, Nellie Galan.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
A lot of people just pop up. So we have
a good time. Yeah, well, I'll tell you if you
want to join us rizationmastermind dot com. Also if you
head by the Digital Marketer booth, we got members of
the of the team that are there. We'd love if
you're a high performance entrepreneur, I want to hang out
with some more. We'd love to hang out with you
in twenty twenty four. With that said, let's give this
man a big, big, big round of applause.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
Dame of John, Ladies and gentlemen, That Moment with Damon
John is a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network.
For more podcasts from the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite show, and don't forget to subscribe to and
(47:38):
rate the show. And of course you didn't all connect
with me on any of my social media platforms. At
the Shark, Damon spelled like Raymond, but what a d
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