Today on The Breakfast Club, John Morgan Talks 'Life is Luck,' Career Journey, Johnnie Cochran, Rival Lawyers, James Dolan. Listen For More!
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Every day a week ago, clicks.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Up the Breakfast Club. You know, I'm finish for y'all.
Done morning.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Everybody's DJ Envy just hilarious. Charlamagne the guy we are
the Breakfast Club. La La Rose is here with us
as well. We got a special guest in the building.
I'm sure you've seen his commercial, you heard his name before.
I'm sure you've even seen his picture. Ladies and gentlemen,
we have attorney John Morgan. How is it going? How
you feeling now? You just the way that you put
(00:30):
your ads out is kind of like a Beyonce, a
Tailor Swift when they release an album. I mean you
see it all over the place. You see it everywhere,
commercials for All Star, super.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Bowl, everything. So Morgan and Morgan is for the people.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Morgan and Morgan is for the people. So let's start
off from the beginning. How a young paper boy delivering
papers got to this multi billion dollar uh I would
say empire that you've accumulated. So how did you start
off and what made you want to be an attorney?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I wanted to be an attorney When I was a
sophomore in college. I got a call from my dad,
my brother Tim was a lifeguard at Walt Disney World
and he calls me. He says, Tim's been in an accident.
He's paralyzed from the chin down. And there began that journey,
and Disney was very tough. We were poor, you know, hopeless, helpless, powerless.
(01:26):
It's a terrible place to be. And a lot of
bad things happened to my brother during that time, and
I became enraged, and I said to myself, you know,
first of all, I'm terrible in math and terrible in size.
So I wasn't gonna be a doctor or CPA. And
so I went into law, and this is all I've
(01:46):
ever done. I decided I wanted to do this type
of law to make sure that people like my brother
Tim got a fair shake. And so I went to
law school and graduated from the University of Florida. I
only applied at personal injury law firms. And here we are,
you know, many years later.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
But there's a lot of injury attorneys out there, but
none of them are as successful as you. What got
you to that level Because there's a lot of attorney
injury turners. It sometimes, you know, they call ambulance chasers
and all these different names. But nobody has got to
the point that you've got what what made people trust
you and sign up with your firm over all these
(02:27):
other firms that.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Go out there.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I'm not exactly sure, except I spent a lot of
time working. I mean I lived in union halls, I
drank and dive bars with the union leaders, and I
kind of built it brick by brick. When I got
into this business. A few years before, you weren't even
allowed to advertise as a lawyer. There was a case
(02:51):
called Bates versus Arizona the Supreme Court that lawyers could
even advertise, so it was verboten you. I mean, you
didn't advertise if you were a lawyer. But I was
just into the business at that point in time, and
I told my wife, I said, look, and I was
getting a lot of cases from these guys on TV,
and I said, this train is leaving the station. And
(03:14):
what a lot of people got to look at is
sometimes trains do leave the station. If you don't get
on the train, you're gonna get run over by the train.
And I said, I got to do this, and so
I went. I borrowed a hundred thousand dollars from bank
people asked me, why one hundred. The other bank said
(03:34):
fifty one, guy said one hundred. So I take them up.
And so fast forward. What I did, and what I
would tell people entrepreneurs is if you're going to scale
a business, especially when you're young, you have to to scale.
You had to take your profits and pour it back
(03:57):
into building the business. So I did Orlando, then I
did Tampa, and then I did Jacksonville, and then I
did Fort Myers Naples, and then I did Miami. And
instead of buying a boat or a car, I expanded
and people, as you know, I didn't make a million
(04:18):
dollars until I was forty one years old. That's the
first year I made a million dollars. But then I
kept growing it and then at some point in time,
all those cities start to take root and sprout. And
so from that one hundred thousand dollars, this year, we'll
spend almost six hundred million in advertising. Wow, and we'll
(04:42):
do two point four billion dollars in revenue. And the
real secret to our success, which a lot of lawyers
don't do. We try a lot of cases. We make
our money in the courtroom. A lot of people make
money taking the last best offer. No, we grab them
by that back of the neck, and dragons.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
They grab by the balls. But you can I don't know,
you might be in some files or something, But let
me ask you what that?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
How do you.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
How do you decide what cases you're going to take it?
What cases you're not right? Because although the victim you
can get them a lot of money, but the person
sometimes you're suing, you can destroy them, totally, take them
out of business where they can't work ever. Again, Like,
let's take an example of let's say an older gentleman
that lives in Brooklyn that has a brown stone that
didn't get out early enough to shovel a snow right,
(05:39):
somebody slips on the ice, they get hurt, they get sued,
But you also have the power to take everything from
him as well. So how do you decide what are
you going to do? And morally, how do you decide
how far are you going to take it?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I think about that all the time because and here's how,
here's how I deal with it. First of all, I've
never done that. I've never done that. How do I
get around that? There's a concept called bad faith. If
the insurance company doesn't operating good faith and they don't
tender the limits, and we go get a verdict. That
(06:12):
difference between the limits and our verdict is called bad faith,
and then we go and sue the insurance company for
bad faith and take care of that gentleman who's property
the injury took place on it. So here I am.
You know, all these years later, not one time have
I ever gone against an individual. I don't think I could.
(06:36):
I don't think I could, because you know, depending on
where you're from, if you've ever been up against the wall,
it's a bad place to be. And so if that
ever came to be, it would not be a case
that Morgan and Morgan. I would never go against somebody
personally to come and take money out of their bank account.
(06:56):
I take it from the insurance company's bad faith policy.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Got you know, you know Morgan and Morgan and slogan
is for the people, right, But you've also been one
of the most powerful corporations in America. How do you
keep those two missions from conflicting.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Well, you you have to keep your eye on the ball,
and it's all about people. You know, I've been what
I've been impressed with coming here today. You got an empire,
but you've got a lot of people making that empire click.
And when I look at my life and I look
at my business, I could give you the names of
(07:31):
a bunch of people that if they hadn't been there
with me, I might not be here. And sometimes you
hear these quarterbacks on you know they're thinking their offensive line.
They need to thank their offensive line. Because if you
don't have an offensive line that I saw that you
have from here today, you can't be who you are.
(07:53):
And so I've been very lucky in spotting talent and
developing talent. Here's how I look at people. If I
send somebody something over and over again to the point
that I know, if I send it, I don't have
to worry about it, I call it sind delete. So
I send you something, I don't have to worry about
it anymore. I delete it. Once I find that sin
(08:16):
delete person, I then elevate them, and then I ruthlessly,
ruthlessly delegate their task and then we and then you
got to pay them, you know, I tell people, So
you pay your people for big time. Listen, I believe
(08:38):
in Florida. I believe what's ail in America is the
when people can't live on what they're making, there's no
little WAYE So what I did in Florida, and it
was also a good experiment. I spent tens of millions
of dollars of my own money to pass a cop
(09:00):
institutional amendment to raise the minimum ways to fifteen dollars
an hour. It was eight dollars an hour when I
did this thing. And I'm like, you know, let's just
see what happens. Everybody told me, he said, John, you're romantic.
You know this isn't gonna happen nobody in Florida. You
got to get sixty percent of the vote to pass
the constitutional amendment. Guess what, We passed it with sixty
(09:22):
three percent of the vote. And then here's what I
learned by that that most of us, when you take
a D down and an R down from behind our
political affiliation, that most of us agree on most things
if you take the D in the R down. And
(09:43):
I did the same thing. I did the same thing
my brother tid of the guy who got hurt. He
needed marijuana to take care of his pain, take care
of his spasms. And so I did the same thing
with and I legalized medical marijuana in the state of Florida.
And so what I say about paying people this, if
you want to build a great circus, the greatest show
(10:05):
on earth, people go to the circus to see the
guy eating by the lines and the guy fall off
the high wire.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's christou'd be going to. When people getting eaten by the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Line, well, we're hoping that they are. We're hoping that
That's why people go to NASCAR. They want to see
the they want to see the crash. They you know,
they want to see the disaster. Then they're sad after
they see it. But the way you don't get eaten
by the lines and the tiger is you pay them
and you love them. You feed them and you love them.
(10:39):
And the way you don't fall off of the wire
the high wire is you focus. So my business philosophy
is focus, feed them, love them, and then the lines
and tigers will give you the greatest show on earth.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
How do you keep your the clients that you're working
for kind of on that train of like things will
work out eventually, and not being hungry for the money.
Talking about feeding them because most people want to ask
for like five figures, but y'all go in and get
way more money than that. And a lot of times
with these type of cases, people talk about how people
will go back and just keep suing people trying to
get money, Like how do you balance that? Because people
(11:18):
need what they need like times of heart.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Well, when people need money, the hardest thing is people
need money and they want to get it now, and
there are funding companies. In some states you can advance
the client money. In some states you can't. The hardest
thing sometimes is to make the client say, please be patient,
please be patient, and sometimes you can get an advance
(11:43):
on their case. I don't like to do it because
he's funding companies charge you know, Tony Soprano type rates.
But it's a delicate balance because when people here's the
business I'm in, everybody that I'm represent and had something
taken from them. They had their job taken from them,
(12:06):
their health taken from them, their their lifestyle, their enjoymental life.
Something has been taken from them, and our job is
to try to put it back together the very best
way we can.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, that's an interesting point, because you're right.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Do you ever wrestle with the idea that your success
is tied to other people's tragedies.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Oh yeah, it's like being a funeral director. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it's it's that, it's yeah, and I don't
like that. I had a client come in one time
his son was killed Domino's delivery truck when of these
fifteen minutes or less deliveries killed his son on a moped. Yeah,
(12:47):
in Orlando. And he walked in my office and we
walked in my office. He sees me and he collapses
on the couch and he starts crying. You know what.
The first thing he said to me was I never
wanted to be here. I never And I was like,
I was like yeah. I was like, wow, it is real.
He's looking at me and said I never wanted to
(13:08):
be here. So to your point, yeah, I do, you know.
But on the other hand, on the other hand, the
good we are able to do is overshadows the you know,
being the funeral director and so and we four million
(13:35):
people will try to hire us this year, and thirty
percent of those calls are from former clients who referred
to someone to us. That's an important stat for me
because that means we've been doing something right for a
long long time. And what we've been doing right is winning.
I mean, we've had some of the biggest cases. Look,
I had to the BP oil spill case. I represented
(13:59):
black farmers in Mississippi. I got I got one point
two billion dollars for black farmers who were discriminated against
in the fifties and sixties. It was a it was
put into law by it was Pelosi and Reid and
Barack Obama sided into law. I had uh uh. We
just hit Google for a half a billion dollars out
(14:21):
in San Francisco. So our cases are against the most
powerful people with unlimited funds. But the good news for
everybody listening is there is something way more powerful than money,
and it's called the truth. The truth is the power,
(14:42):
and that when we see this cigarette industry. I've see
the cigarette industry many, many times, millions of dollars of verdicts.
When they come to trial, they come with unlimited money
and they take us all the way to the Supreme Court.
But guess what if you had the money to hang
at the end of the day. They got all the money,
but we got all the truth.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Who has more power our influence in America today? Like
one of those billionaire CEOs are a trial lawyer, who
can cost that ceo billions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I think I do, and I'll tell you why. When
Johnny Cochran was alive, I helped him build his firm
and it was an incredible journey until he passed away.
When he passed away, we actually had a key Man
life insurance policy on him. But Johnny would say, first
of all that the color of justice in America is green.
(15:39):
And that's true. But Johnny also showed us how he
could come in because he was an unbelievable guy in
the court room, and that the power of the truth
and speaking truth to power. And by the way, all
those CEOs with all their money, at the end of
(16:00):
the day, there's a set of juror six or twelve
or whatever it is. They have the power. They have
the power. So in many respects, I think I got
the power because I see myself as the civil police.
There's the criminal police. I'm the civil police. You don't
(16:20):
when you go to Russia and China, you don't ever
see cars being recalled. You don't see air bags. They
just they just let them die. The reason America is
great is because we got a great civil justice system,
and we make we make the best cars products in
the world. And the people that are watching those people
(16:42):
are people like me. And if they like you know,
these Takata air bags that are killing people. I mean,
it's outrageous what's happening. But what I get to do
is I get to change conduct. And the thing that's
maybe most gratifying to me in this whole journey is
as much as the people I've represented, the people I
(17:06):
never had to represent because we changed conduct. Because I
can tell you this, the one thing about corporate America,
they don't give a damn about us. They don't give
a damn about us. The only thing they care about
is money. And the only thing they understand is money
and having to pay money. And so that's the stick.
(17:28):
That's that's the night stick.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
When you say that's who do you mean? Because you're
worth one point five billion? Like, what do you do
you mean?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Us?
Speaker 1 (17:34):
The people?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
People? Okay, gotcha? People got you? Gotcha?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
For the people are lawsuits ruining the country though, and
not those major lawsuits, but I feel like people's answer
to everything now is a lawsuit. Right, you get into
a car accident, you know, usually you get into a
car accident, be a minor fender bender. You know you ensure,
you know, you you swap insurances, you fix it, you
keep it moving. But now it's it's it's big businesses.
(17:59):
Now I get into an accident. Now I'm going to
do this. Now I slipping fall. I'm going to do
this now? And how do you see who's really hurt,
who's really not who is it? It's really in pain
and really needs the work and really needs the hospital bills,
really needs the money to take care of their family.
And who was doing it? Because it's the best.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What's the best place to slip and fall?
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Madison Square Garden? Because I hate that guy? But now,
how do you if you want to if you want
to sue him, go to sue msg dot com. You'll
be talking to me.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Wow, really, why do you hate him so much?
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Because he's got these cameras in there. When lawyers that
sue him going there, they got this facial recognition, and
if you're part of that facial they throw you out.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
If you're walking there right now, they kicking you up.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, that rockets everything.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I can't go.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
How they throw me out?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
They threw you out before.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I didn't go, but lawyers in my firm Listen, I've
got twelve hundred lawyers, lawyers in my firm. Onto the
Rockets kicked out with their family because this James Dolan
doesn't want to clean up his dirty places. So that's okay,
But guess what, I got another lawsuit coming against him
(19:15):
because that facial recognition that he was doing has also
taken a lot of people's privacy. And I filed a
class action against him a couple of weeks ago because
you walked in, you walked in, you walked in, and
that facial recognition got you and then took your information
and got hacked, and there's been this gigantic data breach
(19:36):
and and and listen, one thing that we want is
our privacy. Privacy is a hot button issue in America.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
How did your beast old him? Like was it the
first lawsuit? And then it just got nasty, like.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
No, he just started saying if you sued, if you
sued any of his entities, that he's got this facial
recognition when you go in and and and and you're
you're out. And so look, I've never been a James
Dolan fan. I got pissed off when he kicked Charles
Oakley out of the out of the garden, like this
guy made the knicks and he hadn't done it. The
(20:11):
only thing James Dolan was done was born. He was
born with a silver spoon, stuck up his ass and
took a fortune and basically destroyed the fortune. And so
it's kind of was personal to me that my lawyers
are getting kicked out. So I decided, look, if nobody
wants to sue it Madison Square Garden, I will. So
(20:31):
that's why I got the website sue msg dot com.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
What's the line between retaliatory though, like with y'all, with
y'all beef right, Like, when does it get like I'm
just coming for him? I have this website. Anybody can
claim anything. There's an actual thing here.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
No way, Because here's the thing. I get four million
calls a year for him. No, no, no, no. In general,
of those four million, I maybe take seven percent of
the calls to come in. From the seven percent, it
probably gets down to five percent. The truth of the
matter is I don't have the money to be messing
(21:07):
around with frivolous lawsuits. And you know who knows when
it's frivolous. The insurance and they know the best and
they love it when it's frilllesus because then they can
build and drive us. So I don't have to your point,
I don't have the time or the resources to be
chasing ghost. I have to be chasing what's legitimate. And
(21:31):
by the way, sometimes you're with a client, you figure out,
you know what this person is not on the up
and up, and when that happens, you got to say goodbye.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Do a lot of people feel like they don't want
to go through the process. I remember I was nineteen
years old, ride of my motorcycle. Lady hit me, fell
banged up pretty bad. Ambulance came, took me to the hospital.
Right called an attorney. I don't remember what wasn't Morgan
and Morgan, but I think it was Jacobe Myers, I
(22:03):
can't remember. But called the lawyer turning from New York.
They said I would have to go through this process,
and it would take six months to go through this process,
and I have to go to physical therapy every day, and this,
that and the other. And after one day of doing it,
I couldn't. I was like, I got a job, I'm nineteen,
I got to go back to college.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
So I remember calling the insurance company and saying, look,
I'm not gonnassue you guys, just please pay for my
bike and my hospital bills. And they said really, and
I'm like yeah, And I remember going there and they
gave me a huge check more than all that, and
it made me think, damn, I really could suited them.
I could have got a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
But there has to be a lot of.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
People that can't do it. They can't go through the
physical therapy. They can't because they'll go injured. You know,
I still got to score all money because of it.
But it's like, what do you do for those people
that are physically hurt but they just can't go through
the process because they got to pay their bills. They
have kids, they have families. They have to do what they.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Have to do.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But it's fed up because they're really in pain. They're suffering.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
And that happens all the time. And look, the younger
you are, the more resilient. You know, when you're nineteen
years old, your bulletproof. Your bulletproof. And for the people
who sometimes people have to take a low ball offer
because they are up against the wall and they can't
get financing from a finance company. So sometimes that happens.
(23:23):
It just and by the way, you know, they have
a strategy which is, you know, delay, deny, deny, deny, delayed, delayed,
delay and starve you out and starve you out. And
the bigger the case, the more they do that with
and they'll just delay it, delay it, delay it and
delay it and starve you out. And so it every
(23:47):
case is different, Every case is different. But the true
where our big money is made is in the courtroom.
If you can wait to get to that trial, you can.
That's that's when you're going to be paid fairly and
(24:09):
compensated fairly for what has been taken from you and
your family.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Now, the name of your book is life is luck.
Nothing luck about what you've done. You you work pretty hard,
You've grinded, You've I don't know if there's much luck
with that you put into work.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Well, I'll tell you this.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But you're also born white in America.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
To listen, first of all, first chapter, the odds of
being born is like trillions to one, just being born.
Before we talk about being born white, let's talk about
just being born in America. You know what if I
was born in North Korea, how am I doing? How
(24:54):
does white North Korea luck to you? Okay, So there's that,
and then there's white, and then there's.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Sorry miss male, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Then there's male, and then there's good looking. Good looking
people do better, you know, and then there's all the
other stuff. Look height, most presidents are tall. So well,
I'm not screwed.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I'm like you said, you wasn't that tall.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
No, I'm listening. I'm built, but I'm out. You know,
Barack Obama, you know, you look up, Bill Clinton, you
look up. They look down at me. So all those
different things that happen. Successful people hate to be told
they were lucky. And the reason they hate to be
told they're lucky is they worked their e fing ass.
(26:03):
But guess what else, Guess who makes the least amount
of money in America The people who work the effing hardest.
Have you ever tried to dig a hole with a shovel?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Actually I have.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
I'm from Mont Corner, South Carolina, so I was getting
a lot of trouble with my daddy told me to
dig a hole because it's either going to be the.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Well of your grave.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, digging a hole and try to dig a cold hole,
Try to dig it with some frost on the grass.
When the people who work the hardest in America are
the people who make the least. When you ever see
a guy there swinging on a building with a wigs,
(26:44):
you know, squeegee, what what would it call? What would what?
Would you have to be paid to get up there
and strapped on with suction cups? You know, swinging in
the wind. But that's poor person's here, you know from
Outamala is sending money back to his family to take
care of his family and living you know, like a
(27:05):
dog here because he's doing the right thing. So luck
does have a lot to do with it. If I
looked at your career like I've looked at mine, and
that's what I did here when I went on, when
I got on that billionaire list, I say, how did
this happen? Well, first of all, the reason I talked
about the paper boy. I don't know if any of
y'all are old enough to be paper boys, but paper
(27:28):
route is a hard deal, and I think that I
was born with an entrepreneurial seed. There's a paper rout
for a ten eleven year old boy. You're up every
day snow sleets, So I think I had that entrepreneurial
seed early, which was a lucky deal for me. But
(27:49):
if you look at your career, and I'm not sure
about it, really I was researching it. I'll bet you
there was a moment that something, there was some break,
there was something new, something that you yeah, tell me
what it was. Man.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
It's been a few of them, but I think probably
the biggest one was when I when do you ever
heard of Wendy Williams.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh yeah, listen. I don't know why. Last night we
were a mister chow. My daughter maybe maybe she knew
about this because my daughter goes, I'm a Wendy Williams fanatic.
Oh wow, my daughter, Kate, She's like, I love, I'm
like Wendy william.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
He used to sit on her lap.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
So yes, that's how she So two thousand and six,
I was in South Carolina and she basically was hearing
what I was doing in South Carolina. Just to make
a long story, very very very very short, without any
new ones her what I was doing in South Carolina,
met her and her then husband, and they brought.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Me up to New York to be a co host.
So that's God, that's luck, Like that's just.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
That's like, and I tell you listen, luck. Luck can
have other words blessings, yeah, God, God. But but when
we become so arrogant that we think it's all us
and not chance. I was telling one of your producers.
I said, when I first applied for a job at
these one hundred applications, my dad calls me and says,
(29:11):
one of the applications slid down behind the back of
my car seat. He said, I said, how did you?
I pulled the seat down. I was vacuuming. My dad
vacuum in the back of the car. Was like, that
ain't ever happening, but he did. I said, who was
who was the letter to? He goes a guy named
Jared Billings. He goes, should I send it out? I go, yeah,
(29:32):
was what do I have to lose? We go already
paid for the stamp. Guess where I got the job? Wow,
Jared Billings, Jerry Billings. And there's some I decided to
go to. I decided I'm Catholic. I decided to go
to daily Mass one day. I'm not a daily mask guy.
I just went to clear my head, not really to pray.
Twenty minutes I go in there, I'm in the community line.
(29:53):
I look ahead of me. I see this girl, these
little terry claws, shorts a little, you know, I'm like,
damn good in church, lusting, lusting. She turns around. I'm like,
that's good too. I go out, I get her number,
(30:14):
I take her out on a date. I marry her.
If I don't go to church that day, I don't
have him sitting over there. I don't have the other three.
I don't have my three other some of my grandchildren
are back at the Lowe Hotel right now. I don't
have my four children. I don't have Everything has changed
that one day, And so I think what we got
(30:36):
to do to make sure that we stay humble, because
I think staying humble makes us better. And I think
we stay humble and realize a lot of people work
a lot harder than us, and there's a lot of
people a lot funnier than us, and there's a lot
of people a lot more talented than us. But that
(30:56):
one break, and if you do that, if you remain humble,
then what you focus on in your life. And it's
the last prayers of my before I go to sleep, gratitude. Man,
I don't know how this happened. I have no fn idea,
but but but yeah, thank you God because this did happen.
(31:20):
And you know, when I look at it, because I
got all sorts of business. I'm in the attraction business, hotels,
all these different things, because I'm kind of an entrepreneur.
But I could never have seen it because when I
got married, when I left town, when I left Gainsville
to get married, I was so broke that guy from
(31:41):
Alabama wants to I said, how broke were you? Jerry said,
I was so broke I needed a co signer to
pay cash. That's broke. So but I was so broke
when I left college to get married. My wife had
to give me her mobile card to get gased and
come home and get married. So we started with ZIP
(32:02):
and then here you are all these years later, and
you're like, how did that happen?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
So y'all came up together basically all the way.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, only forty four years May twenty second.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Incredible, man.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah. So, and so that's how that's when I started
writing the book. And so I didn't want to write
a book about my autobiography because it just wasn't that
interesting enough. But what I wanted to do was tell
stories of my life and how other people can find luck,
(32:33):
improve luck, get return on luck, turn failure into your friend.
At the end of the day, here's what life is.
Life is a gigantic casino. And when you go in
that casino, there's all sorts of games. There's some games
you should never play, like if there's keino, don't play
Keno because the odds of winning and Keno are niel
(32:56):
and none. It's the same in life. There's games to
play and not to play. And then there's moves to make.
I don't know if you gamble or not, but all right,
so you go to play blackjack, what's the rule? Two aces?
What's the rule? But those same types of rules are
in life. But people make a mistake, you know in
(33:17):
business location location location and being adequately capitalized. But people
still make that mistake. If I drive down the road,
I see a restaurant going, I'm like, I ain't gonna
make it. Why it's an old taco tiko and now
they're trying to become a sub shop. And then this
building has failed over and over and over and over
again for a reason. But we make those So what
(33:40):
I've tried to do with this book is to talk
about how we can improve our luck. The main way
we find luck and find success. In my thought about
all this is you have to constantly be looking for opportunity.
When you stop looking for opportunity, you have no chance
(34:01):
for luck, you have no chance for blessings, you have
no chance for God to enter your life and even
do what you're asking for. So there's a lot of
that in my there's a lot of that kind of
stuff in this book.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
One of the stories in the book that I really
appreciated your brother Tim. He was paralyzed at Disney World,
and that reshaped your whole life. How did you turn
something that traumatic into fuel to propel you instead of
letting it break you.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
When he got hurt, I told you before, we were
poor people. My mother had left us before that, so
my dad was kind of a drinker. So it was
just like five of us and there's my brother and
you're living in this little bullshit house and now he's paralyzed,
and you know, and then Disney started playing hardball with him. Well,
I'm I love my family like I would take a
(34:56):
bullet for my family. That's the kind of love I have.
And then You're watching him. He's on a gurney spinning,
you can't move nothing, and Disney's messing with him. And
I just became enraged, enraged, And at the end of
the day, you know, it was what it was. And
(35:18):
at the end of the day, believe it or not.
Because he was a quadriplegic, he became what's called a
super quad where he could drive a car. He had
a daughter, and he worked in my law firm with
me till he died two years ago yesterday. And I
have probably cried a thousand times about Tim, I mean
(35:44):
even now. But I took that experience and I said,
you know what, I know what I'm going to do
with my life. Tim's terrible luck turned out to be
my career. And so when I walk into one of
my offices, when I see people sitting there, I'm thinking
(36:04):
to Tim, I want to be treat them the way
I watched Tim was treated. We ended up hiring a
law firm we never should have hired. We never should
have hired. They made all sorts of mistakes. When I
look back on it now, I mean, it's just malpractice.
This case got dismissed in circuit court and never was appealed.
We didn't know what an appeal was, and so that
(36:30):
terrible day turned out to be my entire career.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
And do it get your I don't want to say revenge,
but did you ever get your get back from Disney?
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Oh? Yeah? But to her point, I don't do it.
I don't have the time or the money for revenge.
I had the time and money for justice. And I
believe in justice. But I also believe when people, when
people lawyers, especially when they come to work, ask me
for a I asked them two questions. I ask them
(37:02):
one question and if there's no right answer, and be
interesting to see what you guys answer this. To this,
I say, what do you value more? Mercy or justice?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Justice? Mercy and justice justice?
Speaker 5 (37:18):
I think, what do you define a mercy?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Ask?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Whatever you are?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I don't know if I.
Speaker 5 (37:26):
Can answer that. I would depend on a situation for me,
in how close whoever the situation happened to is to
me like.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Mercy and justice can be intertwined.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
They but they aren't though, but they can. That's the point.
I'm more of a mercy guy, but I'm also a
justice guy. To your point, they are intertwined, and I
believe that what I get to do is I don't
want to say it's like a ministry, but it's like
a ministry because when I'm with people, I'm representing a
(37:55):
guy right now who his son was stabbed. He came
out of this. It was down in his apartment in
Brickell and Miami. He came out and the guy had
broken into this very secure apartment and stabbed his son
ninety one time. And he walked out with it ongoing. Well,
(38:16):
this guy has had you know, it's the most it's
the most outrageous of all time. But I've spent an
enordan amount of time talking to this guy, not about
the case, just about you know, bringing him off the ledge.
You have the opportunity to seek justice, but at the
(38:39):
same time deal out mercy. The two to your point,
the two do intertwine. And it's a great thing that
when you get up to go to work, you get
to do something good, you know. Johnny back to Johnny Cochran,
he used to say all the time, you can do
good and do well. That was his life us.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
What did you learn with could you talk? You keep
talking about working with Johnny Cochran? What did you learn
about how you watched him navigate luck but also not
luck in certain situations because he was a black man
building when he was building. That helps you today when
you're dealing with people that are in different situations than
you were in Well.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I learned so much from him. The very first time
I met him, I come up here to meet him
in his office. I walk in to his office and
sitting in the lobby was j LO and Sean Combs.
Oh wow, I'm like, oh wow.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
Was it during the club case?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Of course?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Yeah? And then me and him flew to Rochester sign
up a case private little The planes got better as
time went on. Some of those plans you wouldn't get
on today. You're like, I was flying those things, but
we flew to Rochester. The thing I loved about him
(39:56):
was he spoke truth to how hour every single day,
and he was not embarrassed about it. You know, like
you said, you know ambulance chaser that they try to
embarrass me by saying amlence chase. That does not You
cannot embarrass me because I'm not an ambulence chaser. If
I was an amblis chaser, I'll tell you this, with
(40:18):
the technology, I'd be there way before the ambulance, you know.
But what he taught me was, we have nothing to
be embarrassed about about what we're doing because what happened
to them was wrong. And most people don't have the
money to pay a lawyer by the hour. If you
(40:38):
were gone, if you're paid a lawyer by the hour,
it's shocking. You get the first BILLI a wait a minute,
wait a minute. You know, billable time is like organized crime.
That first bill you get, You're like, that's more than
I'm looking for. And so we are the keys to
(40:59):
the courthouse. We get to level the playing field against products,
unsafe products, insurance companies. And so at the end of
the night I was told about I remember, around nine
to eleven, I said to my wife, I said, you know,
I don't even feel like going to work because this
is so horrible. She goes, John, at least what you
(41:22):
do matters. Some people go to work and it doesn't
really matter. And so I really feel that way, and
I feel that I feel that what happened to Tim,
which gave me this business and gave me this life,
as terrible as it was, gave me purpose. And so
when it's all said and done, I'm very happy that
(41:46):
this is the path that I ended up taking.
Speaker 4 (41:49):
How do you feel when you get fooed by like
rival lawyers? Like I was reading about how you got
tooed once because they alled that your commercials use misleading,
druma dramatizations and violated professional conduct rules. The case was dropped,
then there was another lawsuit filed, I think, like in
twenty seventeen or something.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
So how do you feeling?
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Like other lawyers who listen, I've had I've had clients
in my firm where my lawyers blew a statue of limitation.
When that's happened, I personally meet with the clients and
(42:28):
here's what I tell the client. We effed up. When
I say we, I mean he, not me. He And
I said, but here's the bad news, and here's the
good news. The bad news is we fed up. But
here's the good news. I got insurance. You need to
go hire somebody to sue me. And here's the better news.
(42:51):
I'm gonna make sure you get at least as much
as the case is worth, and I hope a lot
more because it's my carrier. And I made this mistake.
And I've had that conversation probably four or five times.
It's a very difficult conversation. But can I tell you
that the interesting thing about that all those people that
that happened to, and I one lady because I started
(43:15):
this bank down in Orlando years ago and she worked
at the bank that I started, and say, John, I
don't want to see you. I don't want I said,
you have to the five people I've had that conversation
with over the years, those people have referred me more
business after my lawyers dropped the ball on their case.
(43:36):
And you know what I think, because I still think
the truth trumps everything and that when you're a straight
shooter and you tell the truth, is it fun to
be sued? No, it's embarrassing. But I believe that the
best way you fight embarrassment is just be honest. Just
be honest. Now, some of these cases, none of the
(43:58):
lawyers in America like it when I come of their city,
because some people say they like competition. I guarantee you this.
There's a lot of DJs, maybe every DJ, maybe every
guy that does what you do in America, that would
rather be you than them. Who would you rather be
than you?
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Nobody?
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Thank you? So all of them would rather be you?
That I mean, and that's true. So you got that
jealousy out there that they say, we like to be
competitive until real competition comes in. So there's when I
go into these states and cities, some of these lawsuits
(44:37):
are filed and they get stomped out. But to me,
it's just it's just you know, par for the course.
I got shiploads of insurance and to the part I
don't have insurance. I got money to solve that problem.
A guy told me once, this is a good one
for you to remember. If money will solve a problem,
(44:59):
solve the problem.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
M hm.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
How did you feel about the actual allegations, the way
they said that you used misleading dramatizations.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
It's I didn't. I didn't. The advertising rules in all
sorts of different states are different. You know, I did
a I did some you know, I did uh some
ads with Kyle Busch before he died, and in Florida,
I couldn't. I can't use celebrities and I'm getting ready
(45:28):
to sue the Florida Bar over this. I can't use
celebrities in my ads, which I think is unconstitutional. Why
because the because the bar doesn't want they don't like
effective commercials that can maybe dry business. Yeah. Why Why
because because lawyers are making that decision. My competitors are
(45:49):
on the rules committee that are making those decisions. So
some of these things that you've seen, I don't know
exactly which dramatization we're talking about, but it could be
something like that, or it could be I run a nationally.
I got an ad I'm doing now with John Daly
and his son, and it runs nationally and maybe it
hits locally in somebody. But they're always shooting at you.
(46:14):
If you're at the top, you're going to be shot at.
There's just no getting around it. And it's usually comes
from envy or jealousy, which are very destructive vices. The
way you do better is be better. Don't worry about him,
you know, I tell people all the time, comparison is
(46:37):
the thief of joy. When you're looking over here, and
you're looking over here, you gotta look straight ahead. And
you know, when you go to the races, sometimes you see
horses with blinders on, you know why, so they're not
looking left and they're not looking right.
Speaker 4 (46:51):
When you talk about being honest, what do you say?
What did you say to your three attorneys? That were
fined for what they called hallucinated AI citations.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Well, one of them was my son.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Yeah, damn, can't fire him.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
No, I'll fire that one over there. I did. It's
not not that. So I did fire him once. I
did fire him once. I fired Dan. Once. I had
this attraction called WonderWorks. The house is turned upside down.
You ever seen them, It's called WonderWorks, The house is
turned upside down. I got six of them in America.
Dan was working at WonderWorks and was fing off all
(47:27):
the time. So I fired Dan. I said, Dan, uh,
you need to go get a job, and it ain't
with me. And he's like, and I said, I don't.
I don't want you to go out of the house
except to go to school and look for a job.
He gets a job at Boston Market cooking hams. He's
(47:48):
there for a week and he comes in. I can't
do anymore. They got me in the they got me
in the washing dishes. I said, think about that, Dan,
you're so talented that you they you can't even cook
the damn hams. So he at Boston Market. He comes home.
I couldn't. I couldn't take I'm vomited in the dish
washing room. I said, well, listen, you're not leaving the
house except to go to school and look for a job.
(48:09):
He gets a job at Firehouse Subs and he becomes
one of the great sub makers of all time and
learned his lesson. So on the hallucinating. What happened is
my son, we had a products liability case in Wyoming
against Walmart and one of our lawyers used AI to
(48:34):
get sites. And I didn't know what hallucination was other
than you know, smoking marijuana with my medical marijuana. I
didn't know. And all of a sudden we did it,
and my son might as well. I said, well, Mike,
how did it happen? Well, so and so the lawyer
did it, And I said, but your name's on the pleating.
(48:56):
And it was terribly embarrassing because it was every you
know again, and people want that the people if you're here,
like if you got busted, there'd be a lot of
people happy. Your competitor to be very happ Oh, look
he never was what he said he was. But I
told Mike, I said, look, this comes to the territory.
He says, what I got to do? I said, I'll
(49:16):
tell you. You got to do. He goes, why I
didn't do it? I said, your name's on the pleading.
Here's what you're going to do. You're going to fly
your ass to Wyoming from Florida. You're going to stand
in front of that judge and you're going to say
we made a mistake and we are sorry, and we
(49:37):
are going to try never to do this again. And
guess what when you do that? And he went out there.
You know what the judge said. He said, said, okay,
the sanctions they were looking at, we'd already paid Walmart.
And we said okay, and the judge it wasn't as
bad as it could have been. Now, if you start,
it's never the act. It's the lies. If you fess up,
(50:01):
that's one thing. If you cover up, it's always the
cover up. It's always the cover up. It's always the lie.
And yeah, it was a bad case. It was a
bad thing, a bad press. And guess what the judge was. Okay,
we went and tried the case and we hit Walmart
for nine million dollars.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
And I read that y'all covered the opposing council's fees.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, yeah, wow, we had to. I mean, I mean,
that's what they had to spend it. It's like one
hundred grand Walmart. Not that they needed the money, but
they deserved it because it was it was our bad.
And if you make a mistake, I tell this to everybody.
If you make a mistake, the sooner you admit it,
the better off you're going to be. Because you start
(50:44):
going down that wormhole of lying and jigging and jagging
and doing all that, you're in for a it's going
to end poorly.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
Something about you seems very fair, you know what I mean. Like,
there's a couple of things that I love that you.
You know, you shit on the myth of being self
made right, and you say things like the money belongs
to God. Like you said, you talk about the responsibility
that comes with extreme wealth. So you've done things like
build food banks, and you fund homeless and hungarylief and
(51:14):
you give back because, like you said, you believe that
luck created the fortune and giving back is the duty
for those who have been lucky.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Ears, I'd like to say, blessed.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
Well, here's how I look at it. I ask myself
all the time, you know, how do I believe in God?
Question number one? Absolutely, But on a scale of one
to ten, Am I a ten? Or am I one?
I would say I'm like a seven or a God's number,
but I'd like to be ten. If you go to church,
(51:46):
say who all believes in God? Everybody say yeah, yeah,
But is it a seven, eight or ten? I'm probably
a seven or eight. But I'm always praying for more faith.
But what I believe more than anything, I don't really
see God up in the sky. I see God around
this table. And what I believe is the best way
(52:09):
for us to love God is to love people. Because
when you're loving people, you're loving God. And when I
build those food banks and the new thing I'm doing
for women and children the Coalition, and we just built
a food bank in West Virginia, and on and on
and on. To me, that is what is pleasing to God,
(52:30):
because God lives in us. And the reason I know
that is because that's what he said. And so, how
can you have this kind of money? How can you
have this kind of money and drive by and see
people hungry? People hungry? How can you drive by and
(52:53):
see people making eight dollars an hour at the grocery
store and then getting in their car and driving to
the Morgan and Morgan Hunger Relief Center. It's not fair.
It's not fair, and what's going on in America right
now is and why you're seeing all these progressives rise
up to your point. It's not fair what's happening, And
(53:19):
it's not because of anything other than the rich are
getting richer by design and the poor are getting poorer
by design, and the poor are saying, you know what,
it's not fair. It's not fair that these new tax
cuts can have a guy like you get a jet
(53:40):
for free. When I bought my jet after Trump got elected,
of course I didn't support him, you know, I'm the
first time I got in politics was Bill Clinton back.
I mean, that was my guy. And then I was
financed for Obama. I had Obama in my house as president.
(54:00):
So but it's not fair. But the Trump tax cuts,
my new jet was basically free with the tax cuts.
That's not fair. This carried interest that these hedge fund
guys get. That's not fair. And I believe that what's
happening in America is this progressive ups is about fundamental fairness,
(54:25):
not that it's not fair to them, but what's happening
to the rich is really unfair.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
And so you like the progressive movement.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Not really, Okay, not really, because I believe this socialism
always turns into something like Venezuela or Cuba. I believe
that what we have a duty to do is to
do the most for the most with the.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Least, So like compassionate capitalism.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, and you know, like let's start with fair pay.
Let's start with fair pay, start with things like you know,
medical for everybody. I mean, why should somebody? Uh, I've
got I've got a clinic that I fund in a
poor section of Polk County in Florida that were filled
every single day with people coming to the Morgan Morgan
(55:16):
Clinic for medical care. That's that's their whole deal. There's
a lot of those people out there, and we could
do over and over again. So but I believe that
I believe what's going to happen in America is I
believe the progressive movement is going to get bigger and
bigger and bigger. Here's how I look at it. I'm
threatening to write a book I call it The Castle
(55:38):
and the Moat. There's this huge castle where the top
point one percent live, and then there's this moat and
it's deep and it's wide, and there's piranhas in there,
and there's sharks, and there's electrical eels, and then on
the outside there is the barbarians that want to come
(55:59):
in and take the caressle. Over time, the point one
percenters in the castle start drawing all the water out
for themselves. They're building spas, they're building pools inside, and
the moat keeps sinking and sinking and sinking. The moat
is the middle class. The moat is the middle class.
And at some point the moat gets dry, and the
(56:19):
eels and the piranhas and the sharks they all die.
And then you know what happens. Then they walk across.
They don't have to swim across. They walk across. And
like on January sixth, the guards in the castle, they
let them in. If you look at January sixth, the
guards let them in. And in every great society, when
(56:43):
you beat people down to a point of hopelessness, helplessness, powerlessness,
you have Marie Antoinette, let them eat, let them be cake.
I don't think so, how about we eat you? How
about the czars in Russia. It's just because we're in
(57:03):
the twenty first century, does it mean those lessons don't
mean the same today. And I believe that this country
is on that path because the rich, the rich wants
so much, so much, and they want to keep and
listen the progressives. Do you know why you know why
(57:23):
a lot of people are siding with Palestine, It's because
they feel oppressed. Think of that feeling that you wake
up every day and you're like, no matter what I do,
it ain't gonna be worth anything. And at a certain
point you rise up and you say, look, And there's
(57:44):
two types of envy. There's benign envy where you go, hey,
I want to be him, so I'm gonna go work
my ass I will be him. Then there's malicious envy
where you go, I just want to take it from
them because it's not fair. And the socialist movement can
grab a holt of that sentiment and write it all
the way. What I worry about is what happens after
(58:09):
Castro becomes in charge, what happens when Chavez? Because I've
never really seen it work anywhere else where it works well?
Speaker 5 (58:20):
Is that why you got your party that you're trying
to put together? The common ground part? So you're about
to politics is where you're about to go next, and
it sounds.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
Like common Ground. I had a contest to have I
think we need a third party because you can't compromise.
I had a friend in Florida he did a constitution
movement to restore Felon's rights. Listen, man, if you do
your time, you should be able to vote in this country.
And guess what, my friend he did it in Florida.
(58:51):
And guess what, they passed that constitutional. Because most people
agree on most things when you take the D in
the R down. So what I believe is all this
Jerry Mandarin. I mean, look, you got you know, look
at South Carolina where you're from. I mean it's it's
just locked and loaded, red red, red, red red. But
(59:13):
there's no compromise. So what I'm thinking about this party
common Ground is a party in the middle. Yeah. We
like some of this stuff on the left. Yeah, we
like some of this stuff on the right. Let us
be the tiebreaker. Let us be because.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Look, here's there's no true moderates. Yeah. Bill Clinton was
a true mons.
Speaker 1 (59:36):
Yes, and listen, believe it or not, so was Barack Obama. Listen,
you know you you take his eight years. I mean
that's some of the greatest eight years in the history
of this capitalistic country. Obama's a capitalist. Believe me. I
mean it's a Netflix guy. Obama's Netflix. He's okay, He's
(01:00:00):
okay with capitalism, and believe me, you know. And so
so my idea is this, in most elections, four or
five percent of the vote is what de hermines elections.
That's when Mitt Romney said forty seven percent. Remember that
forty seven forty seven percent, that's six percent he's talking about.
So I'm thinking about common ground. We could do a
(01:00:23):
lot if we were just in the middle to break
the tie here, break the tie here and find common ground.
Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
And also, I feel like you should call it common
sense ground.
Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Listen, you know what, it's funny you say that because
I put in I become a chat GPT addict speaking hallucinations.
Already bring that back up. But when I put in
common sense, there was a lot of negative stuff about
common sense. It was interesting to do that. When you
get time tonight, just put in which name is better,
common sense or common ground? And they kept give me
(01:00:58):
all the reasons. So I just want to come but
common sense.
Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Because when you say fair paid, when you say free
medical care, and you want criminal justice reform. You want
you clearly want work in label rights, right, things like, oh,
that's just that's why wouldn't we want that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Listen, when we try cases, you know the words we
use most use your common sense. When you go back
to this, you know, use your common sense. And that's
part of the jury instructions is common sense. So to
your point, but when it got down to nut cutting time,
common ground, common sense. My slogan is for the people,
(01:01:34):
and so a lot of people say, what about the
People's Party? But then my lawyer who drafted all the
documents said that that China's got the People's Party and
it could be construed to be you know, you know China,
So we didn't go that way.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Well, life is luck is out right now, and we
appreciate you for joining us.
Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
I enjoyed this conversation a lot, man, I would should
you can come back up here anytime.
Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
So that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
I enjoyed this conversation of life.
Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
Thank you so much, John Morgan. It's the breakfast Love,
good morning, hold.
Speaker 4 (01:02:02):
Up every day I wake up, click your glass up
the Breakfast Club.
Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Finish for y'all. Dump h
Every day a week ago, clicks.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Up the Breakfast Club. You know, I'm finish for y'all.
Done morning.
Speaker 3 (00:09):
Everybody's DJ Envy just hilarious. Charlamagne the guy we are
the Breakfast Club. La La Rose is here with us
as well. We got a special guest in the building.
I'm sure you've seen his commercial, you heard his name before.
I'm sure you've even seen his picture. Ladies and gentlemen,
we have attorney John Morgan. How is it going? How
you feeling now? You just the way that you put
(00:30):
your ads out is kind of like a Beyonce, a
Tailor Swift when they release an album. I mean you
see it all over the place. You see it everywhere,
commercials for All Star, super.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Bowl, everything. So Morgan and Morgan is for the people.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Morgan and Morgan is for the people. So let's start
off from the beginning. How a young paper boy delivering
papers got to this multi billion dollar uh I would
say empire that you've accumulated. So how did you start
off and what made you want to be an attorney?
Speaker 1 (00:59):
I wanted to be an attorney When I was a
sophomore in college. I got a call from my dad,
my brother Tim was a lifeguard at Walt Disney World
and he calls me. He says, Tim's been in an accident.
He's paralyzed from the chin down. And there began that journey,
and Disney was very tough. We were poor, you know, hopeless, helpless, powerless.
(01:26):
It's a terrible place to be. And a lot of
bad things happened to my brother during that time, and
I became enraged, and I said to myself, you know,
first of all, I'm terrible in math and terrible in size.
So I wasn't gonna be a doctor or CPA. And
so I went into law, and this is all I've
(01:46):
ever done. I decided I wanted to do this type
of law to make sure that people like my brother
Tim got a fair shake. And so I went to
law school and graduated from the University of Florida. I
only applied at personal injury law firms. And here we are,
you know, many years later.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
But there's a lot of injury attorneys out there, but
none of them are as successful as you. What got
you to that level Because there's a lot of attorney
injury turners. It sometimes, you know, they call ambulance chasers
and all these different names. But nobody has got to
the point that you've got what what made people trust
you and sign up with your firm over all these
(02:27):
other firms that.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Go out there.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
I'm not exactly sure, except I spent a lot of
time working. I mean I lived in union halls, I
drank and dive bars with the union leaders, and I
kind of built it brick by brick. When I got
into this business. A few years before, you weren't even
allowed to advertise as a lawyer. There was a case
(02:51):
called Bates versus Arizona the Supreme Court that lawyers could
even advertise, so it was verboten you. I mean, you
didn't advertise if you were a lawyer. But I was
just into the business at that point in time, and
I told my wife, I said, look, and I was
getting a lot of cases from these guys on TV,
and I said, this train is leaving the station. And
(03:14):
what a lot of people got to look at is
sometimes trains do leave the station. If you don't get
on the train, you're gonna get run over by the train.
And I said, I got to do this, and so
I went. I borrowed a hundred thousand dollars from bank
people asked me, why one hundred. The other bank said
(03:34):
fifty one, guy said one hundred. So I take them up.
And so fast forward. What I did, and what I
would tell people entrepreneurs is if you're going to scale
a business, especially when you're young, you have to to scale.
You had to take your profits and pour it back
(03:57):
into building the business. So I did Orlando, then I
did Tampa, and then I did Jacksonville, and then I
did Fort Myers Naples, and then I did Miami. And
instead of buying a boat or a car, I expanded
and people, as you know, I didn't make a million
(04:18):
dollars until I was forty one years old. That's the
first year I made a million dollars. But then I
kept growing it and then at some point in time,
all those cities start to take root and sprout. And
so from that one hundred thousand dollars, this year, we'll
spend almost six hundred million in advertising. Wow, and we'll
(04:42):
do two point four billion dollars in revenue. And the
real secret to our success, which a lot of lawyers
don't do. We try a lot of cases. We make
our money in the courtroom. A lot of people make
money taking the last best offer. No, we grab them
by that back of the neck, and dragons.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
They grab by the balls. But you can I don't know,
you might be in some files or something, But let
me ask you what that?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
How do you.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
How do you decide what cases you're going to take it?
What cases you're not right? Because although the victim you
can get them a lot of money, but the person
sometimes you're suing, you can destroy them, totally, take them
out of business where they can't work ever. Again, Like,
let's take an example of let's say an older gentleman
that lives in Brooklyn that has a brown stone that
didn't get out early enough to shovel a snow right,
(05:39):
somebody slips on the ice, they get hurt, they get sued,
But you also have the power to take everything from
him as well. So how do you decide what are
you going to do? And morally, how do you decide
how far are you going to take it?
Speaker 1 (05:51):
I think about that all the time because and here's how,
here's how I deal with it. First of all, I've
never done that. I've never done that. How do I
get around that? There's a concept called bad faith. If
the insurance company doesn't operating good faith and they don't
tender the limits, and we go get a verdict. That
(06:12):
difference between the limits and our verdict is called bad faith,
and then we go and sue the insurance company for
bad faith and take care of that gentleman who's property
the injury took place on it. So here I am.
You know, all these years later, not one time have
I ever gone against an individual. I don't think I could.
(06:36):
I don't think I could, because you know, depending on
where you're from, if you've ever been up against the wall,
it's a bad place to be. And so if that
ever came to be, it would not be a case
that Morgan and Morgan. I would never go against somebody
personally to come and take money out of their bank account.
(06:56):
I take it from the insurance company's bad faith policy.
Speaker 4 (07:00):
Got you know, you know Morgan and Morgan and slogan
is for the people, right, But you've also been one
of the most powerful corporations in America. How do you
keep those two missions from conflicting.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Well, you you have to keep your eye on the ball,
and it's all about people. You know, I've been what
I've been impressed with coming here today. You got an empire,
but you've got a lot of people making that empire click.
And when I look at my life and I look
at my business, I could give you the names of
(07:31):
a bunch of people that if they hadn't been there
with me, I might not be here. And sometimes you
hear these quarterbacks on you know they're thinking their offensive line.
They need to thank their offensive line. Because if you
don't have an offensive line that I saw that you
have from here today, you can't be who you are.
(07:53):
And so I've been very lucky in spotting talent and
developing talent. Here's how I look at people. If I
send somebody something over and over again to the point
that I know, if I send it, I don't have
to worry about it, I call it sind delete. So
I send you something, I don't have to worry about
it anymore. I delete it. Once I find that sin
(08:16):
delete person, I then elevate them, and then I ruthlessly,
ruthlessly delegate their task and then we and then you
got to pay them, you know, I tell people, So
you pay your people for big time. Listen, I believe
(08:38):
in Florida. I believe what's ail in America is the
when people can't live on what they're making, there's no
little WAYE So what I did in Florida, and it
was also a good experiment. I spent tens of millions
of dollars of my own money to pass a cop
(09:00):
institutional amendment to raise the minimum ways to fifteen dollars
an hour. It was eight dollars an hour when I
did this thing. And I'm like, you know, let's just
see what happens. Everybody told me, he said, John, you're romantic.
You know this isn't gonna happen nobody in Florida. You
got to get sixty percent of the vote to pass
the constitutional amendment. Guess what, We passed it with sixty
(09:22):
three percent of the vote. And then here's what I
learned by that that most of us, when you take
a D down and an R down from behind our
political affiliation, that most of us agree on most things
if you take the D in the R down. And
(09:43):
I did the same thing. I did the same thing
my brother tid of the guy who got hurt. He
needed marijuana to take care of his pain, take care
of his spasms. And so I did the same thing
with and I legalized medical marijuana in the state of Florida.
And so what I say about paying people this, if
you want to build a great circus, the greatest show
(10:05):
on earth, people go to the circus to see the
guy eating by the lines and the guy fall off
the high wire.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's christou'd be going to. When people getting eaten by the.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Line, well, we're hoping that they are. We're hoping that
That's why people go to NASCAR. They want to see
the they want to see the crash. They you know,
they want to see the disaster. Then they're sad after
they see it. But the way you don't get eaten
by the lines and the tiger is you pay them
and you love them. You feed them and you love them.
(10:39):
And the way you don't fall off of the wire
the high wire is you focus. So my business philosophy
is focus, feed them, love them, and then the lines
and tigers will give you the greatest show on earth.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
How do you keep your the clients that you're working
for kind of on that train of like things will
work out eventually, and not being hungry for the money.
Talking about feeding them because most people want to ask
for like five figures, but y'all go in and get
way more money than that. And a lot of times
with these type of cases, people talk about how people
will go back and just keep suing people trying to
get money, Like how do you balance that? Because people
(11:18):
need what they need like times of heart.
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Well, when people need money, the hardest thing is people
need money and they want to get it now, and
there are funding companies. In some states you can advance
the client money. In some states you can't. The hardest
thing sometimes is to make the client say, please be patient,
please be patient, and sometimes you can get an advance
(11:43):
on their case. I don't like to do it because
he's funding companies charge you know, Tony Soprano type rates.
But it's a delicate balance because when people here's the
business I'm in, everybody that I'm represent and had something
taken from them. They had their job taken from them,
(12:06):
their health taken from them, their their lifestyle, their enjoymental life.
Something has been taken from them, and our job is
to try to put it back together the very best
way we can.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
You know, that's an interesting point, because you're right.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Do you ever wrestle with the idea that your success
is tied to other people's tragedies.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
Oh yeah, it's like being a funeral director. Yeah, yeah,
you know, it's it's that, it's yeah, and I don't
like that. I had a client come in one time
his son was killed Domino's delivery truck when of these
fifteen minutes or less deliveries killed his son on a moped. Yeah,
(12:47):
in Orlando. And he walked in my office and we
walked in my office. He sees me and he collapses
on the couch and he starts crying. You know what.
The first thing he said to me was I never
wanted to be here. I never And I was like,
I was like yeah. I was like, wow, it is real.
He's looking at me and said I never wanted to
(13:08):
be here. So to your point, yeah, I do, you know.
But on the other hand, on the other hand, the
good we are able to do is overshadows the you know,
being the funeral director and so and we four million
(13:35):
people will try to hire us this year, and thirty
percent of those calls are from former clients who referred
to someone to us. That's an important stat for me
because that means we've been doing something right for a
long long time. And what we've been doing right is winning.
I mean, we've had some of the biggest cases. Look,
I had to the BP oil spill case. I represented
(13:59):
black farmers in Mississippi. I got I got one point
two billion dollars for black farmers who were discriminated against
in the fifties and sixties. It was a it was
put into law by it was Pelosi and Reid and
Barack Obama sided into law. I had uh uh. We
just hit Google for a half a billion dollars out
(14:21):
in San Francisco. So our cases are against the most
powerful people with unlimited funds. But the good news for
everybody listening is there is something way more powerful than money,
and it's called the truth. The truth is the power,
(14:42):
and that when we see this cigarette industry. I've see
the cigarette industry many, many times, millions of dollars of verdicts.
When they come to trial, they come with unlimited money
and they take us all the way to the Supreme Court.
But guess what if you had the money to hang
at the end of the day. They got all the money,
but we got all the truth.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
Who has more power our influence in America today? Like
one of those billionaire CEOs are a trial lawyer, who
can cost that ceo billions of dollars.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
I think I do, and I'll tell you why. When
Johnny Cochran was alive, I helped him build his firm
and it was an incredible journey until he passed away.
When he passed away, we actually had a key Man
life insurance policy on him. But Johnny would say, first
of all that the color of justice in America is green.
(15:39):
And that's true. But Johnny also showed us how he
could come in because he was an unbelievable guy in
the court room, and that the power of the truth
and speaking truth to power. And by the way, all
those CEOs with all their money, at the end of
(16:00):
the day, there's a set of juror six or twelve
or whatever it is. They have the power. They have
the power. So in many respects, I think I got
the power because I see myself as the civil police.
There's the criminal police. I'm the civil police. You don't
(16:20):
when you go to Russia and China, you don't ever
see cars being recalled. You don't see air bags. They
just they just let them die. The reason America is
great is because we got a great civil justice system,
and we make we make the best cars products in
the world. And the people that are watching those people
(16:42):
are people like me. And if they like you know,
these Takata air bags that are killing people. I mean,
it's outrageous what's happening. But what I get to do
is I get to change conduct. And the thing that's
maybe most gratifying to me in this whole journey is
as much as the people I've represented, the people I
(17:06):
never had to represent because we changed conduct. Because I
can tell you this, the one thing about corporate America,
they don't give a damn about us. They don't give
a damn about us. The only thing they care about
is money. And the only thing they understand is money
and having to pay money. And so that's the stick.
(17:28):
That's that's the night stick.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
When you say that's who do you mean? Because you're
worth one point five billion? Like, what do you do
you mean?
Speaker 2 (17:34):
Us?
Speaker 1 (17:34):
The people?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
People? Okay, gotcha? People got you? Gotcha?
Speaker 3 (17:38):
For the people are lawsuits ruining the country though, and
not those major lawsuits, but I feel like people's answer
to everything now is a lawsuit. Right, you get into
a car accident, you know, usually you get into a
car accident, be a minor fender bender. You know you ensure,
you know, you you swap insurances, you fix it, you
keep it moving. But now it's it's it's big businesses.
(17:59):
Now I get into an accident. Now I'm going to
do this. Now I slipping fall. I'm going to do
this now? And how do you see who's really hurt,
who's really not who is it? It's really in pain
and really needs the work and really needs the hospital bills,
really needs the money to take care of their family.
And who was doing it? Because it's the best.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
What's the best place to slip and fall?
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Madison Square Garden? Because I hate that guy? But now,
how do you if you want to if you want
to sue him, go to sue msg dot com. You'll
be talking to me.
Speaker 2 (18:32):
Wow, really, why do you hate him so much?
Speaker 1 (18:35):
Because he's got these cameras in there. When lawyers that
sue him going there, they got this facial recognition, and
if you're part of that facial they throw you out.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
If you're walking there right now, they kicking you up.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Yeah, that rockets everything.
Speaker 2 (18:48):
I can't go.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
How they throw me out?
Speaker 2 (18:51):
They threw you out before.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
I didn't go, but lawyers in my firm Listen, I've
got twelve hundred lawyers, lawyers in my firm. Onto the
Rockets kicked out with their family because this James Dolan
doesn't want to clean up his dirty places. So that's okay,
But guess what, I got another lawsuit coming against him
(19:15):
because that facial recognition that he was doing has also
taken a lot of people's privacy. And I filed a
class action against him a couple of weeks ago because
you walked in, you walked in, you walked in, and
that facial recognition got you and then took your information
and got hacked, and there's been this gigantic data breach
(19:36):
and and and listen, one thing that we want is
our privacy. Privacy is a hot button issue in America.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
How did your beast old him? Like was it the
first lawsuit? And then it just got nasty, like.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
No, he just started saying if you sued, if you
sued any of his entities, that he's got this facial
recognition when you go in and and and and you're
you're out. And so look, I've never been a James
Dolan fan. I got pissed off when he kicked Charles
Oakley out of the out of the garden, like this
guy made the knicks and he hadn't done it. The
(20:11):
only thing James Dolan was done was born. He was
born with a silver spoon, stuck up his ass and
took a fortune and basically destroyed the fortune. And so
it's kind of was personal to me that my lawyers
are getting kicked out. So I decided, look, if nobody
wants to sue it Madison Square Garden, I will. So
(20:31):
that's why I got the website sue msg dot com.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
What's the line between retaliatory though, like with y'all, with
y'all beef right, Like, when does it get like I'm
just coming for him? I have this website. Anybody can
claim anything. There's an actual thing here.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
No way, Because here's the thing. I get four million
calls a year for him. No, no, no, no. In general,
of those four million, I maybe take seven percent of
the calls to come in. From the seven percent, it
probably gets down to five percent. The truth of the
matter is I don't have the money to be messing
(21:07):
around with frivolous lawsuits. And you know who knows when
it's frivolous. The insurance and they know the best and
they love it when it's frilllesus because then they can
build and drive us. So I don't have to your point,
I don't have the time or the resources to be
chasing ghost. I have to be chasing what's legitimate. And
(21:31):
by the way, sometimes you're with a client, you figure out,
you know what this person is not on the up
and up, and when that happens, you got to say goodbye.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Do a lot of people feel like they don't want
to go through the process. I remember I was nineteen
years old, ride of my motorcycle. Lady hit me, fell
banged up pretty bad. Ambulance came, took me to the hospital.
Right called an attorney. I don't remember what wasn't Morgan
and Morgan, but I think it was Jacobe Myers, I
(22:03):
can't remember. But called the lawyer turning from New York.
They said I would have to go through this process,
and it would take six months to go through this process,
and I have to go to physical therapy every day, and this,
that and the other. And after one day of doing it,
I couldn't. I was like, I got a job, I'm nineteen,
I got to go back to college.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
I couldn't.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
So I remember calling the insurance company and saying, look,
I'm not gonnassue you guys, just please pay for my
bike and my hospital bills. And they said really, and
I'm like yeah, And I remember going there and they
gave me a huge check more than all that, and
it made me think, damn, I really could suited them.
I could have got a lot of money.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
But there has to be a lot of.
Speaker 3 (22:37):
People that can't do it. They can't go through the
physical therapy. They can't because they'll go injured. You know,
I still got to score all money because of it.
But it's like, what do you do for those people
that are physically hurt but they just can't go through
the process because they got to pay their bills. They
have kids, they have families. They have to do what they.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Have to do.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
But it's fed up because they're really in pain. They're suffering.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
And that happens all the time. And look, the younger
you are, the more resilient. You know, when you're nineteen
years old, your bulletproof. Your bulletproof. And for the people
who sometimes people have to take a low ball offer
because they are up against the wall and they can't
get financing from a finance company. So sometimes that happens.
(23:23):
It just and by the way, you know, they have
a strategy which is, you know, delay, deny, deny, deny, delayed, delayed,
delay and starve you out and starve you out. And
the bigger the case, the more they do that with
and they'll just delay it, delay it, delay it and
delay it and starve you out. And so it every
(23:47):
case is different, Every case is different. But the true
where our big money is made is in the courtroom.
If you can wait to get to that trial, you can.
That's that's when you're going to be paid fairly and
(24:09):
compensated fairly for what has been taken from you and
your family.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
Now, the name of your book is life is luck.
Nothing luck about what you've done. You you work pretty hard,
You've grinded, You've I don't know if there's much luck
with that you put into work.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
Well, I'll tell you this.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
But you're also born white in America.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
To listen, first of all, first chapter, the odds of
being born is like trillions to one, just being born.
Before we talk about being born white, let's talk about
just being born in America. You know what if I
was born in North Korea, how am I doing? How
(24:54):
does white North Korea luck to you? Okay, So there's that,
and then there's white, and then there's.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Sorry miss male, you know.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
Then there's male, and then there's good looking. Good looking
people do better, you know, and then there's all the
other stuff. Look height, most presidents are tall. So well,
I'm not screwed.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I'm like you said, you wasn't that tall.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
No, I'm listening. I'm built, but I'm out. You know,
Barack Obama, you know, you look up, Bill Clinton, you
look up. They look down at me. So all those
different things that happen. Successful people hate to be told
they were lucky. And the reason they hate to be
told they're lucky is they worked their e fing ass.
(26:03):
But guess what else, Guess who makes the least amount
of money in America The people who work the effing hardest.
Have you ever tried to dig a hole with a shovel?
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Actually I have.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
I'm from Mont Corner, South Carolina, so I was getting
a lot of trouble with my daddy told me to
dig a hole because it's either going to be the.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Well of your grave.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah, digging a hole and try to dig a cold hole,
Try to dig it with some frost on the grass.
When the people who work the hardest in America are
the people who make the least. When you ever see
a guy there swinging on a building with a wigs,
(26:44):
you know, squeegee, what what would it call? What would what?
Would you have to be paid to get up there
and strapped on with suction cups? You know, swinging in
the wind. But that's poor person's here, you know from
Outamala is sending money back to his family to take
care of his family and living you know, like a
(27:05):
dog here because he's doing the right thing. So luck
does have a lot to do with it. If I
looked at your career like I've looked at mine, and
that's what I did here when I went on, when
I got on that billionaire list, I say, how did
this happen? Well, first of all, the reason I talked
about the paper boy. I don't know if any of
y'all are old enough to be paper boys, but paper
(27:28):
route is a hard deal, and I think that I
was born with an entrepreneurial seed. There's a paper rout
for a ten eleven year old boy. You're up every
day snow sleets, So I think I had that entrepreneurial
seed early, which was a lucky deal for me. But
(27:49):
if you look at your career, and I'm not sure
about it, really I was researching it. I'll bet you
there was a moment that something, there was some break,
there was something new, something that you yeah, tell me
what it was. Man.
Speaker 4 (28:03):
It's been a few of them, but I think probably
the biggest one was when I when do you ever
heard of Wendy Williams.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Oh yeah, listen. I don't know why. Last night we
were a mister chow. My daughter maybe maybe she knew
about this because my daughter goes, I'm a Wendy Williams fanatic.
Oh wow, my daughter, Kate, She's like, I love, I'm
like Wendy william.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
He used to sit on her lap.
Speaker 4 (28:28):
So yes, that's how she So two thousand and six,
I was in South Carolina and she basically was hearing
what I was doing in South Carolina. Just to make
a long story, very very very very short, without any
new ones her what I was doing in South Carolina,
met her and her then husband, and they brought.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Me up to New York to be a co host.
So that's God, that's luck, Like that's just.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
That's like, and I tell you listen, luck. Luck can
have other words blessings, yeah, God, God. But but when
we become so arrogant that we think it's all us
and not chance. I was telling one of your producers.
I said, when I first applied for a job at
these one hundred applications, my dad calls me and says,
(29:11):
one of the applications slid down behind the back of
my car seat. He said, I said, how did you?
I pulled the seat down. I was vacuuming. My dad
vacuum in the back of the car. Was like, that
ain't ever happening, but he did. I said, who was
who was the letter to? He goes a guy named
Jared Billings. He goes, should I send it out? I go, yeah,
(29:32):
was what do I have to lose? We go already
paid for the stamp. Guess where I got the job? Wow,
Jared Billings, Jerry Billings. And there's some I decided to
go to. I decided I'm Catholic. I decided to go
to daily Mass one day. I'm not a daily mask guy.
I just went to clear my head, not really to pray.
Twenty minutes I go in there, I'm in the community line.
(29:53):
I look ahead of me. I see this girl, these
little terry claws, shorts a little, you know, I'm like,
damn good in church, lusting, lusting. She turns around. I'm like,
that's good too. I go out, I get her number,
(30:14):
I take her out on a date. I marry her.
If I don't go to church that day, I don't
have him sitting over there. I don't have the other three.
I don't have my three other some of my grandchildren
are back at the Lowe Hotel right now. I don't
have my four children. I don't have Everything has changed
that one day, And so I think what we got
(30:36):
to do to make sure that we stay humble, because
I think staying humble makes us better. And I think
we stay humble and realize a lot of people work
a lot harder than us, and there's a lot of
people a lot funnier than us, and there's a lot
of people a lot more talented than us. But that
(30:56):
one break, and if you do that, if you remain humble,
then what you focus on in your life. And it's
the last prayers of my before I go to sleep, gratitude. Man,
I don't know how this happened. I have no fn idea,
but but but yeah, thank you God because this did happen.
(31:20):
And you know, when I look at it, because I
got all sorts of business. I'm in the attraction business, hotels,
all these different things, because I'm kind of an entrepreneur.
But I could never have seen it because when I
got married, when I left town, when I left Gainsville
to get married, I was so broke that guy from
(31:41):
Alabama wants to I said, how broke were you? Jerry said,
I was so broke I needed a co signer to
pay cash. That's broke. So but I was so broke
when I left college to get married. My wife had
to give me her mobile card to get gased and
come home and get married. So we started with ZIP
(32:02):
and then here you are all these years later, and
you're like, how did that happen?
Speaker 2 (32:06):
So y'all came up together basically all the way.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
Yeah, only forty four years May twenty second.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Incredible, man.
Speaker 1 (32:12):
Yeah. So, and so that's how that's when I started
writing the book. And so I didn't want to write
a book about my autobiography because it just wasn't that
interesting enough. But what I wanted to do was tell
stories of my life and how other people can find luck,
(32:33):
improve luck, get return on luck, turn failure into your friend.
At the end of the day, here's what life is.
Life is a gigantic casino. And when you go in
that casino, there's all sorts of games. There's some games
you should never play, like if there's keino, don't play
Keno because the odds of winning and Keno are niel
(32:56):
and none. It's the same in life. There's games to
play and not to play. And then there's moves to make.
I don't know if you gamble or not, but all right,
so you go to play blackjack, what's the rule? Two aces?
What's the rule? But those same types of rules are
in life. But people make a mistake, you know in
(33:17):
business location location location and being adequately capitalized. But people
still make that mistake. If I drive down the road,
I see a restaurant going, I'm like, I ain't gonna
make it. Why it's an old taco tiko and now
they're trying to become a sub shop. And then this
building has failed over and over and over and over
again for a reason. But we make those So what
(33:40):
I've tried to do with this book is to talk
about how we can improve our luck. The main way
we find luck and find success. In my thought about
all this is you have to constantly be looking for opportunity.
When you stop looking for opportunity, you have no chance
(34:01):
for luck, you have no chance for blessings, you have
no chance for God to enter your life and even
do what you're asking for. So there's a lot of
that in my there's a lot of that kind of
stuff in this book.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
One of the stories in the book that I really
appreciated your brother Tim. He was paralyzed at Disney World,
and that reshaped your whole life. How did you turn
something that traumatic into fuel to propel you instead of
letting it break you.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
When he got hurt, I told you before, we were
poor people. My mother had left us before that, so
my dad was kind of a drinker. So it was
just like five of us and there's my brother and
you're living in this little bullshit house and now he's paralyzed,
and you know, and then Disney started playing hardball with him. Well,
I'm I love my family like I would take a
(34:56):
bullet for my family. That's the kind of love I have.
And then You're watching him. He's on a gurney spinning,
you can't move nothing, and Disney's messing with him. And
I just became enraged, enraged, And at the end of
the day, you know, it was what it was. And
(35:18):
at the end of the day, believe it or not.
Because he was a quadriplegic, he became what's called a
super quad where he could drive a car. He had
a daughter, and he worked in my law firm with
me till he died two years ago yesterday. And I
have probably cried a thousand times about Tim, I mean
(35:44):
even now. But I took that experience and I said,
you know what, I know what I'm going to do
with my life. Tim's terrible luck turned out to be
my career. And so when I walk into one of
my offices, when I see people sitting there, I'm thinking
(36:04):
to Tim, I want to be treat them the way
I watched Tim was treated. We ended up hiring a
law firm we never should have hired. We never should
have hired. They made all sorts of mistakes. When I
look back on it now, I mean, it's just malpractice.
This case got dismissed in circuit court and never was appealed.
We didn't know what an appeal was, and so that
(36:30):
terrible day turned out to be my entire career.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
And do it get your I don't want to say revenge,
but did you ever get your get back from Disney?
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Oh? Yeah? But to her point, I don't do it.
I don't have the time or the money for revenge.
I had the time and money for justice. And I
believe in justice. But I also believe when people, when
people lawyers, especially when they come to work, ask me
for a I asked them two questions. I ask them
(37:02):
one question and if there's no right answer, and be
interesting to see what you guys answer this. To this,
I say, what do you value more? Mercy or justice?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Justice? Mercy and justice justice?
Speaker 5 (37:18):
I think, what do you define a mercy?
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Ask?
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Whatever you are?
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I don't know if I.
Speaker 5 (37:26):
Can answer that. I would depend on a situation for me,
in how close whoever the situation happened to is to
me like.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Mercy and justice can be intertwined.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
They but they aren't though, but they can. That's the point.
I'm more of a mercy guy, but I'm also a
justice guy. To your point, they are intertwined, and I
believe that what I get to do is I don't
want to say it's like a ministry, but it's like
a ministry because when I'm with people, I'm representing a
(37:55):
guy right now who his son was stabbed. He came
out of this. It was down in his apartment in
Brickell and Miami. He came out and the guy had
broken into this very secure apartment and stabbed his son
ninety one time. And he walked out with it ongoing. Well,
(38:16):
this guy has had you know, it's the most it's
the most outrageous of all time. But I've spent an
enordan amount of time talking to this guy, not about
the case, just about you know, bringing him off the ledge.
You have the opportunity to seek justice, but at the
(38:39):
same time deal out mercy. The two to your point,
the two do intertwine. And it's a great thing that
when you get up to go to work, you get
to do something good, you know. Johnny back to Johnny Cochran,
he used to say all the time, you can do
good and do well. That was his life us.
Speaker 5 (39:01):
What did you learn with could you talk? You keep
talking about working with Johnny Cochran? What did you learn
about how you watched him navigate luck but also not
luck in certain situations because he was a black man
building when he was building. That helps you today when
you're dealing with people that are in different situations than
you were in Well.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
I learned so much from him. The very first time
I met him, I come up here to meet him
in his office. I walk in to his office and
sitting in the lobby was j LO and Sean Combs.
Oh wow, I'm like, oh wow.
Speaker 5 (39:33):
Was it during the club case?
Speaker 2 (39:34):
Of course?
Speaker 1 (39:36):
Yeah? And then me and him flew to Rochester sign
up a case private little The planes got better as
time went on. Some of those plans you wouldn't get
on today. You're like, I was flying those things, but
we flew to Rochester. The thing I loved about him
(39:56):
was he spoke truth to how hour every single day,
and he was not embarrassed about it. You know, like
you said, you know ambulance chaser that they try to
embarrass me by saying amlence chase. That does not You
cannot embarrass me because I'm not an ambulence chaser. If
I was an amblis chaser, I'll tell you this, with
(40:18):
the technology, I'd be there way before the ambulance, you know.
But what he taught me was, we have nothing to
be embarrassed about about what we're doing because what happened
to them was wrong. And most people don't have the
money to pay a lawyer by the hour. If you
(40:38):
were gone, if you're paid a lawyer by the hour,
it's shocking. You get the first BILLI a wait a minute,
wait a minute. You know, billable time is like organized crime.
That first bill you get, You're like, that's more than
I'm looking for. And so we are the keys to
(40:59):
the courthouse. We get to level the playing field against products,
unsafe products, insurance companies. And so at the end of
the night I was told about I remember, around nine
to eleven, I said to my wife, I said, you know,
I don't even feel like going to work because this
is so horrible. She goes, John, at least what you
(41:22):
do matters. Some people go to work and it doesn't
really matter. And so I really feel that way, and
I feel that I feel that what happened to Tim,
which gave me this business and gave me this life,
as terrible as it was, gave me purpose. And so
when it's all said and done, I'm very happy that
(41:46):
this is the path that I ended up taking.
Speaker 4 (41:49):
How do you feel when you get fooed by like
rival lawyers? Like I was reading about how you got
tooed once because they alled that your commercials use misleading,
druma dramatizations and violated professional conduct rules. The case was dropped,
then there was another lawsuit filed, I think, like in
twenty seventeen or something.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
So how do you feeling?
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Like other lawyers who listen, I've had I've had clients
in my firm where my lawyers blew a statue of limitation.
When that's happened, I personally meet with the clients and
(42:28):
here's what I tell the client. We effed up. When
I say we, I mean he, not me. He And
I said, but here's the bad news, and here's the
good news. The bad news is we fed up. But
here's the good news. I got insurance. You need to
go hire somebody to sue me. And here's the better news.
(42:51):
I'm gonna make sure you get at least as much
as the case is worth, and I hope a lot
more because it's my carrier. And I made this mistake.
And I've had that conversation probably four or five times.
It's a very difficult conversation. But can I tell you
that the interesting thing about that all those people that
that happened to, and I one lady because I started
(43:15):
this bank down in Orlando years ago and she worked
at the bank that I started, and say, John, I
don't want to see you. I don't want I said,
you have to the five people I've had that conversation
with over the years, those people have referred me more
business after my lawyers dropped the ball on their case.
(43:36):
And you know what I think, because I still think
the truth trumps everything and that when you're a straight
shooter and you tell the truth, is it fun to
be sued? No, it's embarrassing. But I believe that the
best way you fight embarrassment is just be honest. Just
be honest. Now, some of these cases, none of the
(43:58):
lawyers in America like it when I come of their city,
because some people say they like competition. I guarantee you this.
There's a lot of DJs, maybe every DJ, maybe every
guy that does what you do in America, that would
rather be you than them. Who would you rather be
than you?
Speaker 2 (44:15):
Nobody?
Speaker 1 (44:16):
Thank you? So all of them would rather be you?
That I mean, and that's true. So you got that
jealousy out there that they say, we like to be
competitive until real competition comes in. So there's when I
go into these states and cities, some of these lawsuits
(44:37):
are filed and they get stomped out. But to me,
it's just it's just you know, par for the course.
I got shiploads of insurance and to the part I
don't have insurance. I got money to solve that problem.
A guy told me once, this is a good one
for you to remember. If money will solve a problem,
(44:59):
solve the problem.
Speaker 2 (45:00):
M hm.
Speaker 4 (45:01):
How did you feel about the actual allegations, the way
they said that you used misleading dramatizations.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
It's I didn't. I didn't. The advertising rules in all
sorts of different states are different. You know, I did
a I did some you know, I did uh some
ads with Kyle Busch before he died, and in Florida,
I couldn't. I can't use celebrities and I'm getting ready
(45:28):
to sue the Florida Bar over this. I can't use
celebrities in my ads, which I think is unconstitutional. Why
because the because the bar doesn't want they don't like
effective commercials that can maybe dry business. Yeah. Why Why
because because lawyers are making that decision. My competitors are
(45:49):
on the rules committee that are making those decisions. So
some of these things that you've seen, I don't know
exactly which dramatization we're talking about, but it could be
something like that, or it could be I run a nationally.
I got an ad I'm doing now with John Daly
and his son, and it runs nationally and maybe it
hits locally in somebody. But they're always shooting at you.
(46:14):
If you're at the top, you're going to be shot at.
There's just no getting around it. And it's usually comes
from envy or jealousy, which are very destructive vices. The
way you do better is be better. Don't worry about him,
you know, I tell people all the time, comparison is
(46:37):
the thief of joy. When you're looking over here, and
you're looking over here, you gotta look straight ahead. And
you know, when you go to the races, sometimes you see
horses with blinders on, you know why, so they're not
looking left and they're not looking right.
Speaker 4 (46:51):
When you talk about being honest, what do you say?
What did you say to your three attorneys? That were
fined for what they called hallucinated AI citations.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
Well, one of them was my son.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Yeah, damn, can't fire him.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
No, I'll fire that one over there. I did. It's
not not that. So I did fire him once. I
did fire him once. I fired Dan. Once. I had
this attraction called WonderWorks. The house is turned upside down.
You ever seen them, It's called WonderWorks, The house is
turned upside down. I got six of them in America.
Dan was working at WonderWorks and was fing off all
(47:27):
the time. So I fired Dan. I said, Dan, uh,
you need to go get a job, and it ain't
with me. And he's like, and I said, I don't.
I don't want you to go out of the house
except to go to school and look for a job.
He gets a job at Boston Market cooking hams. He's
(47:48):
there for a week and he comes in. I can't
do anymore. They got me in the they got me
in the washing dishes. I said, think about that, Dan,
you're so talented that you they you can't even cook
the damn hams. So he at Boston Market. He comes home.
I couldn't. I couldn't take I'm vomited in the dish
washing room. I said, well, listen, you're not leaving the
house except to go to school and look for a job.
(48:09):
He gets a job at Firehouse Subs and he becomes
one of the great sub makers of all time and
learned his lesson. So on the hallucinating. What happened is
my son, we had a products liability case in Wyoming
against Walmart and one of our lawyers used AI to
(48:34):
get sites. And I didn't know what hallucination was other
than you know, smoking marijuana with my medical marijuana. I
didn't know. And all of a sudden we did it,
and my son might as well. I said, well, Mike,
how did it happen? Well, so and so the lawyer
did it, And I said, but your name's on the pleating.
(48:56):
And it was terribly embarrassing because it was every you
know again, and people want that the people if you're here,
like if you got busted, there'd be a lot of
people happy. Your competitor to be very happ Oh, look
he never was what he said he was. But I
told Mike, I said, look, this comes to the territory.
He says, what I got to do? I said, I'll
(49:16):
tell you. You got to do. He goes, why I
didn't do it? I said, your name's on the pleading.
Here's what you're going to do. You're going to fly
your ass to Wyoming from Florida. You're going to stand
in front of that judge and you're going to say
we made a mistake and we are sorry, and we
(49:37):
are going to try never to do this again. And
guess what when you do that? And he went out there.
You know what the judge said. He said, said, okay,
the sanctions they were looking at, we'd already paid Walmart.
And we said okay, and the judge it wasn't as
bad as it could have been. Now, if you start,
it's never the act. It's the lies. If you fess up,
(50:01):
that's one thing. If you cover up, it's always the
cover up. It's always the cover up. It's always the lie.
And yeah, it was a bad case. It was a
bad thing, a bad press. And guess what the judge was. Okay,
we went and tried the case and we hit Walmart
for nine million dollars.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
And I read that y'all covered the opposing council's fees.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Yeah, yeah, wow, we had to. I mean, I mean,
that's what they had to spend it. It's like one
hundred grand Walmart. Not that they needed the money, but
they deserved it because it was it was our bad.
And if you make a mistake, I tell this to everybody.
If you make a mistake, the sooner you admit it,
the better off you're going to be. Because you start
(50:44):
going down that wormhole of lying and jigging and jagging
and doing all that, you're in for a it's going
to end poorly.
Speaker 4 (50:54):
Something about you seems very fair, you know what I mean. Like,
there's a couple of things that I love that you.
You know, you shit on the myth of being self
made right, and you say things like the money belongs
to God. Like you said, you talk about the responsibility
that comes with extreme wealth. So you've done things like
build food banks, and you fund homeless and hungarylief and
(51:14):
you give back because, like you said, you believe that
luck created the fortune and giving back is the duty
for those who have been lucky.
Speaker 2 (51:22):
Ears, I'd like to say, blessed.
Speaker 1 (51:24):
Well, here's how I look at it. I ask myself
all the time, you know, how do I believe in God?
Question number one? Absolutely, But on a scale of one
to ten, Am I a ten? Or am I one?
I would say I'm like a seven or a God's number,
but I'd like to be ten. If you go to church,
(51:46):
say who all believes in God? Everybody say yeah, yeah,
But is it a seven, eight or ten? I'm probably
a seven or eight. But I'm always praying for more faith.
But what I believe more than anything, I don't really
see God up in the sky. I see God around
this table. And what I believe is the best way
(52:09):
for us to love God is to love people. Because
when you're loving people, you're loving God. And when I
build those food banks and the new thing I'm doing
for women and children the Coalition, and we just built
a food bank in West Virginia, and on and on
and on. To me, that is what is pleasing to God,
(52:30):
because God lives in us. And the reason I know
that is because that's what he said. And so, how
can you have this kind of money? How can you
have this kind of money and drive by and see
people hungry? People hungry? How can you drive by and
(52:53):
see people making eight dollars an hour at the grocery
store and then getting in their car and driving to
the Morgan and Morgan Hunger Relief Center. It's not fair.
It's not fair, and what's going on in America right
now is and why you're seeing all these progressives rise
up to your point. It's not fair what's happening, And
(53:19):
it's not because of anything other than the rich are
getting richer by design and the poor are getting poorer
by design, and the poor are saying, you know what,
it's not fair. It's not fair that these new tax
cuts can have a guy like you get a jet
(53:40):
for free. When I bought my jet after Trump got elected,
of course I didn't support him, you know, I'm the
first time I got in politics was Bill Clinton back.
I mean, that was my guy. And then I was
financed for Obama. I had Obama in my house as president.
(54:00):
So but it's not fair. But the Trump tax cuts,
my new jet was basically free with the tax cuts.
That's not fair. This carried interest that these hedge fund
guys get. That's not fair. And I believe that what's
happening in America is this progressive ups is about fundamental fairness,
(54:25):
not that it's not fair to them, but what's happening
to the rich is really unfair.
Speaker 2 (54:31):
And so you like the progressive movement.
Speaker 1 (54:34):
Not really, Okay, not really, because I believe this socialism
always turns into something like Venezuela or Cuba. I believe
that what we have a duty to do is to
do the most for the most with the.
Speaker 2 (54:50):
Least, So like compassionate capitalism.
Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, and you know, like let's start with fair pay.
Let's start with fair pay, start with things like you know,
medical for everybody. I mean, why should somebody? Uh, I've
got I've got a clinic that I fund in a
poor section of Polk County in Florida that were filled
every single day with people coming to the Morgan Morgan
(55:16):
Clinic for medical care. That's that's their whole deal. There's
a lot of those people out there, and we could
do over and over again. So but I believe that
I believe what's going to happen in America is I
believe the progressive movement is going to get bigger and
bigger and bigger. Here's how I look at it. I'm
threatening to write a book I call it The Castle
(55:38):
and the Moat. There's this huge castle where the top
point one percent live, and then there's this moat and
it's deep and it's wide, and there's piranhas in there,
and there's sharks, and there's electrical eels, and then on
the outside there is the barbarians that want to come
(55:59):
in and take the caressle. Over time, the point one
percenters in the castle start drawing all the water out
for themselves. They're building spas, they're building pools inside, and
the moat keeps sinking and sinking and sinking. The moat
is the middle class. The moat is the middle class.
And at some point the moat gets dry, and the
(56:19):
eels and the piranhas and the sharks they all die.
And then you know what happens. Then they walk across.
They don't have to swim across. They walk across. And
like on January sixth, the guards in the castle, they
let them in. If you look at January sixth, the
guards let them in. And in every great society, when
(56:43):
you beat people down to a point of hopelessness, helplessness, powerlessness,
you have Marie Antoinette, let them eat, let them be cake.
I don't think so, how about we eat you? How
about the czars in Russia. It's just because we're in
(57:03):
the twenty first century, does it mean those lessons don't
mean the same today. And I believe that this country
is on that path because the rich, the rich wants
so much, so much, and they want to keep and
listen the progressives. Do you know why you know why
(57:23):
a lot of people are siding with Palestine, It's because
they feel oppressed. Think of that feeling that you wake
up every day and you're like, no matter what I do,
it ain't gonna be worth anything. And at a certain
point you rise up and you say, look, And there's
(57:44):
two types of envy. There's benign envy where you go, hey,
I want to be him, so I'm gonna go work
my ass I will be him. Then there's malicious envy
where you go, I just want to take it from
them because it's not fair. And the socialist movement can
grab a holt of that sentiment and write it all
the way. What I worry about is what happens after
(58:09):
Castro becomes in charge, what happens when Chavez? Because I've
never really seen it work anywhere else where it works well?
Speaker 5 (58:20):
Is that why you got your party that you're trying
to put together? The common ground part? So you're about
to politics is where you're about to go next, and
it sounds.
Speaker 1 (58:27):
Like common Ground. I had a contest to have I
think we need a third party because you can't compromise.
I had a friend in Florida he did a constitution
movement to restore Felon's rights. Listen, man, if you do
your time, you should be able to vote in this country.
And guess what, my friend he did it in Florida.
(58:51):
And guess what, they passed that constitutional. Because most people
agree on most things when you take the D in
the R down. So what I believe is all this
Jerry Mandarin. I mean, look, you got you know, look
at South Carolina where you're from. I mean it's it's
just locked and loaded, red red, red, red red. But
(59:13):
there's no compromise. So what I'm thinking about this party
common Ground is a party in the middle. Yeah. We
like some of this stuff on the left. Yeah, we
like some of this stuff on the right. Let us
be the tiebreaker. Let us be because.
Speaker 2 (59:30):
Look, here's there's no true moderates. Yeah. Bill Clinton was
a true mons.
Speaker 1 (59:36):
Yes, and listen, believe it or not, so was Barack Obama. Listen,
you know you you take his eight years. I mean
that's some of the greatest eight years in the history
of this capitalistic country. Obama's a capitalist. Believe me. I
mean it's a Netflix guy. Obama's Netflix. He's okay, He's
(01:00:00):
okay with capitalism, and believe me, you know. And so
so my idea is this, in most elections, four or
five percent of the vote is what de hermines elections.
That's when Mitt Romney said forty seven percent. Remember that
forty seven forty seven percent, that's six percent he's talking about.
So I'm thinking about common ground. We could do a
(01:00:23):
lot if we were just in the middle to break
the tie here, break the tie here and find common ground.
Speaker 2 (01:00:33):
And also, I feel like you should call it common
sense ground.
Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Listen, you know what, it's funny you say that because
I put in I become a chat GPT addict speaking hallucinations.
Already bring that back up. But when I put in
common sense, there was a lot of negative stuff about
common sense. It was interesting to do that. When you
get time tonight, just put in which name is better,
common sense or common ground? And they kept give me
(01:00:58):
all the reasons. So I just want to come but
common sense.
Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
Because when you say fair paid, when you say free
medical care, and you want criminal justice reform. You want
you clearly want work in label rights, right, things like, oh,
that's just that's why wouldn't we want that.
Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Listen, when we try cases, you know the words we
use most use your common sense. When you go back
to this, you know, use your common sense. And that's
part of the jury instructions is common sense. So to
your point, but when it got down to nut cutting time,
common ground, common sense. My slogan is for the people,
(01:01:34):
and so a lot of people say, what about the
People's Party? But then my lawyer who drafted all the
documents said that that China's got the People's Party and
it could be construed to be you know, you know China,
So we didn't go that way.
Speaker 2 (01:01:46):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (01:01:46):
Well, life is luck is out right now, and we
appreciate you for joining us.
Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
I enjoyed this conversation a lot, man, I would should
you can come back up here anytime.
Speaker 1 (01:01:55):
So that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
I enjoyed this conversation of life.
Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
Thank you so much, John Morgan. It's the breakfast Love,
good morning, hold.
Speaker 4 (01:02:02):
Up every day I wake up, click your glass up
the Breakfast Club.
Speaker 1 (01:02:06):
Finish for y'all. Dump h
The Breakfast Club News
Hosts And Creators
Charlamagne Tha God
DJ Envy
Jess Hilarious
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