Billionaire Lawyer Reveals His Side Hustle Playbook.

- December 10, 2025 (3 months ago) • 01:15:49

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	John Morgan	"I don't hunt deer; I hunt money."
00:02	Shaan Puri	"You own one of the biggest—if not the biggest—law firms in the country. We've seen your face on the billboards, from Morgan to Morgan."
00:08	Sam Parr	And if...
00:09	Shaan Puri	You just want to say, "Morgan, that'd be great, too."
00:11	John Morgan	My big vision was this: "What if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?"
00:18	Sam Parr	You just became a lawyer to fund your hearty ambitions. Yeah, and that's pretty badass.
00:23	John Morgan	"I built an attraction called Alcatraz East, and it just prints money. I've got apartment complexes. I've got shopping centers that print money, too."
00:37	Shaan Puri	"He's basically like half Walt Disney."
00:39	John Morgan	"Half shark. Where my competition gets beat by me is that 95% of them are shit. I'm not hunting cockroaches — I'm hunting big game."
00:49	Shaan Puri	"I got goosebumps, John. I love that answer — that was incredible."
00:59	Sam Parr	Alright, so first of all, welcome to the pod. I'm from the South — Missouri and Tennessee. I lived in Tennessee for a while. I've been trying to convey to Sean this idea that I call "capital men." Sean's from San Francisco; he's lived in China and Australia and been all over the place, but he's never been to the South or the Midwest. I was like, Sean, there are these guys I'm friends with — I kind of know them through my dad's friends or through uncles — these Southern guys who have a certain draw. Because you're from California, people might dismiss them, but they print money. They follow the process. They just do thing after thing and they don't overthink stuff. They're just ballers. You are a good example of that. Listening to how you talk, I'm like, you are exactly what I'm talking about: these capital men — guys who just get into stuff. It's like an onion; they have layers of things you don't even know about. For this podcast, maybe we can ask you about each of the — I think you have like ten different businesses. We can ask you about each one, because everyone knows you as the law firm guy, but that might not be the most interesting thing about you.
02:09	John Morgan	Well, believe it or not, I've told this to my wife all the time: the thing that I'm most proud of in all my businesses has been WonderWorks, the upside-down house. Back in the 1990s, my kids were little. We'd go to the science center and it was just... they were shit — they were terrible. The kids would want to leave before we even got there. I had a business where I put on fairs around America, and one of our vendors had this huge tent where everything in it was interactive — touching, feeling — before interactivity was a thing. I thought, if we built a science center that was interactive — that's what a science center should be: touching, feeling, doing — and one that parents would enjoy as much as kids, that would work. So I went around America. As a matter of fact, I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco and found a few things worth copying. I found a "bubble room" where you make these big bubbles, and another exhibit called "Recollections." I went around the country looking for interactive things from science centers, but I felt like the building itself had to be great. Then this guy who'd been with Ripley's came up to me with a rendering of a building turned upside down. He said, "This is what you should do — turn it upside down." I asked him how you'd do that, and he started to tell me. I said, "Well hell, if I could do that, I would do that." So I built the first one in Orlando. It's called WonderWorks — if you Google WonderWorks, you'll see it.
03:57	Shaan Puri	It's this right here.
03:58	John Morgan	There it is.
04:00	Sam Parr	And.
04:00	Shaan Puri	This is amazing. I've never seen this. Is this near Disney World?
04:05	John Morgan	One of mine—the one in Orlando—is very close to Disney World and very close to Universal.
04:12	Sam Parr	"Is the inside of the building upside down?"
04:15	John Morgan	When you walk in, you’re standing on the ceiling. You walk through the trusses and now you’re standing on the ceiling. The storyline is: once upon a time in the Bermuda Triangle, the greatest scientists in the world were working on the greatest experiments to better mankind. They were trying to build their own hurricane, but it got out of control. The place was located in the Bermuda Triangle; it lifts it out of the air, spins it, and it crashes down in Orlando, Pigeon Forge, Branson, Missouri. So you go in, and you look up and see the stairs. Now how are you going to visit it? You go through an inversion tunnel where we turn you upside down, so that when you exit the tunnel you will be defying gravity and walking upside down. Then you go from gallery to gallery. Those things print money too. I have zero debt, and I’ll be like $33,000,000 in EBITDA this year.
05:28	Shaan Puri	"Wow, that's amazing."
05:29	Sam Parr	You dropped into kind of a bit of gold that you just kind of stepped over. Before that, you had a national fair.
05:37	John Morgan	Well, we put on fairs around America. We weren't—we didn't own the rides; we were the operator. In other words: Brevard County Fair, Pennsylvania State Fair, Long Island Fair, Nassau County Fair. We would just set it up, we'd promote it, and then the ride people would come in. We were just... it didn't make a lot of money. But, you know, back in those days... I remember the first time a guy and I took a piece of land, flipped it, and made $60. We split $60. We went on a two-week [unclear: "vendor"—possibly "vacation"] celebrating our $30,000 profit. Those first—those first profits were like, "holy shit." It was like a side hustle. I was a lawyer, but I just made an extra 30 [unclear: amount and units] getting a piece of land rezoned and flipping it to the developer, so...
06:29	Sam Parr	Alright, so John has tons of side hustles: upside-down buildings, crime museums, chocolate factories. He's a machine. But here's the thing: every single one started with him spotting an opportunity others missed. My old company, The Hustle, built a database with hundreds of ideas like this. Some are weird, like John's. Some are dead simple. "If you liked what you just heard, go check out the Side Hustle Ideas Database — scan the QR code or click the link in the description." Now, let's get back to the show.
07:00	John Morgan	San Francisco inspired me. I went there once with my wife. We wanted to go see Alcatraz, so we went to Alcatraz thinking we were going to walk right in. They said, "There's no tickets available." I said, "We'll be here a couple more days. When can we go?" They said, "There's no tickets — tickets are sold out for the next two weeks." So the way you always solve that problem is you pull out two $100 bills to the ticket taker and you say, "Are you sure you don't have two extra tickets back there? This is not for the tickets — this is for you." I got to go through Alcatraz. When I went through it I thought I had this epiphany. You have these epiphanies. My epiphany was that America is fascinated with crime and punishment like nothing else — TV shows, movies, books, Netflix — all of it. I was in the attraction business anyway, so I said, "What about an attraction dedicated to the history of crime and punishment?" I built an attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee called Alcatraz East. I built it to look like an 1800s prison. It's the history of crime and punishment, and it just prints money. How...
08:30	Sam Parr	How big is that business?
08:32	John Morgan	It makes $5,000,000 a year.
08:33	Sam Parr	Net-net, in profit — it's just...
08:36	Shaan Puri	"How much did it cost to build it initially?"
08:38	John Morgan	It's an interesting thing. I have a speech called Failure Can Be Your Friend. What happened is I first built it in Washington, D.C., because I thought— I called it the National Museum of Crime and Punishment, and it didn't do very well. In my opinion, the reason it didn't do well is that there's a lot of free stuff in D.C. to begin with. More importantly, they wouldn't let me do anything with the façade, so I was just in a building across from the National Portrait Gallery. I was doing okay—limping along, paying rent, paying just a little bit—but the landlord came in and said, "You're not doing the numbers per the lease and we're going to call the lease on you." I said, "But I'm paying my rent. Why would you do this?" They said, "We're doing it." So I moved everything and built the structure in Pigeon Forge. I moved a lot of the stuff. Some of the stuff I'd had, I bought. The whole thing—from what I had to build and what I took—I think probably cost $13,000,000–$14,000,000. At the end of the attraction I have four things that are just—you just can't believe it when you get there: one, Ted Bundy's VW; two, Bonnie and Clyde's death car from the movie; three...
10:04	Sam Parr	OJ
10:05	John Morgan	OJ's Bronco, four John Dillinger's sedan, and I just bought John Bonnet's bicycle and the Murdoch's golf cart. Let me tell you: America's fascination with crime is such that people are in this thing for three and a half to four hours. It's an easy business to run because it's static—there's not a lot of interaction.
10:31	Sam Parr	I'm looking at your website right now. I've been here. I believe I'm a huge crime fan. So when you were waiting to name what you were going to name, I was like, "You're forgetting O.J.'s car — this is awesome."
10:44	Shaan Puri	And you made a big bet. Because after you did the thing in D.C., I think the normal entrepreneur sort of starts to doubt the concept — doubt the viability. You know, it didn't go well right away, and yet you doubled down in the face of that. Is it just blind faith or conviction — or are you just a stubborn guy?
11:04	John Morgan	That's not that I'm stubborn. It's like—you know, you hear everybody give these speeches about "failure is your friend." Failure can be the best thing that ever happens to you. But when we lose, we never go near it again. We say that; you know, it sounds good in a speech. What happened is, I had some investors from WonderWorks invest in this deal, so I had investors. My wife kept saying, "This is great—it's great. You just gotta build it in a place where there are more people." So I sent a letter to all my investors saying, "Look, I'm gonna move it from here to there and you'll be part of it." Everything was... you know, and not one person took me up on it. Not one person. They all said, "We're taking our loss." Then I asked my wife, "What do you think?" She goes, "Let's do it ourselves." And, you know, my new money was like $8 million, and I got it back in a year and a half.
12:07	Sam Parr	Were you... How big was the law firm? Or, like, what was your financial situation?
12:11	John Morgan	My financial situation was not bad. I mean, as I got older, it got better. I was one of those guys who always pushed my profits into new things, and it was good. But I did have $8,000,000.
12:35	Shaan Puri	"That's amazing. So what's crazy about your story is you're this guy—you own one of the biggest, if not the biggest, law firms in the country. We've seen your face on billboards for Morgan & Morgan, and before that you've done all these other things. You were talking about WonderWorks—maybe your favorite business and the one you're most proud of, which was an amusement business. Maybe some of the inspiration for that came from you working at Disney when you were younger. So, where does the story start for you? Does it start when you were a little kid? Does it start at Disney? Where does the entrepreneurial bug start?"
13:07	John Morgan	I think the story started for me probably the same way the story started for you two, except you're too young for this to happen. There are people that are born with an entrepreneurial seed. A seed — it just happens. Now, for my generation you could spot those people because they were paper boys or paper girls, and a paper route was a M.F.er. At a paper route you're 10 or 11 years old, but it's every single day — rain, sleet, snow. If you miss one, you gotta go back; you gotta collect your money. I'll bet you two guys, if you went back to your 10- or 11-year-old selves — I don't know if there were paper routes when you were younger — you were probably doing something hustling money. You two were probably coding or, you know...
14:00	Sam Parr	Selling stuff on eBay.
14:01	John Morgan	I sold stuff on eBay, and at school I always sold candy. I used to wear army pants with all the pockets and I'd carry watermelon sticks and bubble gum—not chocolate, because it melted. I would sell candy at school and make about $10 a day.
14:19	Shaan Puri	By the way, John, you know the evidence for what you're saying?
14:22	John Morgan	"What?"
14:23	Shaan Puri	Warren Buffett had a paper route — he also sold magazines, gum, and Coke. Jeff Bezos had a paper route. Sam Walton (from Walmart) had a paper route. Walt Disney and Peter Drucker are also on that roster. There's an insane roster of people who did exactly what you're saying.
14:36	John Morgan	Oprah had a paper route.
14:39	Sam Parr	"That's badass."</FormattedResponse>
14:40	John Morgan	And so the reason I know all these people is because I've written a new book that's being edited right now called Life Is Luck. The thesis of my book is: we wake up—we're born—but we're born lucky. You know, we're born in America. Warren Buffett calls it "winning the ovarian lottery," just being born in America. Then you make a thousand left turns and a thousand right turns and a thousand U-turns, and then you end up here with one different turn. Part of my thesis is the paper boy, the paper girl—these people were born with that genetic seed of entrepreneurism. You can't teach it; it's just in you. It's such an advantage in life because, really, it's nothing we did. We were born with it. No one wants rich people to ever be told that they were lucky. They want to say, "I worked my ass off. I deserve every single penny I got." And they are 100% wrong about that because one different turn... I mean, Buffett—Buffett's company is basically five stocks. When Charlie Munger died, I read a piece about him yesterday in the Wall [Street Journal]. If you take five stocks away from Berkshire [Berkshire Hathaway], it's not Berkshire.
16:09	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's like Amex, Coca-Cola, Apple.
16:13	John Morgan	And right—exactly. We see him as a great investor, and his greatness has really been his patience and his understanding of index funds instead of, you know, money managers, and the time and power of compounding interest.
16:34	Sam Parr	I believe what you're saying. I believe luck is real. I think that when most people become successful, they attribute a fair bit to luck because they realize... for example, when I sold my company, the CEO got into a really bad accident two weeks after the deal closed. If that had happened two weeks earlier, that could have changed everything. So there is a luck component. I also have some research here, and I think you have about ten or twelve things that have worked out really well for you. So there's a lot of good decision-making on your side. Were you always doing these little hustles? Did Morgan and Morgan start as a hustle and turn into a real thing, or were you trying to build something big from the get-go?
17:16	John Morgan	Well, I was not trying to build something big from the get-go. I mean, look: when I first got out of law school, if somebody had told me they'd pay me $100 and [unclear phrase] I would have been, you know, "give me the pen." I mean, I wasn't even thinking like this. I got into this business because my brother got hurt when I was in college. He became a quadriplegic from an accident, and I was in the middle of all that. Our family was relatively poor, and when you're poor you're helpless, hopeless, powerless. Then you're watching your brother be, you know, pushed back by the big companies, and I became enraged about the way he was treated. So when I went to law school I knew exactly what I was going to do. I was going to come back and do this work. I had a lot of job offers elsewhere, but this is all I wanted to do, and this is all I've ever done. I couldn't have dreamed this — it's too big to even dream.
18:34	Shaan Puri	Well, it's interesting because I would say personal injury lawyers have a pretty bad perception in the public. I think "ambulance chasers" are seen as sort of a sleazy thing. That, I think, is fair as a mass perception. But when you think about what you're actually doing — and what you did, right — like, your brother has a tragic on-the-job accident and becomes a quadriplegic. Insurance companies and large corporations are not trying to pay out fair compensation or huge settlements to folks who need it. In a way, you're basically helping somebody who needs the most help and who tends to have the least power or resources to fight against those who have a lot of power and resources. In many ways, that's a very noble thing, but it has the opposite perception. Is that how you see it? Or, what's going on?
19:28	John Morgan	Yeah, it's—look, it's like this. When I got out of law school—almost when I got out—you weren't even allowed to advertise. Personal injury lawyers were, as you said, called "ambulance chasers." Everybody wants to look down on somebody. Lawyers had a bad reputation themselves, anyway. You know, "kill all the lawyers"—all of a sudden they found somebody to look down on, and that was the personal injury lawyer, the ambulance chaser. "I'm not an ambulance chaser," and then all of a sudden there were the advertising lawyers, which became another group to look down on. The personal injury lawyers would say, "Well, I don't advertise; I'm above that. I'm down," you know. When I got out of law school, I would have been the last person you would have ever expected to do that. I was straight and narrow—the president of everything at the university. I had all these job offers, but I didn't take them because I did have a desire to do what I'm doing. When I got out, I started going around to people who did advertise—who were kind of shady—and they gave me their business. I took their bad cases. I took their tough cases. But I got inside the belly of the beast, and I saw the future. A lot of times you get to see the future. Bill Gates and Paul Allen—they saw the future. If they were born today, that future wouldn't be there for them; that was their luck when they were born, because if they were born today, Microsoft is already something else. So I saw it, and I sat down with my wife and I said, "Look, this goes against everything I ever thought I'd be, but this train is leaving the station."
21:19	Sam Parr	And that train being advertising for your services.
21:23	John Morgan	Yes — advertising for my services to get cases. When I started out, other lawyers would refer you business and you were paying them a 50% referral fee. So if your fee was $100, you had to give your referring lawyer $50. Well, that hurts margins. All of a sudden you were seeing a different way. It was still iffy when I did it because it hadn't really become mainstream at all, but it was something. I was so embarrassed about it I didn't even do the commercials myself. I had a friend who was very handsome and I said, "Vance, I want you to be my face," and he did it. Then the bar came in and said, "Well, you can't have spokespeople — you gotta do it yourself." So I had to take my fat face and go on TV. There I was. Look.
22:19	Sam Parr	"Don't know, man. You look pretty good to me, yeah."
22:20	Shaan Puri	You look... you look sharp, but...
22:22	John Morgan	"I didn't like the way I looked."
22:24	Shaan Puri	"So, were people not advertising because they were literally just too proud for it, or was it a gray area legally—of whether you could or couldn't?"
22:31	John Morgan	It wasn't illegal, but it was taboo. It was just not done. People who could afford it wouldn't, because they didn't want to be shunned at the country club. Those who would have wanted to didn't have the money. How I got to do it was: I went to the bank, borrowed $100, went down [to the TV station], and did the commercials. When I think back later... By the way, my credit was so good that the TV station would only run my ads if I paid in advance — that's how good my credit was.
23:11	Shaan Puri	So you're saying the order of operations was: you graduate as a lawyer, you know what you want to do as a practice, and you saw that there were some lawyers at the bottom of the social barrel who were advertising. You didn't advertise yourself at first; you just went and took their cases. They would catch the fish, you would cook the fish — you would go and actually do the case. You said you were "in the belly of the beast" and you saw, "Oh, this is the future. These guys are getting a lot of cases. This is how lawyers are gonna get business," and you decided to do it. What was it that let you go against that kind of country-club mindset? I heard this quote from Larry Ellison. He said one time, when they were talking about how successful he was: > "I had all of the necessary disadvantages you would need to be successful. I had this chip on my shoulder — I wasn't the best student, I wasn't the best at this. I had everything I needed to be successful. That's what I needed." What was it that you needed to break out from the way other lawyers were doing things?
24:11	John Morgan	Well, I've always been, you know, aggressive and I'm a networker, but I didn't want to do it this way. Paying that 50%—how I looked at it was this: they were throwing me their trash. I felt like I was up in a dumpster eating a half-eaten Whopper that had been thrown up in the dumpster. But guess what? It tasted okay. I was living. Still, I would rather have had a fresh Whopper handed through the drive-through window instead of having to climb into the dumpster. That was my decision. Do I just keep doing it? I knew it was going to happen, and I knew first to market was always an advantage. If I could get in early enough and become Kleenex instead of, you know, tissue, I had a better chance. My wife was a securities lawyer—she's very smart. I'm not. I'm the part of the 50% of the law school class that enabled there to be a top 50%, and without me, there's no "them." My wife was in the top 2%.
25:26	Sam Parr	The foundation. We call it The Foundation.
25:29	John Morgan	Yes. So the thing that happened to Tim—this was one of those situations where we're very close, and he's in a terrible situation, and Disney is really treating him terribly. The more we fought, the more they crushed him. When you're watching somebody you love that much get manhandled that way, a rage comes inside of you. I always knew what I was going to do. I was offered a job—this guy Mark Hulsey wanted me to come to his firm—and I told him, "You know, this is what I want to do." He helped me get my first job out of law school. The good thing about what I've done—and the good thing for people listening to this—is that when you wake up and work is not work, you're a lot better at it. I woke up every day thinking, "I'm gonna take care of the thames of the world" [unclear: "thames" may be a transcription error]. So it was never work for me. I wanted to go and get my pound of flesh from these people who had bullied us when we were helpless, hopeless, and powerless. As time has gone on, to me it's been very noble. The people we represent didn't do anything wrong, but they had things taken from them: their health, their ability to walk, their income. What we do is give them back as much as we can—or compensate them as much as we can—for what was taken from them. I like the business. Listen, I liked Robin Hood when I was a kid—I always liked the Robin Hood story. So the people I'm going against… look, the tobacco industry. I've had many, many trials against them. What do they do for a living? They are in the business of premeditated murder. They know what they're doing. They're going to kill us; they're going to kill a bunch of us this year, and they know it. In their internal documents they call new smokers "replacement smokers." They laced the cigarettes with additives to hook us. They gave them to kids; they gave them to service people. They're in the business of premeditated murder. So I don't feel bad at all when that's my enemy. I don't feel bad at all when I'm trying to get compensation for people who were hooked and addicted by a very evil company. By the way, today those same companies now own our food companies.
28:31	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's crazy.
28:32	John Morgan	"And processed food is the new tobacco."
28:35	Sam Parr	In terms of—so, in a little bit we want to ask about all your businesses, because you've had so much going on. But just to add context to the timeline: when you started advertising, do you remember, over the next ten years of the business, how big did your business grow?
28:52	John Morgan	It was gradual. The way I always looked at it was: I had a number for what I thought a case was worth, and I had the number of cases that I would sign up. I would divide my spending by the average fee per case, and as long as that equaled out so I could break even, I kept pouring more money into it. For example, if a case was worth $4,000 and I was spending $80,000, I had to get 20 cases to break even. If I got double that, then that was profit. That's kind of how I did it in a very simplistic way, and I felt like as long as I was breaking even I was building the brand, and building the brand was very important too.
29:46	Shaan Puri	When you say "building the brand," what's the John Morgan School of Brand? If you were going to school us on how you think about brand, what do you think about?
29:54	John Morgan	First of all, I wanted it to be something memorable. When I first got into it, there weren't even computers. I didn't have a computer or a URL. The first time I really understood what a URL was, I was at a Yankees game with some lawyers in New York. They all had these devices called BlackBerrys and I was like, "What are those?" They were just thumbing through them the whole game. I asked, "What are you doing?" They said, "We're getting cases." I went back home and said, "I gotta get a BlackBerry." When I got the BlackBerry, I said, "I gotta get a URL." So the beginning of the brand was the URL. I wanted my URL to be my mission statement and my branding statement. The two things I came up with in my mind were "justice for all" and "for the people." Those are the two URLs I ultimately considered. I went with "for the people" because I was worried people couldn't always spell "justice," but I knew we could all spell "for the people." When I built my brand, I wanted my brand, my mission statement, and my URL to all be one thing so I never had to say something twice. I could just say it once. A lot of the ads would be like, "Visit—call Morgan—and morganforthepeople.com." I can say it all just like that. Building the brand was very, very important.
31:40	Shaan Puri	"Who did you take inspiration from when building an iconic, memorable brand? Who did you think was doing it well?"
31:47	John Morgan	Well, the people that I admire in my life are Walt Disney. I worked — I did magic — at Walt Disney World, and so every time I walk out of the magic store I see Walt Disney holding Mickey's hand on Main Street. They had the slogan "dream it, do it," and that was kind of in my mind. It was P.T. Barnum, Disney — those types of people. I like the promotion. When I was building WonderWorks, I knew that the building itself — you've heard the slogan "sell the sizzle, not the steak." Well, there's a lot to that. So when I was building WonderWorks I was thinking "sell the sizzle, not the steak." People will pay just to get behind the curtain, like they did with P.T. Barnum. They'll pay to get behind the curtain just to see the human pincushion.
32:46	Sam Parr	How many active companies do you have right now?
32:50	John Morgan	I’ve got so many K-1s from businesses that I’ve built. I have shopping centers that I’ve developed and apartment complexes that I built and are under construction. I’ve got that whole part of my life covered. I also have attraction businesses. I started building Marriott hotels about twenty years ago. I had a billboard company that I sold to Lamar for a lot of money. I had an ad agency for lawyers called Practice Made Perfect that I sold — it did well. The new thing I’ve got going right now — you know who Guy Fieri is, he’s a California guy — is a concept that combines Dave & Buster’s with Guy Fieri. Dave & Buster’s kind of has it all to themselves, so we built our very first location, which we call Downtown Flavortown, in Pigeon Forge. We opened the first one about a year or so ago, and we’re building the second one right now in Myrtle Beach.
34:02	Shaan Puri	This fascinates me because so many people come on this podcast and their message is: you just gotta focus. Don't get distracted. Don't chase the shiny objects. You just have to do one thing and let it compound for a long time. But you seem to have done both. Your firm has compounded — I think you guys do about $2 billion in revenue now — this is a huge firm, but you've had all these other entrepreneurial side quests. So I guess, just to square that circle for me: are you focused or unfocused? How do you think about that? </FormattedResponse>
34:31	John Morgan	Here's how I think about that: those people that tell you to "focus" are also doing a lot of this — hunting, fishing, golfing — all three of them. Now, nothing wrong with "off" time, but there's nothing about business in those activities, except maybe a little golf. You can do a little bit of that. But hunting, to me, makes no sense. Killing an animal up close makes no sense. The venison... I can taste the fur. I don't want to eat it, so I don't hunt. Fishing — I don't get it. I don't understand "catch-and-release." Let's go out and have a good time, catch a fish, rip its mouth open, tear its eye out, and then throw it back in the water. I don't understand that. And golf — look, it's a great hobby, but I'd rather shoot pool for an hour than golf for... All that focus that these people are focusing on, I don't have that distraction. I don't hunt deer; I hunt money, and I like it. So instead of collecting stamps — some people collect stamps as a hobby — I collect artifacts for Alcatraz East. </FormattedResponse>
36:05	Shaan Puri	Hunt.
36:06	Sam Parr	"You're a big fan of presidential note cards — you know, presidential flashcards. You just like collecting those bills."
36:11	John Morgan	Yes, yes — and clipping coupons. So I am very focused. I'm just not hunting, golfing, or fishing. If you take all that... and listen: I watch sports on TV, but there are people who are more interested in, you know, Lane Kiffin's new job than they are in their own job. Well, I don't have those distractions affecting my focus. </FormattedResponse>
36:40	Sam Parr	Can I ask you about each one of these businesses that I researched? I want to brag a little bit about you, and you can tell me if it's true or not.
36:50	John Morgan	Okay.
36:51	Sam Parr	So, listen to this, Sean. Tell me if this is true. So we have Morgan & Morgan — that's a hugely successful firm; you talked a lot about that. But you also have a company called Litify, which I think you sold. Litify is a tech company for lawyers, and I believe you sold around 60% of the company. You still own 40% at a $600,000,000 valuation. Is that true?
37:12	John Morgan	That's right.
37:13	Shaan Puri	"Do you have a method where you create the vision and then hire a CEO early on? What makes the system work?"
37:21	John Morgan	A guy joined me who was—one of the smartest young guys. He could do anything. I could just tell him— I called it "magic carpets"—and say, "Can you do this?" and he'd say, "Yeah, I can do this." "Can you do that?" "Yes." When I first brought him in, I had a vision. I've written two books: You Can't Teach Hungry and You Can't Teach Vision. My big vision for the law was this: > "What if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?" That idea kept replaying in my mind. The problem for a guy like me was that I'm terrible at math and science. I had no idea about coding, but I had the vision: what if Google was a law firm? I decided I was going to build what I called the Google law firm, even though I didn't have the technical skills. I had been close with Obama's team and I was talking to the Obama people—the guys who ran the cave in Chicago: Teddy Goff and another guy, Yeland Creigle. When I talked to them about the Google law firm, they just gave me blank faces: "What do you mean, the Google law firm?" I found a guy who got it. The first thing I said to him was, "Everything we're going to do, we're going to ask, what would Google do?" Here's what Google would do if it was a law firm: Google would be everywhere for everybody. Google wouldn't want some cases; they'd want all the cases. If they didn't handle a case in-house, they would refer it out. They would partner with a firm—like Uber. I was inspired by Google and Uber. I wanted to build the Google law firm: keep a lot of cases but refer many more out. So I told the guy, "What I want the most is transparency and automation." We had a software called Client Profiles [software], and it was pretty good, but he kept saying, "It's not enough. We have to build our own software." That was the last thing I wanted to do because it was so big and not what we did. He finally convinced me we had to build it. I had gained such trust in him, so we built Litify for internal use and put it on Salesforce. We layered it on Salesforce—nobody had ever done that before. Suddenly we attracted engineers. We built a staff of engineers, and Salesforce became interested in us because they hadn't been in the legal space before. We realized we could change things and do whatever we wanted. Part of the deal was: if you want my referrals, you have to be on Litify, because that's how we talk to each other. A case comes in that I'm going to refer out to Des Moines. The partner who's on Litify gets the referral. He has twelve hours to accept or decline. If he declines, it goes to a second person, then a third, and so on. So it started as something internal for us, but it became so good that everybody wanted it, and then we started selling it.
41:30	Sam Parr	"What was—how much did you invest in it, and what was the time to exit?" </FormattedResponse>
41:34	John Morgan	Well, other people invested in it. Fortress put some money in. I was on a bank board — I was on the bank board of Esquire Bank, which is a bank for lawyers that trades on Nasdaq. I sat on the board. Tiger Capital put in some money. I would say, from beginning to exit, six to seven years. And... look.
41:57	Sam Parr	That's incredible.
41:57	John Morgan	I didn't really want to exit, but it was time because, like you said, I needed to focus on the Google law firm I already had. I still have a lot of input with Bessemer, and I sold it to somebody who I thought would be good. I sold it to Bessemer, and they're very good at this. So, yeah—about six or seven years.
42:24	Sam Parr	Okay, that's amazing.</FormattedResponse>
42:25	Shaan Puri	By the way, it seems like there's a flywheel between these businesses. You said, "we built it kind of for ourselves," and then you used your position and leverage in the market—like, "hey, if I'm referring you to a case, you have to be using our platform for this to work well" to get more customers. The second business, I think Sam's going to bring up, is this ad agency you created.
42:44	John Morgan	The ad agency was—here's how the ad agency was. I called it Practice Made Perfect. My idea was that I would go out across America and say, "If you want to do what I'm doing, I'll write your ads, I'll place your ads..." And when big cases happen—when mass torts happen—you can put them in and then refer them to me. So I built this company called "Mass," or "Practice Made Perfect." I had all these lawyers across America. I was charging 15%, so I made money. I was probably making eight or nine million dollars a year just running that business. But more importantly, all those lawyers started referring me cases. When Vioxx would happen, or when mass torts would happen, they would send me their cases as well. I built this—I thought of it like Global Crossing, where I'm laying all this fiber-optic across America. But my fiber-optic were these law firms across America: I would make money via the ad agency, but I'd make the big money with the cases they would sell.
43:50	Sam Parr	"Wait — was that its own entity? And you're saying it was doing 8 million in income?" "Yes. That's incredible. Where is it now?"
43:57	John Morgan	I sold it because — here's why: I had to sell it. As I started to expand across America with all these lawyers, they were all good friends of mine by the end. But I kept… they were like, you know, I had a guy up in Indiana and he's like, "John, you know, you're infringing on my territory." I'm like, "How?" My deal with these clients is this: you don't have to sign a contract with me. You can fire me anytime you want, and I'll never compete with you. I'll never compete with you. It was just a handshake. Well, they were calling saying, "Well, John, you know, I saw one of your billboards." I'm like, "Well, where did you see it?" He's like, "I was driving to Louisville." I go, "Were you in Kentucky or Indiana?" He says, "I was in Kentucky, but I was driving…" I was like, "Hey man, you're in Indianapolis; I'm in Louisville." So I started getting — I was infringing on my clients.
44:48	Sam Parr	Right.
44:49	John Morgan	And it just became untenable. I was at a crossroads, and I either had to not grow the Google law firm or keep this other business. So I sold Practice Made Perfect. I don't know what's going to happen to it. I'm very worried about it, because when they bought it from me, the person that came in to run it — they called the person they put in there the "resident entrepreneur" or something like that. They had some name for the guy who's going to run it. I just... give me the money and go do what you want.
45:26	Sam Parr	"How much did you sell it for?"
45:28	John Morgan	About 18.
45:30	Sam Parr	Okay, so that's 18,000,000. Alright, now listen to this, Sean — is this true? Do you still own this, and can you tell me the story about it? You had a trade show called "Mass Torts Made Perfect," and it's a twice-a-year trade show for lawyers. So you basically owned the networking of law firms, is that right?
45:48	John Morgan	It's called Mass Torts Made Perfect, and we held it twice a year. People would come to learn about the latest mass torts. It was a play on Practice Made Perfect. I had Practice Made Perfect for my clients and Mass Torts Made Perfect for all the lawyers in America, and I stayed with that for a long time. At a certain point, it was me and two other firms. It was when Johnny Cochran was alive—he was part of it—and I was helping him map out his national strategy, which also helped me learn about going national with another law firm. But, back to your focus: you are right about focus. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both say, focus, focus, focus. At a certain point, Mass Torts Made Perfect was not helping me grow my business, so I sold it. I let them have Mass Torts Made Perfect; I kept Practice Made Perfect, and then I went and spent way more time on the Google law firm.
47:03	Sam Parr	Well, how big was the trade show business?
47:05	John Morgan	It was big, but it wasn't that profitable. The trade show itself made money, but not a lot of money. Practice made perfect. The ad agency was really supplementing that, but what we were really looking for were cases. We were really looking for people to say, "Hey, you know, we're gonna send you our cases." So the trade show itself never made money; it was the cases that we got.
47:30	Shaan Puri	Where do you see opportunity today... that a younger, more free John Morgan would actually be able to go and pursue? What would you go chase down?
47:39	John Morgan	If I was young, I would probably—because of AI, and because I'm not good at that stuff—I would be looking toward the service industries. For [uncertain: "john morgan"], you know: plumbing, electrical, air conditioning. I think that's where a person like me could thrive. I'm good at scaling. I'm good at building teams. I'm good at sharing the profits. So I think I might be in something like that. But the business I really enjoy the most is the entertainment business. And—it's just the great thing about the entertainment business, whether it's the downtown FlavorTown, or WonderWorks, or Alcatraz East, is you're not fighting...
48:41	Sam Parr	Can you—okay, so Shard and I are, I guess, sort of in the entertainment business because we have this podcast. But, you know, I love the idea of owning an upside-down museum. That sounds amazing. It sounds fun. It sounds like it's good for the world. It's wholesome. It sounds fantastic. It seems cool to touch the things you're working on. Could you teach us how to get into that business and how to operate, run, spot an opportunity, or what a winning formula looks like?
49:06	John Morgan	Well, the winning formula looks like you gotta go back to the basics: location, location, location. Look — my Orlando store does the best. Pigeon Forge is the second best, and Myrtle Beach does pretty good. Branson does less than Myrtle Beach. It's all about where your locations are. If you don't have a great location for this type of business, you're in trouble. Look, Six Flags is having trouble in America right now because there's just not enough people going to Six Flags. I like these one-offs — location-based attractions where it's at the corner of "Maine and Maine" [sic]. You've got a lot of people coming with money, and when people come with money, they're coming to spend money. When people come to Orlando, they're coming to spend money. So that's what I would focus on: the cities themselves.
50:11	Sam Parr	And is the business model just $30 tickets or $50 tickets?
50:14	Shaan Puri	Or.
50:15	John Morgan	They're not — it's like $26 tickets. And the reason I think I'm really doing well is the value is incredible. There are probably four or five things inside each attraction that, if you just went out and paid for them on the street, would be expensive. For example, virtual roller coasters in malls go for $20 a ride (three minutes). With us, you can just keep going and going. Ropes course: $15–$20 a ride. Laser tag: $15–$20. There are probably five items inside a WonderWorks that would cost $100 each by themselves, but here a family of four comes in for $100 and they leave with a huge grin, sweating from all the activities. The thing I love about the business is there's really no fighting. In my law business, I'm competing to get cases — I'm fighting the insurance company, I'm fighting defense lawyers — everything's a fight. The only thing that's a fight here is when somebody comes and says, "I didn't like it, I want my money back." We basically look at the ticket and ask, "How long were they there?" If they were there for an hour or less, here's your money back. If they were there for three hours, we're like, "Get the fuck out of here."
51:50	Sam Parr	Is there a winning strategy? Okay: the story of an upside-down house that got tossed out of the Bermuda Triangle — that's kind of cool. Crime and Punishment is cool. What other winning story formulas do you like? </FormattedResponse>
52:05	John Morgan	Well, I have one that I'm going to... that I'm looking to build right now, and it's called "Santa's Chocolate Factory." Imagine this is Santa's Chocolate Factory.
52:18	Shaan Puri	Nice.
52:19	John Morgan	Okay, and the thing in the middle—envision here. Here's where this idea came from. I'm out at Disney one day and I'm sitting at Ghirardelli's. Ghirardelli's is an ice cream and chocolate store. Right next door was a Christmas store at Disney Village. Christmas is, you know, a year-round business in certain places. So I thought, what could I build that would be phenomenal? I thought, well, Willy Wonka you have to pay IP for, but you don't have to pay IP for Santa Claus. So I said, what about Santa's Chocolate Factory? Santa's living there. This is Santa's house—there's a big chocolate factory, there's ice cream, the booths are made out of sleighs, and you have all the merchandise you're going to sell. You have Santa Claus in his workshop, pictures being taken, elves working there. My idea is to build this complex of Santa's Chocolate Factory where Santa is, and on the hour—every hour—the clock turns to midnight. The clock goes, "dung, dung, dung, dung," the lights go down, and all of a sudden the store comes alive: the train starts moving, the bears are moving—it's Christmas time. It's kind of a Bellagio moment where people come, it's snowing outside. So that's the next thing that I'm going to do.
54:01	Shaan Puri	"I love it. Have you seen Enchant? Enchant Christmas? Have you seen this business?"
54:05	John Morgan	Yep. But here—think about this. What I'm thinking about is, because the inside's going to be so phenomenal, I'm considering doing something that's never been done in the history of the world: charging money to come into a retail store. A dollar to come in. Now, I don't know if it'll work. If it doesn't work, I'll quit charging the dollar. But I think I can build something inside so spectacular that people will want to get in there to see the clock strike twelve. When the clock strikes twelve, all of a sudden everybody's up on the counters, like Johnny Rockets. They're all singing, "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." There's this five-minute interlude every hour, and I think people will pay to come in and see it. So that's my next thing that I'm working on right now.
54:59	Shaan Puri	Sam, isn't it crazy that he's basically like half Walt Disney? Yes.
55:03	Sam Parr	Shark.
55:03	John Morgan	Half lawyer, shark. You know better.
55:07	Shaan Puri	"Call Saul meets Jeff Bezos — it's like one of the wildest combinations."
55:12	Sam Parr	That's pretty amazing. I mean, you've been in the... it's kind of funny—there's a joke here: "You just became a lawyer to fund your carny ambitions."
55:20	John Morgan	Okay.
55:20	Sam Parr	And that's pretty badass, to be honest. Being a lawyer is cool, and I'm totally on board with helping the little guy. But there's something special about—particularly in a world of AI. This is a common theme that Sean and I have talked about. In a world of AI and increasing digitization, it's pretty cool to be out of the house and have screen-free experiences. So I actually find your attraction business almost, probably, more interesting than...
55:42	John Morgan	"Your huge law firm — that's what I told you. I'm... I'm, you know, my wife doesn't understand it when I tell her I'm... I'm more proud of my attraction business than the law business, just because it's so unlikely."
55:54	Sam Parr	And what do you think? So that business is 30—what do you think, do you own the whole thing?
55:59	John Morgan	Almost—I had some limited partners over time. I've bought a lot of them out, but yeah.
56:05	Sam Parr	"So, what's that worth?"
56:07	John Morgan	"8 × quarter — 1,000,000,000. Yeah."
56:11	Sam Parr	What are you doing with malls? Are you doing something interesting with malls?
56:14	John Morgan	So what I'm doing with malls is this: everybody's tearing malls down because malls are no good. Up in Myrtle Beach I was going to—I'm building this new Downtown Flavortown with Guy Fieri. There was a mall that was just on its last legs. There's an outparcel that has a Bass Pro that kicks ass, so that's golden. But what I really wanted out of the mall was the JCPenney location. The location's fantastic. The mall's just no good. I wanted the JCPenney location to build Downtown Flavortown, but then I got stuck with the mall. I bought the mall. I bought it all for an incredibly low price. So now the question's going to be: do you level them all or what do you do? What I've decided to do is something that's never really been done. For your viewers—you guys will know the answer to this—are you all familiar with the concept of first-principles thinking? Okay. Yeah. Elon has popularized this term and Aristotle taught Elon the term. So you take these assumptions and you deconstruct them. Right now the assumption is: if you buy a mall you tear it down because there's nothing you can do with it. So I've decided—because I do a lot of first-principles thinking in my businesses—what if I take this older mall and, with new technology and LEDs and illusions and all that, I don't tear it down? I just repurpose it. I make it a gallery. I make the whole mall illusions, like when you're at the Venetian and you see those scenes when you're on the water. There are so many things to do with LEDs. So I'm going to take this mall and repurpose it and call it The Gallery. The mall is going to be a museum. You're going to go to the mall just like you're going to go to "Santa's [unclear phrase] the factory"—you're going to go just to see the inside of the mall. You're going to go to see all this and that. I'm going to have a zip line from one end to another. I'll have my ropes courses in the middle. I've got so many cool things. When you go to this mall—most malls are now just torn down; that's just what you do—I'm going to take Elon's first-principles thinking and I'm not going to tear the mall down. I'm going to make the mall the attraction.
59:16	Sam Parr	You're fascinating. What would your wife, your children, and some of your close coworkers say it's like working with you?
59:24	John Morgan	Well, I think they would say that I have strong feelings. If I feel something is important—I don't want to say "my way or the highway," because I do a lot with consensus—but once I form that consensus, then I execute. I'll spend a lot of time going around the horn, but once I figure out what it's going to be, I execute. I would say procrastination may be what they would call it: I might put things off a little bit, but I don't see it that way. I feel like I'm still thinking about it even while I'm on the mall; I'm still planning what I'm going to put in it. For example, over the weekend I was looking at buildings that have painted illusions on them. You pull up to a building and it looks like something—but it's not; it's an illusion. So this weekend I was looking at all those different things. It's not really procrastination in my mind—it's just thinking, planning. Yeah, so when
01:00:34	Shaan Puri	You seem like you probably meet or talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. If I said to you, "Man, so many entrepreneurs just don't get it," what is it that they don't get that you do?
01:00:49	John Morgan	Well, first of all, I have a game that I play when I drive down roads. I'll see a new business coming in, and the game is: is it going to make it or not? I'll see an old Burger King being turned into, you know, some health food store, and you look over and think, "Is that going to make it or not?" Usually, if they're repurposing an old Burger King, they're probably not going to make it. I think the mistake they make is they want to do it so badly that they try to put a round peg in a square hole—it just doesn't work. They want to do it so badly that they forget location, location, location, location.
01:01:36	Sam Parr	"So, would you summarize that as just planning in advance? Or, basically, if you nail one thing, does everything else get taken care of?"
01:01:45	John Morgan	Yeah. I also believe "bullets before bombs." You gotta really test things a little bit. A lot of people try to build two at once or three at once. You gotta build that first one—the first pilot—and really get it down. That's how I do the law firms. Before I really go big in a city, I come in, spend some money on ads, and hire a few lawyers—the bullets. Then, when I feel it's catching on, I bring the bombs.
01:02:16	Shaan Puri	When other people try to compete with you... I was in Vegas, and in Vegas every single billboard is a personal injury lawyer. It's insane. I don't know why that is in Vegas, but there was a lot of competition. When I think about what you did, my shortcut answer to "Why did you win? Why did you become the largest law firm while everybody else is playing for second place?" is: you were early. You were first—not necessarily the first mover, but very early. Once you figured out the secret—business is about exploiting secrets—you figured something out before everybody else, before it became consensus. You realized you could advertise effectively and basically pour money into ads to get people and cases out of it. You were way more aggressive with that. Even if other people were advertising, they weren't as aggressive—either in putting money and effort into the creative or in reinvesting capital to build the national brand. So I guess that's what I would say is the thing. Am I right, or am I missing something important about why you won and everybody else didn't?
01:03:29	John Morgan	Okay, you're missing a very big piece. One of you mentioned fishing, and I have a saying in my business: first you gotta fish, first and fish fast. There are two sides to my business. There's catching fish — to catch fish you have to fish first and fish fast — and then there's cooking fish. The value where my competition gets beat by me is simple: most of them — 95% of them — are terrible lawyers. They couldn't try cases even if they wanted to, so they have to take the last best offer. You'll see people bragging, "Hey, we settled this case for $1,000,000." Yeah, well the case was worth $10,000,000, but the problem for them is they couldn't do it. They didn't know how. When I analyzed where my money comes from, I realized 20% of my cases generate 80% of my revenue. But here's where the money really comes: it comes the Friday before trial. They've said "no, no, no, no, no" — and now it's the Friday before trial and a lot of times they say, "Okay, here it is." The next time the money comes is right after jury selection. We pick a jury, they don't like that jury, and they pay us then. The third time is during the trial — they might say, "Here's the money." And the fourth time is the verdict. I get gigantic verdicts. Where they're talking about $500,000, I'm getting much larger. I got a verdict in San Francisco against Google a couple of weeks ago for $500,000,000. I'm not hunting cockroaches — I'm hunting big game. I'm not happy just to get a little bit; I want exactly what it's worth. Another differentiator is results and reputation. There's also a concept in my law called "bad faith." If there's a million dollars in coverage and they don't pay it, they're in bad faith. Perhaps when they come to offer me the million, it's too late. Most lawyers, because they need the money, take the million. I say, "Fuck you." I go get the verdict. I go get the verdict for $10,000,000. I had one this year — a representative, a state senator. They were offering us nothing. They finally offered us a million the day of trial in a death case. I said, "Fuck you," and we got $100,000,000. So where the disconnect is: they're not real lawyers. What have I done? I've built a stable of "racehorses" that get big verdicts. I have people who do that exclusively. They go around the country — parachute in from place to place. I call it the Walter Payton rule. When Walter Payton played for the Bears, he got the ball 50 times a game. When it was fourth-and-goal, he always got it. I've got my Walter Paytons who I parachute in, and they get these big verdicts. My differentiator versus my competition is that most of them are marketing people who take the last best offer. Their margins are terrible. In my business, my margins are about 35%, but on the cases I refer out — to the Google law firms and others — my margins on referrals are 85–90%. That referral business is getting bigger and bigger as my national footprint grows. So I have two sides of the business: the stuff I handle internally, and the cases I refer out. When I refer them out, it's not an Uber driver — it's Mario Andretti I'm referring these customers to.
01:08:08	Shaan Puri	I got goosebumps, John. I love that answer — that was incredible. That should be your next infomercial. That was incredible.
01:08:14	Sam Parr	John's a cowboy. I mean, you've got this cowboy energy, which we love. We have a joke—we call ourselves "Manifest Cowboys" because we like to dream up stuff and make it happen.
01:08:22	Shaan Puri	Because we're hoping other people start to call us that. We get to stop saying it ourselves — that'd be great.
01:08:26	Sam Parr	When you nickname yourself, it's not as cool. But I think you actually are the "Manifest Cowboy." </FormattedResponse>
01:08:30	Shaan Puri	"Law firms can't really be held by nonlawyers, right? So do you own the— I guess it's a partnership— but do you own a huge chunk of this firm yourself? No— there's no investors, right?"
01:08:40	John Morgan	No — it's amazingly me and my family, but I do have a lot of partners in it because I believe that, when I look at this firm or all my businesses, I always envision that I'm building a circus. I want to build the greatest show on earth. When you see some of these circuses in shopping centers, you know, they've got an elephant with one tusk, a drunk clown, and a seal that's hot — it's a bullshit circus. The circus I'm building is the greatest show on earth. Why do people go to the circus? They go for two reasons. One: they want to see the lions and the tigers eat the man — that's why they go. And two: they want to see the Great Wallenda fall off to his death. That's why they're at the circus. It's the same reason they go to NASCAR — they're hoping that somebody is going to die. How do you not die? Well, with the animals you feed them and you love them. I've got a lot of partners who make a lot of money because they got a piece of this deal. The second way is you focus. You're up there on that high wire and you have to pay attention; you have to get from here to there. So in building this firm, I got three rules: love them, feed them, focus. Then you can build the greatest show on earth.
01:10:06	Sam Parr	"You're very successful. You've won so many times in life. Has there ever been a time when the business or the firm almost went under? You said you're a pretty risk-on person—have you almost had to pay the consequences because of that?"
01:10:21	John Morgan	I don't know about "pay the consequences," but look — I sent a guy up to Atlanta when I opened up Atlanta. I sent the wrong guy up there. By the time I got him out, we were $14,000,000 in the hole. It just kept... you know. He was a disaster. But, you know, now he's gone and my team — I mean, Atlanta pretty much prints money, so that was tough. I've had a couple of cities that didn't do as well as I hoped, like Memphis. So yeah, I've had some things not do well. I built a small amusement park called Magical Midway that I ended up selling and lost $1 million, but that doesn't bother me because nobody bets $1,000. I mean, if you bet $300, you're in the "Hall of Fame." All you gotta do is get on base one out of three times and you're in the Hall of Fame, like we talked about earlier. Warren Buffett has five big stocks — you take those stocks away, he's not Warren Buffett anymore, and he's the first person who tells you that. That's why I love him so much. That's why I have so much Berkshire Hathaway stock. He's my guy.
01:11:35	Sam Parr	> "You've been doing a lot of media. I saw you on this Jubilee thing, and I had known who you were before that and I was like, 'What the hell? Why would you want to do that?' > > You came off... you came off pretty good. You came off pretty good. You've done a really good job of judoing a bunch of these—gotcha—moments, so that's been pretty cool. > > What are you going to do? Are you going to try to run for office one day? I mean, what's going on? Why are you—why do you care about being... why do you care about being out there?"
01:11:59	John Morgan	Fish. I want fish. I want to catch fish. You know, I do these things called "john in sixties." But, look — I have had some success running for office. Look, I don't know about that, but in Florida, when my brother — the brother I told you about who got hurt — he needed marijuana desperately to help his situation. I ran a constitutional amendment twice in Florida to legalize medical marijuana. I spent tens of millions of dollars to pass it. And then later, when you make money, I believe we have an obligation — a civic obligation, a moral obligation — to give back. One of the things I believe the country is headed in the wrong direction on, and you're starting to hear about it, is affordability. It's all because people aren't paid enough money. That's the affordability problem. The minimum wage in America is $8 an hour. So what I did with my own money here in Florida was run a constitutional amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Everybody told me, "That's never gonna happen." Well, it did happen. I raised the minimum wage in Florida from $8 to $15 an hour. Because of those constitutional amendments, I became almost like a politician in this state. Everybody was like, "We want him to run for governor." When I would go to the White House, they would take me to the side and show me polling about my poll numbers. You think about it, but then you have to think about the job itself. I would have trouble with the job itself. I live in Maui five months out of the year, which I love. I'm 69, so I don't know. Really, what I'm doing in this day and time is just being out there. If somebody sees me and they are favorably disposed by the jubilee... I was just on this thing this weekend that printed called Business Insider.
01:14:19	Sam Parr	Yeah, that was a good interview. I saw that.</FormattedResponse>
01:14:20	John Morgan	So I just did that. My thought is—it's kind of back to that: why bother? Some people are going to see this and some people are not going to like me, but some people will. Look, you can become president if 51% of the people like you. You can get rich as hell if 51% of the people use you. I look at these things as new-age marketing, where people get to see me. With my ads, I look like I'm, you know, working at a funeral home with what I'm selling. By doing these things, they're like, "that guy actually has a personality; he's not a grave digger." But we want to make sure there's enough people watching before I'm going to do it.
01:15:13	Shaan Puri	"So, like and subscribe. Leave a comment. We gotta get you out of—well, this has been awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on. Shout out your new book."
01:15:22	John Morgan	It's being edited right now. It's called "Life Is Luck: The Paper Boy."
01:15:28	Sam Parr	You're the best. That's it. That's the pod.

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Billionaire Lawyer Reveals His Side Hustle Playbook.

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