Twisted Business: Lessons From Life In Rock And Roll With Steve Farber And John “Jay Jay” French

I've never had one.

Well, I'm a tri— I'm a trisexual. I try anything. So, right, it's understood.

Yeah, we're gonna cover a lot of ground today, and I— my guess is it's gonna be fairly random. That, that's my read of the— of where this may take us. But I do want to start by just saying I love this book. So I'm holding the book in my hand. I'll hold it up for those of you guys that are watching on YouTube, and the rest of you are going to just take down this name and get this book called Twisted Business. It is lessons from my life in rock and roll by JJ French and Steve Farber. And Steve Farber, you, you are a rock and roller, just not from Twisted Sister. So let me start with you, Steve. So this is a really interesting project. I think I shared with you guys, I've been reading the book in the hot tub. It's my favorite place to read a book. In part, I love it because it's the most relaxing spot. My mind is clear. I love doing 2 things at once. My habit of swimming is bootstrapped to my desire to read more. So I put those 2 things together, stack them, and there I have a pretty effective habit. But I also love it when other people in the hot tub, because this is a hot tub at a gym, I love it when people look at the 2 things. One, the act of reading in the hot tub seems to be like a circus trick for some reason, you know, and they're all amazed at that. And then they look at the title, they wonder, what is this crazy bald guy like reading in the hot tub? And so I feel like I'm promoting this book each and every day that way. But, uh, Steve, how— you know, you, you and JJ go back a ways, so just give us a little context for the project.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So JJ and I met at a business conference 10 years ago. I find that nowadays when I'm not really sure of a time frame, I just say 10 years. So even if it was last month and I'm not really sure, it was about 10 years ago.

That's

right. Steve, you know what they say on Long Island, you know, when they can't remember years? What? It's the standard answer, 12, 14. You know, I met 12, 14 years ago. I don't know, it's never 13, 15. It's never 17, 19. It's never 8 or 10.

You're in New York. Wait, hold on. You grew up in Manhattan and it's 2, 3. All right. It's not— well, it's—

well, it could be tree, but it's, it's, you know, it's like 12:14.

Go ahead. 12:14.

Anyway, it was 6 and a half to 15 years ago, uh, where we met at a business conference and we just, we just had an instant connection, became friends right out of the gate. He had this business background. You know, my thing is leadership. I spoke at the conference. He responded to my message. We sat down. together and had breakfast, and he told me the whole Twisted Sisters story. And I said to him 2 things pretty much at that, that very first time we met. You really need to tell your story on stage because it's an incredible story. And JJ is one of the most talented, natural storytellers I'd ever met. Story was amazing and hilarious, and he told it really well. So I said, you got to get up on stage and tell the story, and, you know, you gotta, you gotta write a book. So part one was getting up on stage, and I had an event coming up in— so I could tell you when this was. It was 2012, was the very first event that I ever put on. It was called the Extreme Leadership Summit here in San Diego. And I invited JJ to be a speaker at that event, which would've been his debut as a keynote speaker. He was playing to 70,000 to 100,000 people at these big festivals, and he was the stage banter guy. But he'd never actually done a keynote before and told his story. And he did, and he killed it, and it was great.

Like Steve says, you're in, you're in front of screaming, drunk, drugged-out, and genuinely excited fans more often than not. You're now in front of a business audience.

They're— In other words, I'm speaking at a Forbes conference. They got different drugs.

They're using different drugs in that environment. So do you have any nerves around getting up and giving a talk as opposed to—

Speaking, speaking in front of 1,000, 2,000, 10,000, 100,000 is the easiest thing in the world, and speaking in front of 40 people is the most terrifying

Right.

Thing in the world, really is. And it's exactly what Steve said. I mean, yes, I— we used to speak in front of very few people when the band was starting out because there were a few people at the bars, you know, in the early days, like 30, 40, 50 people. And the original lead singer was so inebriated he could not put 2 words together. So he was so drunk, I would have to walk up to the microphone and say, thank you for coming tonight to Dodd's. Please tip your bartenders. Tomorrow night we're going to be playing at Dodd's and the next song is by David Bowie. And that was kind of it. And that was it. And then the band took off playing a lot of people, but having to give a message speech, having to truly be responsible for a message in a concise form, all joking aside about the ability for me to be concise.

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The fact is, is that it was a terrifying concept, but I understood that learning how to do that correctly was going to be the key to succeed. So it wasn't like, I have no idea what you're talking about. What it was was, oh my God, I know what I would have to do. I don't know if I have the stomach for it. And I don't know how fast I can do it because there's guys out doing it a million times. Right? I watched Steve perform. The point was I watched Steve perform and I'm like, whoa, that is an amazing performance. I watched other people perform. And now I know performance shtick. And let's be honest, every speaker is a performer. And I'm watching Steve going, he's really good at his craft. How close can I get to that? And how long is it going to take me to get to that? And it was so daunting that I wasn't chomping at the bit for it. And so when he basically forced me to do this, I really lost sleep over it, which is stupid because I could fly and play in front of 50,000 people, walk up to the microphone, hey, Sweden Rock, How you doing? Because you know why? Because they're there to see me and they love me and I can't lose. I can't lose.

Well, Adam, Adam, you'll appreciate, you'll appreciate this because, you know, Adam is a, is a phenomenal speaker and trains speakers and, and all that. So I think you'll appreciate the method that we used.

Well, this is the point. So Steve had to come up with a method in order to indoctrinate me quickly.

I love it.

Yeah, yeah.

We got to hear about the anecdote.

Yeah. So what happened was, so I saw this as JJ's opportunity to launch his speaking career, not just by virtue of having his debut in front of 140 people or whatever it was, but to get good footage that he could use to promote himself and get other gigs. So we had a great production crew there, 3-camera shoot, beautiful stage, the whole thing. The idea was we would stick him on stage. So what I told him was, just prepare a little introduction, 15 minutes worth. And by this time, we had talked for hours and hours and hours. I'd heard a lot of his stories. And I thought, okay, what I'll do is I'll set a chair on the side of the stage, and from that chair, I'll interview you. So I won't be on camera. It'll just be you on camera. And we'll have clips of you responding to the questions, because I knew that all I had to do was press play and he would go. So I'd say, hey, John, tell us about the first couple of years of the band.

Just wind him up. That's it.

And it was great, and he killed it. It was fantastic.

To actually give you a little bit more background, I didn't know this was going to be the plan. So of course I didn't know this. So when Steve gave me the date do the speaking engagement, which was 6 months from the time we met and became friends and said, yeah, no, I'm gonna have you do this.

That's a lot of notice.

It was a lot of notice, and then notice enough for me to freak out and get— and come back and say to him, well, you do know that I get paid to play in Twisted Sister, so if we have a gig on that particular day, I'm not going to be able to do it because Twisted Sister has priority, which it does with all of our lives. You do know that. And Steve goes, yeah, well, 2 months later, my tour manager calls and says, guess what? You're headlining Sweden Rock on June 8th, 2012. That was the day, or that was the weekend. So I'm going to be in Sweden. So I called Steve. I said, well, sorry, pal. Thanks a lot. I appreciate this. Some other time. And he went, when does your festival season end? And I said, well, yeah, mid to late August. He goes, well, why don't I just move the whole conference to the end of August? And I went, what? He says, yeah, I'll just move the whole conference. I said, you're going to move the whole fucking conference so I can talk at it? You're going to move the whole— no, you're not. Yeah, yeah, why not? I'll do— we got plenty of that time. I went, son of a bitch. So he moves the date, and the whole summer my wife is like, have you written your speech? Sadistic.

Talk about a sadistic—

Have you written your speech? Have you written your speech? Have you written your speech? And every day as the summer's going by, I'm looking at the calendar I'm sweating more. And my wife was like— and you have to know my wife, she makes Type A look like Type B. I mean, if my wife was God, it wouldn't have taken 8 days to create the universe. It would've been done in 4 because she would've said, Uranus, over here now. Get your ass— Saturn, get over. So she's on my case. And finally I looked at her, I said, I will write the damn speech on the plane flight to San Diego. There's a 6-hour flight. And I brought a legal pad and a pencil, and I wrote everything that I thought I could say on this legal pad. And what Steve's not telling you is I get to the hotel, he goes, what do you got? He looks at this note, so just random, this story, that, blah, blah, blah. And he went, screw that. This is what we're going to do. And that's really the lifeline that he threw me after all of that. I mean, look, you need a mentor like Steve. All kidding aside, if he didn't care so much, if he did not care so much, this— all of this would never have happened.

Yeah.

Okay.

He set you up for success, not, not just because he put you up against your— the wall of your comfort zone, which clearly that did.

Steve did everything that he always says in his books about what you do for people who you mentor. He did everything that he said he was going to do. And that's the last time I compliment you.

You know what, I was just going to say, let's just change the angle of this whole show. I want it to be about that guy.

Yeah, let's talk about me.

Let's talk about Steve. All right.

So the other thing about me that I was going to say—

Yes.

But actually, I want to take it into, into how the book came out of all this, because over the years we had kind of danced around this idea of maybe doing the, the book together, but he had a couple of false starts with other co-authors, and it just became pretty clear that, that really the way this was going to get done would be for me to get involved in, in the project. And similar to the speaking thing, I knew this was important. It's a great story. I thought I could help. So we decided to work on it together. And this is a huge departure for me because this is J.J. French's story and it's written in his voice. So my job was to take his natural storytelling ability and his great story and just make it work on the page, which is a different— as we all know, it's a different kind of a dynamic from the spoken word. And then to try to help figure out what stays in and what doesn't, that whole thing. So it was a great project and it turned out great. And I'm just really happy to have been a part of it.

Steve, by the way, a friend of mine yesterday who was in my creative writing class in New York a couple of years ago, she got a copy of the book. She emailed me yesterday. She goes, oh my God, I'm reading your book. It sounds like you're sitting there talking to me. In my living room. That's, that's the art. Yeah, that really is the art. Because what Steve did was he sublimated his own style.

Wait a second, did you just say sublimated? Is that what you said?

Yes. He's got, he's got quite a vocabulary.

Yeah.

You were in Twisted Sister, weren't you?

Fucking right.

Fucking right.

Yeah, fucking right.

Do you used to say that when you were selling drugs? Did you say, hey, I want to sublimate you some, uh, some of this, uh—

Hey, look, in those days, in those days, We used to be able to rattle off tetrahydrocannabinol, lysergic acid, dithylamide. I mean, come on,

dude.

And multiple languages. And I was able to convert currencies in Europe while dealing on acid in 6 different currencies. So I was multitasking at a—

Multitasking.

Anyway, so the thing was, it's that Steve— the art of that book is that Steve retained my voice.

Yeah, well, I thought without knowing you, JJ, I felt like And but I do know Steve. I thought he was not in his own voice. I felt like it was coming out of your mouth. Now, hearing you speak, I feel like it's really true to that, of course, with fewer digressions. But other than that, you know, I think it's such an epic story. I don't know that digression would have helped or worked because it would be in volumes, truthfully.

Well, the thing with Steve— the thing with Steve was when we decided to do the book, my self— right, my joke in my head is If I'm writing the book, it's the 18th volume history of the Jews.

There you go.

Which is a completely unrealistic way to write a book about your life. And Steve goes, okay, nah, nah, nah, no, no, not that. End there. Move on. You know, I needed this person to do it. I needed someone I could trust to do it. And yes, I had fits and starts. This thing started out actually 30 years ago with one of my cousins. I tried a first draft and it didn't go anywhere. And the thing about the speaking world, as you know, is one of the first things that a booker says is, where's your book? I mean, everybody has to have a book, you know? And then they go, well, so what are you going to speak about? Right? That's the big thing. What are you speaking about? Where's your book? I didn't have a book. And as far as my speaking, I could say I write for Inc. Magazine and there's 50 articles in Inc. and pick an article and I'll talk about it. But you know as well as I do, that's bullshit anyway, because a speaker speaks wherever the fuck the speaker really wants to speak about. And the booker is going to be hustled into booking the person. And the person's just going to go do what the fuck he wants to do and hopefully gets away with it. And Steve told me, years ago, he said, the only thing you need to understand as a speaker is that you have to make the guy that books you look like a superstar. If you can make that guy happy, then it really doesn't matter particularly how you do it. You just have to look good to that booker. Now look, this is real kind of hustling, dealing kind of shtick, but it's really true. I understand that shtick as much as anybody else. So I understand the value of telling the story to make the person who booked you Look good. That's the key. And nothing was more perfectly— there's no better example than this. I replaced Timothy Geithner, the former Secretary of the Treasury, at a speaking gig, which was maybe my 10th speaking. And I replaced him because, Steve, our friend Ian, who you met, knew this guy who was the head of the Small Business Investors Alliance. And he says to my friend, we just lost Timothy Geithner. I need a speaker. And my friend goes, well, why don't you hire JJ French? And the guy goes, who is JJ French? He goes, twist this. He goes, why am Why am I hiring a guitar player, drug, alcohol? He goes, why would you even suggest it? And he says, well, I think he could pull it off. And the guy goes, well, how well do you know him? He goes, I know him really well. And he says, well, I can't inflict 250 of the most buttoned-up bankers in the world to a heavy metal guitar player. So the guy calls me and he goes, I don't know. I'm a little worried. And I said, come to my house. And my wife was working for Forbes at the time. So she went to Forbes and pulled all these business books and we put them all over the house, all these Steve Forbes books. And we've put all this crap around the house. And when the guy came in, he felt better, but he couldn't come in because it was a snowstorm. So he calls me and he goes, I can't come in. And I said, look, here's the deal. I understand that you're concerned that I can't do this gig. I said, however, don't pay me until I finish. If I don't get a standing ovation, you don't pay me. But if I get one, you stand on the side of the stage with the check and just hand it to me. That way, if I suck, at least you can say, well, it didn't cost us anything. He was an asshole, but we got him for free. And that way you win. And he goes, okay, I'll do it. So I show up 2 hours early to hear the other speakers. And they're some of the worst fucking speakers I ever heard. I mean, you literally wanted to slit your wrist as they were talking about potato futures in Kansas. And I mean, it was like the bankers were just about to commit suicide. If you had had 250 ropes, there would've been 250 nooses either to the speakers or to the people sitting in the seats. They hated every second of it! And I, as a performer, I'm sitting in the back going, okay, I'm going to just fuck this up! And I walk up to the front of the podium and I said, ladies and gentlemen, how many of you guys have high school graduates? How many of you college graduates? How many business degrees? Everyone's got business degrees. I said, well, you're going to listen to a guy who is a high school dropout, former drug dealer, former drug addict, heavy metal guitar player. Boy, did you lose out on all the fun! And then I said, I promise you this. No PowerPoint. At which point they all went crazy, like, oh, because they've been watching PowerPoints for 3 hours. And I said, I have a limited amount of time and I want to tell you some great stories. So I'm going to let you vote on which story you want. I can tell you a Led Zeppelin story or a Johnny Cash story. Which one do you want to hear? They voted for Led Zeppelin. At the time when I finished the Led Zeppelin story, I got a standing ovation, which had absolutely nothing to do with the business conference. You understand? This had zero to do With any business lessons, anything. I got a standing ovation. I looked at the guy, handed me the check. I walked out and I heard people saying, that was the best speaker I ever heard in my life. So on top of everything else, what Steve really kind of taught me was the art of the communication device and how to kind of size it up.

So JJ, that story tells me you fulfilled the promise. You made the booker look good, as you said. you entertained and people were happy. And in the end, you don't argue with happiness. So the check was there. I'm curious when you were able to navigate, and I assume you have, the interesting integration of the entertainment and the insight. Because I think what in part I get out of this book that I enjoyed and I'm still appreciating as I'm really near the end now is the fact that it's both. It is wildly entertaining because you have one of the more colorful in its fucked-upness. It's just brilliant the way you stick the landings. And I'm a resilience guy. I've got a book coming out called Change Proof. We're going to talk about resilience or about how you develop change-proofness, made-up word. But you're that guy. You've been able to really land on your feet again and again and again and again. And I don't know if that's the through line of your message to business audiences that's also married to the shtick and the amazing entertainment value of your life, your story, and everything you've done. But I'm curious right now, what does it look like when you speak to a business audience today? Is it just pure entertainment or is it more than that?

Well, at the risk of giving you more linguistic acrobatics, I am in essence a broad-based conceptualist, always have been. I've always been able to see things macro and micro. And my story has been told so much at the expense of my wife and Steve. But my story's been told so much And I've learned how to tell my story so well that I know what entertains people and what doesn't entertain people because I've done it 1,000 times. The documentary We Are Twisted Fucking Sister was only made because the director of the documentary was interviewing me about another artist. And after the interview was over, I said, by the way, what do you know about Twisted Sister? And he goes, not much. He was in my living room. 3 hours later, he said, I'm going to do a documentary on Twisted Sister. And he spent the next 8 years doing a documentary because of the story. So I know the value of my story. I know how to be compelling and I know how to— not only do I know how to be compelling, but Steve will tell you, I know how to be compelling in the right exact time bite. If you tell me I got 15 minutes to be compelling, I'll do it in 15. If you tell me you got 30 minutes to do it, I'll do it in 30. If you tell me I got an hour to do it, I'll do an hour. I did a 2.5-hour one because the guy who booked me didn't realize he was supposed to put a time limit on and I was having such a good time, I just decided to Just see how far I could go. And he flew me down to this resort in Mexico. This was at an insurance company, the American Title Insurance Company, whatever. And I did 2 hours and 15 minutes and nobody got up and walked out.

Without a sip of water or a breath?

Yeah, I did have a sip of water, but without a diaper. I did 2 hours and 15 minutes. And at the end of it, I walked up to the guy and said, by the way, not for nothing, I said, because you still got the deal you paid, but I did 2:15. And he said, well, how long are you supposed to do? I said, actually 45 with a 15-minute Q&A. I said, but having so much time hearing myself, I didn't really give a shit. I just went off. And he went, he goes, it felt like half an hour.

Hmm.

So there's an art, as you know, the whole thing comes down to an art. So it's enough to write a book and tell a compelling story and the other art— enough to have the content. How do you relate the content is really the issue. With Steve, I found the perfect conduit to be able to push the content because you're right, it's a huge story. It's an expansive story. It covers the '60s and everything the '60s was, and it covered the '70s, and it covered the '80s, and it covered the '90s, and it covers now. I mean, it's really, it's expansive.

Steve, so structurally in the book, I imagine this is in part where you brought your own genius, having authored wonderful books like The Radical Leap and The Radical Edge and Greater Than Yourself, et cetera. I think your latest book is Love Is Just Damn Good Business. So it's not— let's say it's not your first attempt at creating a book. How did you wrap your arms around the volume, let's call it, of stories that you had to choose from? And then how'd you select— you and JJ select a through line for this book that was intended to educate business readers as well?

Yeah, it was really a challenge because there are lots of ways to go with this. this, right? We didn't want it to be just a memoir. We wanted it to also be a business book because one of the things that makes JJ unique is that he's a business guy. He's an entrepreneur.

Right.

And there were lessons that needed to be imparted. So we knew conceptually, not just a memoir, but also a business book, which led JJ to coin the term bizwar, part business book, part memoir. But that was pretty high level. So then what was it going to look like? At first we didn't know. I mean, did we organize it chronologically? Right. Because you do have that sweeping story through all the decades and the rock and roll story and the TWISTED story throughout it all. But then one day he started, I think it was from a walk, one of his daily walks through Central Park, he came back and said, I've got it. It's TWISTED. TWISTED is the acronym that spells out all of the elements of what we learned. So is it a little bit force-fit to fit TWISTED? Yeah, kind of, but it really works. So starting with trust and moving all the way through— or tenacity and moving all the way through discipline, it became clear that, okay, the first part of the book will give the backstory, and then the second part of the book will lay it out with the various elements of the TWISTED method and find the stories That illustrate those particular principles.

And it's tenacity, wisdom, inspiration, stability, trust, excellence, and discipline. And the stories don't stop. The, as you say, the beginning, which is more chronological and just sort of the scope of JJ's experience in life and elsewhere, but the stories keep going and they keep getting filtered through that, through each of those principles, which I thought was really incredibly well done. So you say it was forced in some spots. Can you think of a place where it just didn't feel as congruent as you wanted it to?

No, I don't think it was forced in any particular spots. What I'm saying is, is it a coincidence that all the principles that he learned happened to spell Twisted, right? It's not— that's what I mean. It was using that framework to say, okay, what are the elements that we can hang on each one of those letters. And are they true? Are they true and are they accurate? And the answer is yes, they are. So we could have worked it into another acronym, I'm sure. I mean, anybody that's ever— I mean, I'm an acronym guy. Love, Energy, Audacity, and Proof is LEAP. I mean, is it— was it just like, oh, look, these are the principles and they just happen to spell— no, it was— it's always engineered to some degree.

Right.

But then it has to hold up. Because it has to be true, because people reading the book have a good bullshit meter. And none of the elements are manipulated or manufactured. They're all accurate reflections of the principles and the lessons that he and the band learned along the way.

Also, the more speaking engagements I did, the more I could test out certain concepts.

Right.

And also, writing for ink was important. Because I did this with Inc. Without knowing it, my articles related to certain episodes in my life. And then I would write a story because when I got hired by Inc., Inc. was known for its listicles. And I'm not a listicle guy. And I said, I don't want to do a listicle. In fact, I want to do my first article called The 8 Reasons Why I'm Never Going to Write Listicles, because I don't like them. It's like the 7 reasons why you shake the hands of a CEO from the left side. I mean, it's just not me. And I told that to the editor. I said, if you're hiring me because you want the 7 reasons why, the 12 reasons why, I'm not that guy. I'm going to give a completely different perspective. And then they said, well, what kind of perspective? And I said, I'm going to start writing. And I did. So I had 50 articles in Inc., which in a way was the template. In a way, those articles forced me to conceive of these things so that when I was doing my speaking engagements and someone said to me, what are you going to speak? I literally did say, okay, go to the Inc. glossary, look at the articles and say, do you want me to talk about tenacity? Do you want me to talk about this? Do you want me to talk about that? And they go, yeah. And of course, then I would go off on a tangent, but it allowed me to go off. And what Steve said about that day that I was walking in the park, that day, that's interesting because Steve and I were probably into year 3 of the book at this point. And it was fits and starts and fits and starts and fits and starts. First, we had to get a publisher. We got Rosetta, but it's like, how are we doing this? And I felt like You remember the movie Chinatown at the end where my sister and my mother and my sister and my mother is slapping her in the face? And I'm going, what kind of book is it? It's a memoir. It's a business book. It's a memoir and a business book. And all my friends would go, what is it? I hate this shit. Well, you're writing a book. Oh, that's right. What kind of book is it? Well, what do you mean what kind of book is it? You just asked if I'm writing a book. Yeah. Well, what kind of book is it? I don't know. It's a memoir. Well, I don't know. It's a business book. I don't know. It's a memoir. I don't know. It's a business book. So that drove me crazy as to where the focus was going. And then the art of making All of it expends— here's what I thought. I hate PowerPoint. I like simplicity. I'm a dumb heavy metal musician. I like it simple. It's fucking twisted. It's easy to remember. You don't have to take a pen at a business conference and write tenacity, wisdom. You go, oh, it's the Twisted Method. I own the name Twisted Sister. There's a value to that. You know, the name Twisted is valuable in my brain. I wanted to be able to keep the logo. I wanted to be able to keep part of the trademark. I always wanted to keep people bringing them back to the core of who I am, which is Twisted Sister. So Twisted Business is perfect. Steve came up with Twisted Business. I mean, that was his lightning bolt. Like, of course you're going to call it Twisted Business. Why wouldn't you call it Twisted Business? I mean, that was the lightning bolt of the title. You know, we have an album called Twisted Christmas. That was my lightning bolt. You know, we're a bunch of Jews who did a Christmas record. I said, why not? Jews make the best Christmas music anyway. I mean, you know, originally the line chestnuts roasting on an open fire was latkes floating in a sea of oil, but I don't think that Mel Tormé thought that that was going to be a line that would be universally loved. So the bottom line is, is that we wanted to maintain— here's what we did, Steve. We covered the bases. We kept the name Twisted. We did Twisted Business. We kept the logo. We kept the creativity. And you know what? Nobody has said it's a false narrative. Nobody has said, oh, that's a cute concept, Twisted, but it's bullshit. It's not bullshit because every one of those letters is meaningful. Could you find a meaningful story with every letter? Yeah, you could. But I didn't have to because Twisted was enough to tell the story. And as people have commented so nicely, at 240 pages, it's a great read.

There'll be people that, that'll read this book, and maybe even because they've listened to this interview, they're already on Amazon dialing up and ordering their copy. 'Cause everybody has the dial-up internet stuff. Don't you still, Steve? Right? Yeah, exactly. Yep. I'm still ordering through AOL. So they'll do that. And then there are others that they want to get a little primer of it right now. I'd love it if we could demonstrate what it's like to tell the breadth of a story in just a couple of minutes. I'm going to put you to this challenge, JJ. And I think the chronology is pretty good in my head. If you stumble, I'm going to jump in. Right. But I want, I want you to take us through this roller coaster. That brings us to the point where you get reunited. Let's go there, where you get reunited with your band, with the last—

The opening line, the opening statement of the book is, I was turned down more times than a bedsheet in a whorehouse and come back more times than Freddy Krueger.

Yeah.

And

really, you said that to your brother, right? That's—

and I said to my— you know, I said, so let's talk about what entrepreneurs do. I mean, let's say the bottom line is, what is an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur— you come, you become an entrepreneur for one of two reasons. Either You either in your brain have discovered something the world has never seen before and you're willing to risk everything that you own to show it to the world, or you improved on something that's existing and you're willing to bet everything in the world. Those are it. Those are the 2 choices. Okay? For every entrepreneur, which one is it? Did you invent something no one ever saw or do you improve something that needs improvement? In my case, there was 1,000 rock bands before Twisted Sister. I just wanted a better version of it. That's all. There was the New York Dolls. They sucked. I thought they looked good. I could do a better version of the doll. So I fit perfectly into that. I can improve an existing model. Here's the thing. When I joined Twisted Sister at the age of 20, I was a guitar player. And that's all I was, a former drug dealer, former drug addict, former high school revolutionary who decided to leave all of that behind. You know, like the good news for my mom was I no longer am doing drugs. The bad news is, but I've decided to join a transvestite rock band. Like, that's really— That was, that was 1972. That was the good news, bad news conversation with my mom. Mom, good news.

Good news.

I'm out of the drug business. I'm out, but I'm

out.

I'm gonna be dressing like a woman. And then I don't know if she thought, well, maybe you should go back to the drug— I don't know. But, um, that was an important changeover. So I did not join the band to know any of this shit. I joined the band to be a guitar player and become a rock star. I was forced to become a musician because I was a business-oriented guy, and as the crap started building up over years, I started to have to adapt to survive.

Wow, the pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. But the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5 business leaders across the globe have taken, and all you have to do to get your own free Resilient Leader Assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Yep.

Because I'm a hustler. So you adapt to survive or you die. And so in the book—

So part of your definition of— just, we're developing a definition— your definition of resilience, adaptability being the first one we're gonna—

Well, it's, you know, here's bottom line. Take each letter. Without tenacity, you got nothing. I don't care what you've got. If you're not tenacious as a human being, you will never succeed. So that's the T for tenacity. And it doesn't matter if it's a shoe company, it doesn't matter If it's ice skating, it doesn't matter anything. Tenacity is the whole goddamn ballgame. That's really all it comes down to because you know what? When you see a gold medal skier, that gold medal skier is gold medal skier because that gold medal skier is up at 4 o'clock in the morning doing this for 12 goddamn hours every day of his life for 10 years. You're not doing it because you're a fat fuck and you want to sit on your couch, but that dude is doing it and he's going to get the gold medal. You want to be the first chair as a violin player at Carnegie Hall? You're up at 4 o'clock in the morning, you're playing violin for 12 hours a day for 15 years. That's tenacity. You don't want to do that? You're not going to be the first chair. It's as simple as that. You want to win? Tenacity. So that's T for tenacity. Wisdom. That's the W. That's being smart enough to understand that as the shit comes down, how do you adapt to what you need to do to survive? And that is wisdom. And by the way, I didn't know I had any wisdom. And this is true. I did not know I had wisdom until a conversation I had with my father, which I illustrated in the book. On the day of my mother's death, I looked at my dad and I said, "We don't have a relationship. We have no future." And I had to make a decision right there at the age of 22. Do I save my relationship with my father, or do I jettison it and we have no relationship? And I remember it because I live in the same apartment that I'm talking to you right now. So this conversation took place ten feet away from me. I looked at my dad and I said, "Here's the deal: I will agree to forget all the crap that you made me go through as a kid, that you whipped me with a belt, that you blah blah blah blah." I said that if you're willing to forget that I dropped out of school, became a drug dealer, drug addict, and all the other shit. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And we shake hands and we start from scratch today. Today, leave all that stuff in the past. We can have a relationship because my father's not the kind of guy that's going to go to therapy. He's old world. That ain't going to happen. We shook hands on it. And you know what? We had a great 10 years.

Yeah.

Great 10 years. Never talked about the past.

Never revisited that again. Yeah.

No, because it wasn't going to work in his life. And so that wisdom carries itself through business and carry, you know, being smart enough to understand.

Just for one second, because that, that's really important. There's so many people walking around with things that they carry from the past. So not to belabor the point, but I think it's worth pausing there for a second. What's the wisdom there?

I'm transactional. And if you want to survive, you need to be transactional, which means you deal with the shit you're dealing with today and you move on to the next one. It doesn't mean you don't carry certain baggage with you. Look, we're all human beings and we carry it. But at what point are you going to let it bog you down and prevent you from moving forward? Twisted was thrown so many roadblocks. You know, I talk about this book as saying I turn roadblocks into pathways.

13 iterations of the band. Did I get that right?

The 11th version is the one that made it.

11th version is the one that made it.

The one that made it. And as all of these versions were happening and all the crap that came through it was happening, which we illustrate— I'm so proud of this book because this book actually gives you tools. It says, this is what I saw, this is what my response was, this is how I adapted to that response, and this was the end result of that response. Good and bad. I take you through the whole thing. So that's really what it's about. It's about being smart enough to understand your limitations. And by the way, I know what I know and I know what I don't know. And I always ask people when I don't know. To be so arrogant that you think you have every answer is just your own stupidity. I just knew I didn't know a lot of shit. And I also was not— however, I didn't have fear. I always thought I was going to get my ass kicked anyway. And I said, you know what? If I get my ass kicked, I'll get it kicked once and it'll never be kicked that same way again. But I'll learn from that. And I believe all survivors do that. The band structure, the structure of the band, the band's ability, the S for stability in the Twisted Method is an important piece because having a stable company is important. And to have a stable company, I said to the guys in the band, how much money do you all need to earn on a weekly basis so all I have to do is worry about you being in this band and not having to get another gig? I need stability. And we all came up with a number that we could reach. And you know what? That was the perfect business plan.

Yeah.

Because once we knew how much everyone— once we agreed on a figure, as long as I could deliver that figure, I had a stable organization. And what's my quote from Duke Ellington? I have a quote from Duke Ellington which, when I found the book and I found the quote, I almost fell on the floor. Duke Ellington says, if you want to keep a band together, you need a gimmick. My gimmick was to pay the musicians. I swear to God, that's from what, 1930?

Genius.

Genius. What a concept.

And the stability of not tolerating alcohol use and drug use while you guys were in the process of creating some successful version of this thing anyway. That's also quite counterintuitive, right?

If you think a company is like a plane that flies through the air, you know, and you try to be as smooth as possible, and then you hit some turbulence, you know, and everybody hits turbulence, and turbulence can take— this is where we get into the weeds a little bit, and this is where I think my experience really comes through. Turbulence is expected. So if you look at a company and you go, okay, what kind of turbulence do we have? Well, we got challenges turbulence, we got crisis turbulence, and then you have catastrophic turbulence. And you try to make sure you never reach catastrophic turbulence. So you try to keep it into the challenge mode. You try to take it out of the crisis mode because you never want to see it in the catastrophic mode. Nobody expects a heavy metal musician to talk that way. Nobody thinks that we think along those terms. The other problem is, is that when you're dealing with these kinds of chaos, these catastrophes, these challenges, it's how you view these oncoming headwinds. So I learned a long time ago, there's 2 ways you view chaos, and that is proactively and reactively. And it's like the way a football game goes. Why is it that the offense has always got a second more than the defense? The offense knows what it's doing. The defense has to react to it. How are you going to react as a company? You're going to be offensive or you're going to be defensive? Well, it's always better to be offensive and not So how do you do that? You have to have wisdom because you have to do what Keith Richards said is the difference between him and Mick Jagger. And Keith Richards' statement about the difference in him and Mick Jagger is beautiful. And Keith Richards said, the difference between me and Mick Jagger is Mick Jagger wakes up every morning, he goes, what am I doing today, 10 days from now, 10 weeks from now, 10 years from now, 10 months? He goes, I get up in the morning and go, I got up this morning. Well, that's fine. Every band needs that, but you need that person. Yeah. You can see.

So fill in inspiration right now. I think it's a good place to stick that right in there.

So without inspiration, what do you got? I mean, inspiration is the fuel that feeds you when you got no money. You know, we all start with nothing except the belief that we can do it. That's really it. So whether you're a 5-year-old girl who goes to a Broadway show and sees someone doing Annie on stage, you're going, Mommy, Mommy, I want to do that. I want to do that. All of a sudden you're filled with this fire. I got to do that. Well, all successful entrepreneurs had a fire built into them, which is why every book about an entrepreneur is a biz war. How do you write a book about your success if you don't write a book about what made you successful, which is the memoir part of a book? This is what does it. So in my case, I was fueled. My inspiration was this record, which I described, hearing this record on the radio when I was 10, which made me obsessed with AM pop radio, seeing the Beatles the next year. That was the Saturn V rocket of my life. That got me off the planet Earth. And the Bowie part in '72 was the second stage rocket, which took me into the atmosphere. Without inspiration, you got to— so you need tenacity. Without that, you got nothing. Without inspiration, you have no fuel. And by the way, inspiration, like I said, is the fuel that feeds you while you have no money, because eventually you have to convert this passion and this love into financial success. Otherwise, you're out of a job. And I knew that.

I'm going to use the last 3 letters— this is fun— to challenge you. JJ, to do a TED Talk, to get on a TEDx stage or a TED stage and deliver a talk. And, and the last 3 letters are TED. So just fun to put it out there, man. So trust, excellence, discipline. Lay it on us.

Okay. Well, if you don't have trust from your partners, you also have nothing. Because if they're looking at you for taking them down a pathway and you're willing to roll all the dice in that pathway, then they better trust you. And they trust you because of your actions. So if you don't have trust, you also have nothing. All of these things, if you don't have it, you really have nothing. So you need trust from your partners.

You know what I loved in the book? I loved in the book where you You know, you and Dee, obviously, you know, anybody that knows the history of, of the band may know that you guys had a, had a falling out and didn't end up great, but now are great and all that. But you still had trust in each other. You trusted him. I love this part in the book where you say, he was the guy to write these songs. He was the one to think about how to deliver them. And I trusted him to do that. And he trusted me to manage the business, to manage the brand. That's a big deal. It's a really big deal in the success of, of the band. Yeah.

Yeah. And not only is that important, the word trust internally, but all the people you do business with have to trust you. They have to trust that you're going to deliver the products. You have to trust you that like if your product has to be due on September 30th, it's going to be due on September 30th. They have to trust that you're going to show up at a venue. Think about this. How many bands can play in front of 100,000 people on the planet Earth? Not that many. Not that many artists can be trusted by the 100,000 people. It's a very small list. We're one of those people. We're one of those lists of bands, very tiny list. Where a promoter goes, my entire festival is going to rely on you going out there.

They're not going to shit the bed. These guys are going to get out there.

And if you suck, my festival goes down because people are going to say you suck and we suck for having you. Can you trust this band to be great? So yes, that's what trust is about. It's not just internal, it's that everybody that deals with you can trust that what you're going to deliver is what you're going to.

Did you guys really practice? I mean, a lot? Did you put a lot of practice time in? I don't remember that.

So obviously the 10,000-hour factor that comes up plenty of times because I'm so anal, I went back to my 10 years of before the record deal. I added up all the effective working hours of all the effective working days and non-working days in that 10-year period of time. In that 10-year period of time, I added up all the hours of performance or rehearsal, came out to 9,800 hours of performance and rehearsal before we got our record deal. So you make yourself bulletproof because you do it over and over and over and over and over again. And that's how you become great because you just wind up doing it, which then takes us into the E for excellence and the D for discipline, which is you only become excellent by discipline. You only become excellent by doing it over again. The thing that gets me annoyed is this whole bullshit cliché about insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, that's not true when it comes to the arts. When it comes to the arts, doing it over and over again makes you better, even if you don't realize you're getting better. You do it over because your reaction in your brain starts to change. The chemicals start to change. The synapses in your brain start to connect. And all of a sudden, things happen. They explode when you least expect them to. This is the beauty of repetition. And this, I say, is the boredom of excellence. Right. Because if you were to ask the greatest of the greatest why they were great, they would say, because I did it thousands and thousands and thousands. You know what? Young bands come to me. They go, hey, man, see my band. I go, how long you going to be together? 2 years. How many shows you played? Oh, we played a lot. We played 50 shows. I said, oh, you've done 50 shows in 2 years? Wow. Like, how long are the shows? Oh, 45 minutes. I said, you've done 50 45-minute sets? That's impressive. Well, when you get to 500, call me and I'll come and see your band. 500? It'll never happen. I said, well, there's a good chance I ain't going to see your band because you're going to suck until you hit at least 500 and I got no time to waste while you suck. So when you hit 500, let me know. So to illustrate, I took a calculator. I took down the number of weeks from the first day we played in March to the first break we took in March '73 to Labor Day Sunday, 1975. That was 12, 22, 32 months times, times 4 times 52 times 5.5, 4.5 shows a night. Twisted Sister played in the first 3 years of his existence. 3,550 45-minute sets. So when a kid tells me in the last 2 years he's done 50 and I've done 3,550, fuck you. Like, which is what kills me about The Voice and American Idol, because the kid wins the award, gets a record deal, and says, I'd like to thank my fans for sticking with me for 15 weeks. And I want to fall off the chair in hysterics. It's like, what the fuck? That's not how you do it. I'm sorry, that's not how you do it.

The last thing I want to, I want to ask you and Steve—

Did that answer your question?

Is about change. No, you, you, you, you led us through it, and I feel like you put— you teased out a nugget for each one of those things. So thank you for doing that. Anybody that wants to get more of the meat— I mean, you gave us meat, so it's, uh, I appreciate it, but there's more meat in the book. That's, that's good.

So, Adam, I just want to just draw it back for a second and, and give the high level on this because People that are unfamiliar with Twisted Sister, I think it's really only the Twisted Sister fans that know the story of Twisted Sister. For people who have heard of Twisted Sister, like me, for example, when we first met, I mean, I was never a Twisted Sister fan growing up, but I always thought it was the greatest band name I'd ever heard. But I didn't know anything about the band. So most people, they know, you know, We're Not Gonna Take It and I Wanna Rock, and that defines Twisted Sister. So from a high level, what your listeners, I think, need to understand right now, so you know where all this is coming from, is the Twisted Sister story is one of near success and failure, near success and failure, near success and failure over and over again, then success, and then failure, and then massive failure.

Well, massive success, massive failure.

Massive success, massive failure, then a reunification and even more massive success. And they retired on that high. It's the roller coaster is just almost unimaginable. So when you read the book, you'll hear the details of, of all those ups and downs. But these principles that we've extracted from that come from a very simple process. Which is, what happened, JJ? What happened and what did you learn from it? What happened? What did you learn from it? And I think that's a principle that all of us should be asking of our own experience. The Twisted story is very dramatic. Our own stories are also very dramatic, at least to us. And we have a great opportunity, I think, all of us, to look back through the course of our lives, see where we are right now, and look at our own ups and downs and ask ourselves, what did we learn from it? And then if we have a give and take with each other where we're hearing each other's stories, learning each other's lessons, then we all grow together. And I think that is essentially what this book does. It extracts those lessons from this incredible story.

It's a call to action for everybody to write their own book on some level, right, JJ? You started this project how many years ago? Even before Steve?

Yeah, like 30, 35 years ago.

30, 35 years ago. So it's been a work in progress as you are, as your life is. And so did you, in completing the book with Steve in this collaboration, did it create a level of clarity about the life you've led? Because so many experiences after a while, I think people can be dizzied even up by what they have learned, as Steve is pointing out. What does it all mean? people go through those stages. And I think in the pandemic, where the level of anxiety and even depression has really been exacerbated, people question where they are, what they've learned, what value they've added. Did the book help to really solidify for you what your life has been committed to and what it's meant?

Yeah, it did. In fact, yesterday, and seriously, yesterday I was sitting around thinking, because I'm the face of a Prostate cancer research. I'm doing a lot of social media for prostate cancer awareness, research, fundraising this year because I had prostate cancer 3 and a half years ago. And I was featured last night on a Fans for the Cure podcast. And I'm all over social media for Zero Cancer. And I was thinking about this phrase that's used, he's battling cancer. He's battling this. He's battling. And I said to myself, when I was diagnosed with cancer, I didn't battle cancer. I said, fuck you. I said, I know exactly what I'm doing. And I dealt with it and I moved on. And I refuse to have that word battling because I'm very transactional, which is I'm confronted with this shit and here's what I'm doing about it. So what do we say in the book, Steve? I said, when you dealt with the trauma, you mourn it, then you reflect. Reflect. Yeah. You reflect, you retool, and you reapply. Thank you very much. So get bad news. It sucks. Then think about exactly what was going on. Like after the trauma, the first traumatic wave, Really think about what you're going to do, then plan a course of action, and then put that action— and then put that plan into action. And that's what I did with my prostate cancer. That's what I did with my daughter's eye disease. My daughter has a very rare eye disease. I had 2 heart operations because I had atrial fibrillation. And I wasn't going to take it. Seriously, without the pun involved of I'm not going to take it. But the fact is, it's like, find me a doctor, give me a plan, and let's get on with it. And the day there is no answer is the— I guess the day you get the terminal conversation, because everybody— it's like the Jewish blues song, Once everyone, you know, everybody gets bad news. Like, at some point you're not going to come back from it no matter what you try. But until then, you're going to try your best. And so what it illustrated for me, to answer your question, is it showed me that that's just the way I do it.

Yeah,

I just come back, I come back, I come back. You hit me and I— and that's why the left set's comment was— You're a cockroach.

Hold on a second. You don't take my line right here. You're, you're a cockroach, buddy. Now—

That's, that's exactly it.

This was before we started recording. So we weren't recording when we discussed that earlier.

So yeah, that was—

for me to call you cockroach, is that a compliment or is that a, you know—

In this particular case, you know, they say, you know, Keith, what's going to survive the nuclear war? Keith Richards and Cher and cockroaches. Those are the 3 things going to survive. And that's said in, in the most humbly respectful way, right? Um, you just keep coming back. You just keep coming back. You keep coming back. And what the book did was it illustrates that we keep coming back, which also means when people say to me it's twisted over, I can't give you an answer and go, it's never going to happen. I don't see it happening again. I will say this, the book could not have been written until this point in my life.

Hmm!

Because if the book was written 30 years ago, it really wouldn't have made any difference. If the book was written when I was a stereo salesman and that was all, that wouldn't have made much. If the book was written when Twisted started to reform and come back, that wouldn't have meant as much. What really meant as much was that the whole hill, the entire irony of the ridiculousness of my life, has been lived out to a point where now I can look and go, you know what? Damn, that's a life.

Right. There's enough landscape that you can— it's not over. It's not the final chapter by any means, but there's a certain perspective. I think Steve really hit it— for me, he hit the nail on the head with what's happened, to be able to look back and see what's happened in your life. And then what did you learn from it? It's difficult when you're in your 20s to apply to apply the learnings of things. You know, we're impatient, right? Among other things.

I'm also damn lucky. I am damn lucky. I'm damn lucky I didn't die as a hippie. I, I did so much crazy shit. I could have been arrested. I could have been murdered. I mean, I was almost murdered 6 times anyway. I had guns put to my head, knives put to my throat. I could have been murdered on a number of occasions. I could have had a drug record. I could have been arrested, put in prison. I mean, when I tell the stories, they are unbelievable to some people. They're all true, but they are kind of unbelievable. And sometimes I sit there and go, God, man, what That's a crazy ass— well,

I think it's some of those near misses in your early life really changed the way you looked at— and is it fair to say you became— I don't like the word conservative, but there are certain things that you just decided weren't worthy risks to take later in life, right? You became adamantly opposed to doing drugs. And,

uh, and I was busted for drugs after I stopped doing drugs and talked my way out of the drug bust because I was so pissed off I really was so angry that I was straight and I had drugs on me that were put in my bag by somebody else. And I got so angry that the cop was like, okay, he obviously doesn't do drugs and he's— without getting into the specifics of how I talked my way out or where it happened, because if I say where it happened, they'll never let me back in that country again. But let's just say that my force of nature, of my personality, my ability to talk my way in and out of stuff, is kind of legendary, which helps, by the way, because all managers, like anyone who operates at that level, a street person level, and I'm very grateful I'm a street guy, not an academic. My brother's an academic. I'm a street guy. I grew up in Manhattan on the street, dealing drugs on the street, hanging out on the street, buying guitars on 48th Street. My father was a jewelry salesman on 47th Street. That's the Damon Runyon. That's like, hey kid, get out of here. Get out of my face, kid. That is an incredible life to live, and I'm grateful for it. And I'm also grateful that I escaped the minefield of disaster.

Yeah. Are you glad that you didn't become a member of the band KISS?

I can't answer that question because who knows?

I'm only kidding.

No, no, no, it's a fair question. It's a fair question. I get asked that a lot lately.

Do you get asked that a lot?

Oh yeah, of course I do. They said, well, yeah. I said, well, a lot of guys didn't make it in KISS. I was one of many guitar players didn't make it. But then again, So here's— this is— I will say this, okay? If you look at these 4 bands as some of the biggest bands in 1973 that were created, which was KISS, AC/DC, Judas Priest, and Twisted Sister, all were formed in 1973. Now, if you asked any of us in 1973 how long we would last as a band, our stock answer would be 5 years, because that was the stock answer you gave. Oh, if I get 5 years, that'll be great. Maybe we would have said 10 years because the Beatles lasted 10, but it would have been 5 or 10 years. Right. Here we are 50 years later, okay? Now, I will grant you that AC/DC and KISS have sold more records than us. I don't know if Judas Priest has, but I'll— so I'll give you that. I will say this: you take a 10-year-old kid and you go, sing me a KISS song, just go, send me a KISS— I don't know one offhand. Sing me an AC/DC song, sing me a Judas Priest song. You say to that 10-year-old kid, we're not gonna take it, and the kid will sing the entire song. So we have established a worldwide international call to arms and action song that everybody loves, to the point where last week, a guy running for president of Honduras was using We're Not Going to Take It as his theme song. Someone sent me a video clip. A guy running for president of Spain had 30,000 people singing it in an auditorium for his campaign. When Brexit was going on, they were singing We're Not Going to Brexit in front of Big Ben. You had this guy in Australia running, which we sued him for rewriting the song. We're not going to cop it. Could I have imagined it? No. I am grateful for it. Now, the fact that Rachael Ray has decided to pay us a lot of money for making the dog food commercial this year, I have no problem. I've got no problem with that.

Well, this is, this is where, again, you, you're, as a business person, you, you saw that even emerging out of bankruptcy, that the value was going to be in the brand name. You kept it.

There's, there's the wisdom part of it.

You know, that, that

was, that

was

Maybe the greatest thing I ever did was that speech at that moment. Was probably the greatest talk I ever gave.

You got to read the book to find that out. I'm not going to give that one away. But to stand in open court and have that conversation with a federal judge, a big— and I used to spend part of my life was spent standing in court in front of judges, federal judges. That was a big deal, buddy. I, I was reading that with my mouth open.

That was the Hail Mary pass.

Yeah.

You know, I had nothing to lose. I lost— I had lost everything, you know. I'd been— I went from JJ French superstar to having 2— 1 guitar and 2 subway tokens. And so I had nothing left.

Yeah.

And I sat there, and if it wasn't for the fact that, as you point out, which you read in the book, that I saw something on TV in England 6 months earlier,

right,

and a light bulb went off, that conversation never would have happened, and that name Twisted Sister would have been owned by somebody else.

The way you You unpacked the twisted principles for us today. It was really meaningful, Steve and JJ. Thank you for doing that. And I don't think it ended up on the cutting room floor, but I haven't finished the book yet. So I got to find out whether this idea of what's happened, what's happened, what happens in our lives, and what have we learned from it. I think that's an element of this that is maybe just kind of encircling all the rest of it, JJ, because you've been consistent, I think, in learning. In learning from things in your life. And then, as you said, continuing to reapply, to be tenacious, to find the wisdom, the inspiration to create stability, trust, and commit to excellence and discipline. And it's just been— it was a blast to spend time with you now. It's been a wonderful ride, a real roller coaster, as Steve said, roller coaster, and just in reading the book. And it's a pleasure. So thanks for taking the time with us. Steve, this project was new for you. You feel great about it, I know. Yeah,

yeah, yeah, it was new in that— well, for one thing, if you look at the COVID it's by J.J. French. My name is very small, very small print, because this is his story and written in his voice. So yes, as we, as we said earlier, it was a departure for me. Never written a book Like this before. And honestly, this is not something that I would have done for just anybody or with anybody. You know, it was very— took a lot of time, took a lot of conversation, took a lot of, you know, the old saying, sitting down at the keyboard and staring at the screen until blood breaks out on your forehead. You know, that kind of a thing. I did it because I love JJ and wanted, wanted to help get his story out. So it's, uh— Like I said earlier, it was a great pleasure and an honor to be a part of it. And, and it's fun. I mean, this is, this is the fun part. We're having a great time telling the story.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to ChangeProof.com, and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience. And what a great lesson in business that is as well, because collaboration is so important that this work might have just sort of kicked around for however long if there wasn't this cooperative process.

Well, the other W for wisdom is that I knew what my limitations were even in the band. I never cared about— Ahmet Ertegun, I quote him in the book. Very few people I asked for advice from, and I asked him why he was so successful with Atlantic Records, being that the label started out as a jazz label, you know, and then wound up, you know, with Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and then, you know, goes to Led Zeppelin and cross-sells to Nash, and, you know, and now hip-hop. And he goes, success is easy if you don't mind who gets the credit. That's a crazy freaking statement to make. It is. You want to know something? I lived that statement. I actually lived that statement. It's easier if you don't mind who gets the credit. So when people say, well, these faces here, these faces here, I said, so what? If Deez Face wasn't there, where would I be? I'm sorry. I hired him because he did all those things that I could not do. And if I could do them, I wouldn't have hired him, but I can't. God created Bob Dylan so I could sing cover material. So obviously, I'm not the lead singer. So he is, and I'm not a songwriter. So I've never had a problem with him writing songs. In fact, I thank him every day. When I sent my daughter to college, I thanked him for her college fund. I mean, I really don't carry that with me. I don't. Wow. I gave him his— you know, I don't carry it. And with Steve, I couldn't have done it without Steve. You know, collaborative projects are really where to go. I don't say enough about my— all my band members. I want to take one second or one— Please, please. Half a minute out here, which is without the sacrifice of Eddie Ojeda, without the sacrifice of Mark Mendoza, without the sacrifice of AJ Pero, rest in peace, or all the other guys that were in the band, nothing would have happened,

right?

You know, nothing would have happened. But those guys— but Eddie and Mark and Dee kept their shit together going through all of the crap, and they just did it. They showed up every gig, they played every gig, they did every rehearsal. You know, it wasn't that Dee wrote the songs or I marketed it. They had to do it. But they showed up and they did it. You know, where do we have to go? What do we have to do? You gotta find those kinds of people to be partners, you know? And then you have to reward them correctly for being partners.

Yeah.

You know, that's why I split everything up with everybody because without them, there's no me. You know, I don't wanna sound like Mother Teresa here, but the truth is, is that it is a collaborative— success is more collaborative than it is by a lone journey. Although there may be some people who wanna claim the narcissistic view of it, being their sole thing, but I never did. So Steve was as important to make this happen as the other guys in the band were to— I love it— lead to the success in the band. And that's, that's just the truth.

That's just, to me, if there's a point that is the tip of the spear from my experience, is what you just said, that you moved your ego to the side. And that quote, success is easy if you don't mind who gets the credit.

That is, you don't mind who gets the credit.

Success is easier if you don't mind who gets the credit. Brilliant. Thanks for this conversation. And I, I gotta ask this question. So Steve and JJ, first of all, do you love your lives? I know it's kind of an odd question, but I want to just hear one moment from each of you about that. So Steve, do you love your life?

Is that a leading question? There's— there's— it might be. Yeah. So the— so yeah, the answer is yes. The question of why is a bigger question, but I'll leave it at yes.

Okay. You got a short answer to the why?

Yeah. I live a life that I've created and created with other people in pursuit of what I love to do. So almost every waking hour, I'm engaged in doing something that I love for people who benefit from that in some way. That gives me great joy.

Beautiful. Thank you, Steve. JJD, you love your life.

So long as my blood tests on my PSA continue to come back negative, I love every day of my life. My daughter, I love deeply, but she has the face of an angel and the mind of Chucky. That's always just been the way it is with daughters. My wife is insanely intelligent and beautiful and pushes me all the time. But I'll say this, one of the tricks I used back in the early days when we were broke and we would come back from a club at 4 o'clock in the morning and had very little money, and I was like 23 years old, I would read the old bits in the New York Times and I would read them And I'd see, you know, 80-year-old guy, blah, blah, blah, you know, has a house in Marchmont. And I thought to myself, Jesus, if you could go to that guy the day before he died and said, listen, would you give everything away to be 25 again?

Yeah.

He'd probably say, I'd give everything I could to be 25 again. So I used to say to myself, be grateful that you're 25. Yeah. And that's it. So now I can tell you, I'm grateful for everything I've accomplished. And there's really no other way to look at it other than I am extremely grateful. And I'm looking after a close friend of mine right now who may lose his leg to diabetes. And I hang out with him almost every day and I look at him He's not too far from my age. And I hate that phrase, it puts it in perspective, because it's such a clichéd phrase, you know? But sometimes you need to have perspective. You need to go, wow. You know, like this whole thing about Anthony— Tony Robbins. This one thing about self-help guys that drive me crazy is that they try to instill this thing that nothing is enough. That's bullshit. It really is bullshit. There comes a time where things have to be enough, where you sit there and you go, I'm really grateful for how things are. And I can't just be dissatisfied every day. It doesn't mean you don't want to get up and create and be, innovative, but just be grateful for what you've got.

Well, you just, as far as I'm concerned, you, you put the exclamation point on it, JJ. Gratitude's not in the acronym, but it's, it, uh, in the acronym TWISTED, but gratitude is one of the most important things. And it just feels good to be with, in this moment with the both of you. I feel really grateful and mostly appreciating the, the depth of the conversation and the fact that people will get to experience thinking about some of these things and, uh, and reading about them as well. So for now, I will just say ciao, and we will pick this up again soon.

Okay,

thank you. It's great. Thank you.

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