Mentors & Mentorship

Hello everyone, welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. What would it be like if you had mentors like Bruce Lee or one of the groundbreakers in the direct marketing industry? What are the things that you wish you could glean from having a mentor at that kind of a level? Today, Dan Kennedy brings on two successful business owners, each mentored by geniuses in their field. Marty Edelston, one of the groundbreakers in direct marketing, and Bruce Lee. Now, saying you have a mentor is one thing, but allowing yourself to be teachable, to be able to absorb all of the lessons that are being taught and to be able to treasure those beyond your time with them. What are the lessons that can be learned from being mentored by the greats? Let's listen to Dan Kennedy as he brings on Brian Kurtz and Dwight Woods.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

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His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Welcome to the Diamond Call. I have, uh, two terrific guests who we will get to in a moment, but I will remind you, uh, at the moment of who is on the call. Uh, Brian Kurtz from Boardroom Reports, who is being kind enough to call in while he is roaming about Europe, uh, and so he's calling in from Germany today, uh, and, uh, and Dwight Woods is our other guest on this side of the call this time. And we will be doing a fairly unusual call for Diamond.

We—

each of these individuals has a rather profound and important mentor-model relationship, each with a different person. And since we all are students, but many of us are also mentors. I think you will find their comments about all of this valuable. So now that all that is done, I want to talk with both Brian and Dwight about their key mentors and their lessons learned from them and relationships with them and really the whole process of having a business model or models, of having a life model and life models and how that has worked. For starters though, gentlemen, I'll ask you to do your own— Sing for Supper work and for those who don't know you well, most people know Dwight only as the annoying guy who beats them to the Q&A calls. So if each one of you will just sort of give your thumbnail intro, maybe not all the way back to birth but from whence you came and kind of what your business looks like now. Brian, why don't you go first?

So I'm honored to be on the call. I love everything that you do, Dan, and I think anybody who follows you as a mentor has been privileged. And so I consider one of those people as well. I've been doing direct marketing and direct response for 33 years. I like to say I started when I was 9 so people can do the math and not think I'm as old as I am. But now I'm really proud because my mentor who I'll talk about later, Marty Edelston, is someone who used to say getting old isn't so bad because you get really smart. And I've gotten pretty smart because I've hung around with great people. My claim to fame, a couple of claims to fame are just that I've been a great list guy. I kind of grew up in the list business, mailing list business. I love researching audiences and I think I understand direct marketing from the human behavior side and the list side as well as anybody I know. And I've mailed— I'm responsible for mailing, I would like to say, over a billion, probably 1.3 billion pieces of direct mail. I did not lick every stamp, thank goodness, and I'm proud of that fact because to put that many pieces in the mail profitably with a good return on investment and a good lifetime value, means that a lot of thought had to go into it and I had to have a lot of people working with me at my side all the time and also have great mentors. I've also done quite a bit on direct response television and infomercials and had some incredible successes there. We do quite a bit online as well with my company. This is all with my company Boardroom Incorporated, which is a publisher of newsletters and books, the largest of which is Bottom Line Personal. Which still, believe it or not, has 400,000 paid subscribers to something called a print— that's P-R-I-N-T— newsletter. And we also publish books, and I know, Dan, you love my story of my diabetes book, which just in a year and a half we sold 200,000 copies. That's hardcover books on paper— that's P-A-P-E-R— and we never were noticed by the New York Times bestseller list. Because I really didn't care because we sold 200,000 books at a huge profit and I didn't need to sell them on Amazon or Barnes Noble. Anyway, that's me in a nutshell.

I think quickly one of the points people ought not miss about your experience, and I know you and I agree about this completely, and you made the point about the billion pieces of mail is that online marketing, even that which is effective and that represents great opportunity, encourages sloppiness and sloth because it doesn't bear heavy costs or huge financial risk. And people like you who have predominantly built your business and spent your life dealing with media that requires somebody to write a check and usually to write a big check and often to take risks tends to be a lot more diligent and meticulous and work a lot harder at everything from list selection to to product, to offer, to copy, to understanding both the math and the psychology than folks who have sort of grown up doing it all online. So I think that that experience is richer and more valuable even if you take it and transfer its lessons to online marketing.

It's funny you say that, Dan. I did an article recently which I think I'm going to post to my list this week since I don't want to have to do a new article while I'm in Germany, which was titled How Paying Postage Made Me a Better Marketer. And it's 12 lessons of what that means, exactly what you just talked about. And I also like to say $1 per 1,000 marketing, which would be email, deserves $500 per 1,000 thinking, which would be the cost of— although I wish direct mail was still $500 a 1,000. It's getting costlier as I sit on this call.

That's right. All right, my friend Dwight.

Well, I am doubly honored to be on this phone call. I mean, I'm out of my league because I came into the marketing world 8 years ago. I've been in the martial arts world for over 40 years and like Brian, I started when I was really young. I was like 6 months old when I started. It's interesting, I was telling Brian earlier that we just moved into a a new location. And last night, another martial artist from the area came by to say hello and welcome me to the area, and he was telling me that he has watched my YouTube videos, and he was really impressed with how I have put, you know, how there's a teaching methodology for what I do. And what he thought was that I was taught that. What he didn't know is that I made that up. I created that myself. And the reason why I was able to do that, because it doesn't exist in the, in the Jeet Kune Do world so much. The reason I was able to do that is because I became a student of marketing through you, Mr. Kennedy, 8 years ago. So in a nutshell, I am best known as a Jeet Kune Do instructor. I'm not as well known as a Jeet Kune Do marketer, but I'm working real hard on that.

Well, it's not necessarily bad that somebody is not known as a great marketer or as a great salesperson, particularly in certain environments. But it's important that we all know that that's how you get known as a great anything is being a great marketer. So let's just stick with you for a second. And so we'll start with you and I'd like you to talk about the— the person you are most connected to that you have viewed as a content mentor for what you do as well as a success mentor. And so talk a little bit about Mr. Lee.

Okay.

So when I came into the GKIC world, I heard everyone talking about Napoleon Hill and Think and Grow Rich. And then I heard about definiteness of purpose, otherwise expressed as definite chief aim. And I'm thinking, I've heard this phrase definite chief aim before. And when I check my notes, it's Bruce Lee's handwritten note to himself entitled My Definite Chief Aim, which is probably on Google still the most popular rendition if you do a search for definite chief aim. And so what I realized at that point is that Bruce Lee, you know, because we had been told that his personal library consisted of over 2,000 books. Well, I always thought that they were martial art books, but now I realize that no, he is as much a student of success as he is a student of martial art. And so that was, that was a grand revelation for me because now I felt like I had permission to seek success in the martial art world and be able to use, you know, one of the most recognized personalities, not just for the physical attributes but now for the success attributes also. Because if you read his definite chief aim where he says, you know, his intention was to be the first highest-paid Oriental superstar in the United States, and he made no bones about the fact that in the decade 1970 to 1980, his goal was to have $10 million. And so with that realization, which I came to because of my involvement in Glaser Kennedy, I was set free to pursue both commercial success but to maintain the integrity that comes with being a martial arts instructor.

I think that it's really interesting that martial arts is one of those professions or business categories, whatever you wish to call it, where there is a lot of the sackcloth and ashes mentality. Oh, yeah. That we're just really supposed to serve and be excellent at what we do and somehow the money will take care of itself and it's unseemly to talk about money. And here, uh, and here the idol of many.

Exactly.

It was, was as crass about it, um, you know, as you possibly could, and determined about it as you could possibly be. I think that, um, your, you know, one of the things that, um, that, that Finding mentors and finding models and then really researching them, not just sort of superficially knowing about them. Often does for people is what this did for you. It hands somebody a giant permission slip to think and behave in an effective way that they might otherwise, you know, not not have done.

Right. Oh yeah, it's made me a much better instructor.

Well, so, okay, talk about that a little bit.

Okay, well, so, because— so now it gave you permission to be an aggressive marketer and to integrate every aspect of marketing that, that, that can be integrated onto the teaching floor. So when you said to us, it doesn't matter what business you're in, you're pretty much in the entertainment business, well, that made complete sense to me. I would never have thought that 10 years ago, but it makes complete sense to me. Like you just said, Bruce Lee is probably one of the world's— probably still one of the world's most popular entertainers. I am able to use so many aspects of his personality and so many of the and so many things that I've come to understand about him through the research that I've done on him and put it into my teaching. And I become a better instructor and my students become better because they too get permission slips to think in a much more elevated way.

All right, Brian, I'll go to you and let you sort of go down the same path about Marty.

Yes, actually that was very inspiring what Dwight just shared and, you know, we were having a little conversation before we started about this whole notion about marketing in certain places. So martial arts could be one of them but there are many others in health and fitness. There's a lot of places where it's almost marketing is evil, you know, we can't market, we're too altruistic to do that. Too much into a mission to do that. And I said to Dwight, and we agreed that it's almost irresponsible to not get your message or your service or your contribution out to the world, and nothing happens until you market it. So kudos to Dwight and all he's doing. So I was very inspired to hear all of that. So thank you. My— I mean, I have a lot of mentors. I've kind of lived my whole life as a mentee. Realizing now that it's my turn to go the other way. But Marty Edelston, who founded Boardroom out of his basement in 1972, he was a man— and it's a nice segue because he was a black belt in karate, which was kind of interesting. I'll tell you about that later if it's relevant. But the focus that he had and the tenacity that he had for both living a full life and living— and he just passed away in October— for living a full life and to be just excellent in everything he did is something that I hope that I can live into for the rest of my life. And he chose me. I got to Boardroom in 1981, heard his story and was totally inspired. You know, here's a guy who worked in the magazine business selling space and he outworked everybody. He sold better than anybody. He was probably the best advertising salesman in the magazine business ever. And then when it came time to launch his own magazine, no one would fund him and no one would give him the money. So instead he started a newsletter because it was a lot cheaper and so the best advertising salesman of all time launch the newsletter with no advertising. He was also a student of direct response. If you watched the way he lived his life before I knew him, because I've traced everything that Marty did before I met him, he made sure to align himself with everybody that he could learn from, everything that he could become better, to become the best that he could be. He had an expression that says, "You only go through life once. You might as well be the world's best." And when I got to Boardroom in 1981, we had just— the company was about a $3 million business, and we just— he just chose me. And when he chose me, I said, "This is a huge responsibility to be the guy that this guy is going to take under his wing and teach." everything that he knew up to that point, and then together we became this incredible partnership in building what was as high as $150 million business, selling mostly books and newsletters, a lot in the health category, helping millions and millions of people. And Marty was just, you know, he epitomized that expression of when you can't distinguish between your work and your play, life is just such a great— it's so much greater. And to teach me that at a very young age was just one of the gifts of all time. And I live into that today. That's a broad overview.

Yeah, well, I mean, as you know— yeah, I'm going to come back and look for the one big thing from you. So, you know, for Dwight, okay, it was permission. Um, so I'm going to come back in a second. I'll look for that one big thing. But, um, you know, as you know, I, I knew Marty, not obviously on the level that you did, but I did know Marty and spent some time with Marty and had some conversations with Marty and, uh, and studied Marty. And, um, I think, I mean, as you say, there are many lessons. I mean, he absolutely epitomized generosity with his platform. I mean, being helpful to people in many cases where there was no immediate or evident quid pro quo. And I think a lot of people err by by living only by quid pro quo. But the thing that was most impressive to me about Marty was his unfettered, insatiable curiosity, both going broad and going deep. You know, I don't think I ever managed to achieve a conversation or meeting with Marty where I asked more questions than he did. This was a guy always digging and probing and trying to see if you knew something or somebody that, you know, that he didn't know that might be interesting or useful to him.

And, um, well, you know, you reached out to— well, we reached— you reached out to me after Marty passed away and sent me a beautiful one-page letter just outlining what Marty meant as an entrepreneur, as a direct marketer, all the things that you admired. If you recall, I sent you a copy of my eulogy. My eulogy of Marty basically— Marty used to talk about being this ordinary guy from Newark, New Jersey who ended up doing extraordinary things. The night before his funeral, I'm sitting at my kitchen table at 2:00 in the morning I mean, what am I going to say about this guy? I've worked together with him for 33 years. He was like a second father to me. We were tremendous business partners. So what made him so extraordinary? And I came up with 4 things at that kitchen— on the kitchen table that night, which I then shared with you. And as you recall, the 4 were that he outworked everybody. He had just this entire— he was tireless and not just working for the sake of working, working because he loved it. He had this insatiable curiosity, which I think is just amazing, and I have so many stories about that, specific examples, and you just gave a couple, Dan. The third was that he only surrounded himself with the smartest people. I love the expression, you know, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And Marty lived that every day of his life, and in most cases, he could have easily been the smartest person in the room. But by going in knowing that he wasn't, that there was always someone in the room that knew something about something that he didn't, made him take that insatiable curiosity and create this body of knowledge that was just incredible. And then the fourth thing, which goes into the generosity category that you talked about, but it's even bigger than that, it's that he always thought in terms of how he could save lives. Saving lives, I used to say saving lives is different than just running into a burning building, pulling people from a burning building. Marty, besides the philanthropy and the gift giving and just doing nice things for people, as you said, with no reciprocation, with no promise of any kind of quid pro quo, he also understood that if he had a million subscribers to Bottom Line Personal, which we once had, he wanted to save every one of their lives with every article that went in there. Then he wanted to save everybody and at that time he had the triple Rolodex. People on this call probably don't even know what a Rolodex is, a lot of them, but back in the day when you didn't have a contact list on your iPhone, Marty had one of those triple Rolodexes, meaning that he had 3 wheels. They were these wheels of business cards and they were the big ones. I'm not talking small wheels. I'm talking big wheels and he had 3 of them. I remember the day I got my second. I went from my first to my second. He was patting me on the head saying, "You'll get there. You'll get there." It wasn't because he was collecting people. Marty would have hated Facebook. He wasn't collecting people and he wasn't collecting business cards. He was collecting knowledge. He would save the million lives on the subscriber list. He would save anybody in his triple Rolodex. The 85 employees or so that worked for him, he would save any one of their lives any chance he got. Obviously any one of his family members, and every life was precious to him, but in the way that he was teaching all the time. Everything was a learning opportunity. Everything was also a teaching opportunity. Those are the 4 big things. Those are big takeaways. There are a lot of examples.

Now, the flip side—

Dan, you and I are going to have enough.

Go ahead.

The flip side is Marty was a great capitalist.

Absolutely.

He was incredibly adept. I only know 3 or 4 people maybe in the same league. He was incredibly adept at getting tons and tons and tons of people to work free. He had massive amounts of content contributed to those publications without paying for it. That's correct. I think of who's speaking for me in June, Mark Victor Hansen and the Chicken Soup for the Soul empire, in much the same way. An incredibly adept person at figuring out how to get everybody to do all the work for him. Marty was great at that.

And you wanted to do it. I mean, he made it so that you just wanted to do it.

'Cause that's who he was. Just as an aside, could you just very quickly talk about the salon dinners?

Yeah, yes, that's me.

Not a lot of people maybe— well, first of all, not a lot of people were fortunate enough to be invited over the years, but obviously a lot were. It's somewhat a concept I teach people to do in their own worlds and in their own industries.

Yeah.

So the boardroom dinners are legendary and they're still going on. I mean, actually when Marty had his stroke, I ran them by myself for a couple of years and it's an amazing concept. Basically Marty used to say no better way to spend an evening. And the concept actually ties into a lesson from another mentor of mine, Dick Benson, who was probably the smartest man who ever lived. In the direct mail world. And Dick, I used to always say to Dick, you know, why are you so smart? How did you get so smart? And Dick would look at me and take his thumb and his index finger and put them an inch apart and he'd say, I know everything about this much. And Marty understood that. Like Marty understood that if you could bring people together in a room that everybody was clearly going to be an expert about this much. And again, an inch apart, thumb and index finger. And if you put each one of them in a room and had them all take turns to go around the table in one evening to talk about for 5 or 10 minutes the thing they knew everything about in a nutshell, you were going to come away from an event like that so much smarter. It's not just a bunch of people speaking at a live event. It's an interactive environment, and you've been to many of the dinners, Dan, we were fortunate to be at dinners together, and Marty was a master emcee as well. So the concept was that you pick— he picked a very elegant place. He used to do them at his apartment on 72nd Street in New York City, in an apartment overlooking the roof of the Dakota. And the Dakota, as you may know, is the building where John Lennon was shot, and Marty heard the shots that night, unfortunately. Anyway, we have the dinners there and he could have only up to 14 people and they would be 14 people that were either contributors to the publication, they were some of the smartest people that he knew, some were authors, politicians, and whoever they were, it was an elegant dinner. He would do all the introductions because he had all their bios in advance as opposed to have people introduce themselves so that you can really do what you want to do in terms of make people feel totally at home and totally generous with the introductions. And then people would eat and he'd actually set the table in a way that it was assigned seating. So he'd actually put people next to each other that might have something in common or that they might be able to do business together or they might just have an incredible affinity for each other. And then after the meal, after the main course, He would then lead one conversation around the table with each person telling everything they knew about this much in about 10 minutes. And the results of that, you know, obviously created an incredible amount of editorial content. He used to tape them early on with permission and then use— get story ideas. And then we also used to get incredible amount of marketing ideas. We just built them and the dinners got a little bit bigger when we went to an outside location from his apartment at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York where we're still holding them. And there we could get even 25 people around the table. And what an art to get around the table in one evening with 25 incredible experts in estate planning and in health and in taxes and in direct marketing and whatever industry they might be in. And it's— they're legendary and they'll continue to be legendary. And the interesting thing is that anybody can do something similar. It's not that hard to do. As you said, you've told a lot of your folks to do their version of— I mean, I guess they call it masterminding today, but it's much bigger than that.

Well, it's different. It is very different.

It is different.

Marty and Summers White are the only two I ever saw really do this true salon. Yeah. And, you know, it's not about everybody talking about their businesses necessarily.— it is, as you say, it is about putting really a diverse and eclectic group of really, really smart people in a room and having each one focus on his true super expertise and super interest.

Yeah. Actually, some of the worst— not the worst, but the dinners that were the least fulfilling were the ones that stayed on— like you had 4 marketers in the room or 4 or 6 doctors and while all the information was interesting, you didn't get the diversity and those dinners weren't as good as the ones where you had the incredible diversity. Everybody has that kind of diverse group in their life. You don't realize everybody in your life is an expert in something.

Can I tell you my bottom line story?

Sure.

Okay. So when I left school and started working in the airline industry, I worked for Eastern Airlines. Right out of school. And when I started—

The very same people who don't know what a Rolodex is, don't know what Eastern Airlines is.

They don't know it.

They've never heard of Eastern Airlines.

They can look them up because they're trying to resuscitate them.

Somebody bought the name. Somebody bought the intellectual property.

Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to resuscitate them, I think, as a charter company or something, and they're going to do it all wrong. Anyway, but yeah, so when I started work at Eastern, we had two 727 jets, which nobody will know what those are, that flew to the islands out of San Juan and out of St. Croix. And about 6 months after I joined, all of that was changed and it became a widebody L-1011 now serving the islands out of Miami. So I started visiting the mainland. And I realized immediately that Americans, as we call them, were not necessarily smarter than us island people, but they were definitely better informed. So Bottom Line Personal became one of my research pieces that helped me to carry on intelligent conversations with people from the mainland.

Isn't that interesting? That is very interesting. If I'm not mistaken, Brian, for a time weren't there sample issues in airline seat pockets?

Yeah, yeah, we had a thing called Currents that, you know, again, we couldn't make any money doing it, but we actually, you know, it's anecdotal, but a lot of people found out about Boardroom Reports and then Bottom Line in the, not just the seat pockets, which was Currents. It was like a little mini version of Bottom Line, but then we also were in some of the, Sky Clubs at the time and the Hyatt Hotel waiting rooms and stuff. But essentially what Dwight said is that one of the things that I like to talk about with Marty, I came up with this for the eulogy and I said, Marty, I think, felt like reading books cover to cover was actually overrated, but reading was not. And what I mean by that is that we, He knew that no one could read all the stuff that you needed to read to become as intelligent as Dwight figured out when he came to the mainland. He understood the idea of digesting at such an incredible level that basically the concept that there's probably one chapter in every book, except yours, Dan, that's worth reading. You want to get that gold nugget and that gist of that. In fact, the first promotion for Boardroom Reports was written by the great Gene Schwartz, and it was read 300 business magazines in 30 minutes and get the guts of each. So making sure that people could become educated quickly was something Marty was so ahead of his time. I always said he invented hypertext before the Internet. He just understood this concept of information and what you needed and what was need-to-have versus nice-to-have. What an incredible gift to have that, that he saw that. He was like a real seer of that. He was just incredible that way.

Brilliant. I go through a lot of books, even hardbound books. What you'll find that I keep is maybe 5, 6, 8 pages ripped out, stapled together with the COVID stapled to them, and the rest of the book goes in the trash.

You and Marty were so simpatico. He admired you so much, and I think, and vice versa, obviously. And I think because you both have that incredible thirst for knowledge, but you don't want to waste your time.

Okay, I'm going to have one more question for each of you. And so the question is, and we'll start with Dwight. So you have to think quicker than Brian does. I'm younger. There you go. That's right. The synapses will fire quicker. Thanks a lot.

I'm going to go check my Rolodex while you guys are doing this.

I mean, in part because there's a lot less for the synapses to work their way through.

Okay.

You said it. So the question is, What big tip can you give people about modeling, about paying deep and thorough attention to somebody and being able to extract actionable items from them? And so I'm looking for a really valuable tip tip here, okay, from, from what you did in your case with Bruce Lee, okay, and in Brian's case with Marty.

All right, well, so let me make sure I clarify that I today I am a product of 3 mentors: Bruce Lee, who I never met personally, uh, his premier disciple Dan Inosanto, who's been my teacher for the past 31 years, and then you, Dan Kennedy. So I have, I have blended teaching and lessons from the three of you. But in answer to your question, in 19— we were at a seminar in Sarasota, I think it was 1995, and I asked Sifu Insano, my teacher, whether or not it was okay to copy how someone else moved in martial art. And he said to me, yes, it's fine as long as that person's motion is considered to be exemplary. But the deeper lesson in that is you don't get anywhere just by copying people. You do have to do it, and the responsibility is yours ultimately. So yes, you can model people, you can try to copy what somebody does, but you still have to do your own research as to how that person got to move that way, why that person is considered to be exemplary. It can't just be blind copy. You know, so that's kind of like when, when, when you tell us, Mr. Kennedy, about, about using somebody else's copy to inspire your own. You can't just swipe it wholesale. You still have to understand what it is that you're working with. But that's— that would be the big tip. Yes, you can model others. Yes, you can try to do things the way other people do things, but Not blindly. It's got to be a result of your own research. As a matter of fact, I'll just finish with this. So there are 4 quotes from Bruce Lee which I always talk about, and I call them the 4 tenets of Jeet Kune Do. And tenet number 1 is research your own experience for the truth. Tenet number 2 is absorb what is useful. Tenet number 3 is "Reject what is useless." And then final tenet number 4 is "Add what is specifically your own." These 4 tenets were a sign that Bruce Lee made that he had hanging in his school in the old days.

Well, they are good ones. All right, my friend. Thank you.

Brian, you're up. So totally plus one on what Dwight said about you don't just copy blindly what someone else is doing. You need to admire them. You need to say, Okay, that guy is living a life of incredible, not just stature. I mean, this isn't about following somebody who is famous or rich or whatever, or even they might have a lot of characteristics. There are a lot of things that Marty did that I did not emulate. But what I saw was someone who was living life excellently. So anybody, I mean, that wouldn't be just Marty. As I said, I think I mentioned that you only go through life once. You might as well be the world's best. Anybody who is not living that way, that's sort of like the deal breaker for me. I'm not even going to try to look for somebody to model myself after if they're not trying to be the world's best at what they're doing. Also, I'm not going to model myself after anybody who does not believe that if they're the smartest person in the room, they're in the wrong room. I think that if I don't want to— no matter how brilliant someone is who I'm following or modeling, if they always are presenting themselves as the Shamu and the smartest person in the room, that's not the person that I'm— that's a deal breaker for me at the start as well. The other piece that's really interesting is that I have a lot of friends from high school who I love like brothers who unfortunately or fortunately I actually inhaled with. I can say that because I'm not going to run for president anytime soon.

They just opened up, they put the first marijuana vending machines out in Colorado this month.

I know. It smells like pot everywhere you go in Colorado. It's unbelievable.

I think the stigma is gone.

The stigma is gone. Yeah, the stigma is gone. So I did inhale with a bunch of these guys in high school and listened to a lot of Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull. I realized that I'm never going to disown those people as friends because they're like relatives in a way. They're my buddies. Would I choose them as friends today if I want to achieve at the highest level? No, I wouldn't. Sometimes you have to come up with, to achieve big things in your life, you just might have to find some new friends. It doesn't mean that you have to shun the old friends, but you have to understand that if you're really modeling yourself after someone or a group of people who are doing this world's best thing, which is there's nothing better than doing the world's best thing, then I'm not going to spend a lot of time with people who aren't playing in that game. And then the other, one last piece, and I'll read a quote which was on the back of Marty's business cards. And this is something that I don't know if it's as universal for everybody else, but it is for me at this stage of my life as I look back about how you work and how you play in your life. And so on the back of Marty's card, which was a Zen Buddhist text, it said, The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both. So again, a starting point for me for someone to model myself after. If they're not living into that principle, that's where I want to be for the rest of my life. So why would I want to live into or model myself or look for mentors and people to teach me who aren't living the same way?

And I'm going to take the liberty of sort of translating and adding. I think one of the most important things that you've just described that a lot of people are very reluctant to do. Is to be judgmental and to have litmus tests about who they let in and who they don't let in and who they pay attention to and who they don't pay attention to. And not only is it okay to have litmus tests and to say this is a deal breaker, I'm not letting this person in, I think it's essential to have them. I think it's extremely important. All right, gentlemen, I am— we could go on, but I am afraid we are out of clock. And so, Brian, Dwight, thank you very much for your time and your insights. And everybody on the call, thank you for being here. And if not before, I'll talk to you same channel next month.

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