Jesse Itzler - Entrepreneur Extraordinaire, Living with a SEAL, 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet

Foreigners. Ryan Daniel Moran here. And today we're going to be listening to somebody who definitely lives life in the fast lane. You're going to be hearing from Jesse Itzler. Jesse Itzler is the founder of Marquee Jet, which he sold to Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway. And he is was also an integral part of Zico Coconut Water which sold to Coca Cola. He has a net worth north of 100 million and he's married to the world's youngest self made female billionaire, Sarah Blakely, the founder of Spanx. I want to sit at their dinner table and find out what the heck do they talk about? What is, what do two incredibly successful people who are married to one another talk about over the dinner table. He's also the author of Living With a Seal, which is one of the most empowering books that you can read when it comes to overcoming the limits that we tend to place on ourselves in our brain. He argues that when you think you've exhausted all of your internal resources, you're only at about 40% capacity. Now we recorded this previously for capitalism.com so the person doing the interview is actually Jason Hartman who is a regular contributor to capitalism.com so it's a previously recorded episode that they did for the website. But I know a lot of you are coming to Freedom Fast Lane Live and you may not be familiar with with Jesse. So I thought this would be a great way to cruise into the event and have a good idea of who you'll be hearing from on I think he's day two of the event. By the way, we are almost done with our promotion for Freedom Fast Lane Live. We end tickets on December 1, which is early because we are almost sold out. So head over to freedomfastlanelive.com before December 1st and we'll see you at Freedom Fast Lane Live in Austin, Texas. Enjoy this chat with Jesse Itzler.

Hey, it's my pleasure to welcome Jesse Itzler to the show. He only eats fruit until noon. He loves Run DMC and enjoys living life out of the box. Actually, he doesn't even have a box. He co founded Marquee Jet, the largest prepaid jet company, in 2001 and he and his partner sold it to Berkshire Hathaway NetJets. He later partnered with ZCO Coconut Water, which he sold to Coca Cola Company in 2013. He's a former rat on MTV, he produced and he's also author of the best selling book Living with a Seal. When he's not training for his next 100 mile run or being a dad to his four kids. He can be found at Atlanta Hawks game where he is an owner of the team. Jesse, welcome. How are you?

Great to be here. I'm doing great, thanks.

Gosh, you have such a fantastic resume. Congratulations on all you've done, all your success. It's great to have you on the show. Talk to us a little bit about building. How did you happen to get into the private jet business?

Well, I love in the bio that they don't have any of the failures. They list all the stuff that's worked.

That's how bios usually go.

I know they should have a bio that has some of the egg on the face too. Probably learn a lot more from it. Yeah. So I got into. I've had a very non traditional, unorthodox journey in business where a bunch of different hats and just listening to the bio. I think the common thread throughout all those different ventures has been that I've had no prior experience in any of them and no business experience in any of them. And I think for a lot of people that could be a big deterrent into starting something or getting into something just because of the fear of not knowing or lack of experience. But for me it was a great blessing because it basically guaranteed that everything that I did would be done differently than in the past and the results would be different. So I got into private aviation coming out of the music business really just as a customer. I was a guest on a private jet. We were flying from New York to the Bahamas and I went on with my business partner at the time and we got onto the plane. It was like the scene in the wizard of Oz where everything goes from black and white to color. People fly like this. This is unbelievable.

It's a lot easier, I'll tell you that. I love flying private and really, you.

Know, we got into the business just because we wanted to use and travel like that. So we investigated how does one fly privately and this is back in 2001 ish. And the answer at the time was really either you buy your own airplane, which was way out of the question, too expensive. You could buy a fraction of a plane, which is also is quite expensive and required a big time commitment, long term commitment. Or you could charter a plane. And there were a lot of questions around charter, who's flying the airplane, who's managing and maintaining the airplane, et cetera. So we just wanted to take two or three trips a year with our friends to go skiing or on a vacation. So we Came up with this concept of a 25 hour jet card called the marquee jet card that worked like a debit card, a prepaid Starbucks card for private jets. I mean, you would have all the benefits of owning your own airplane available on short notice, all the conveniences with none of the hassles involved with owning the plane, no scheduling issues or management of this and that. We created this 25 hour jet card.

So Jesse, was NetJets not offering that back in 2001? I mean, that's become commonplace. You can do it on Delta, you can do it on NetJets, et cetera. Were you the first to offer that pay by the hour type of card? Was NetJets only in the fractional business and management business back then?

They were, they were only in the fractional business and management business. They had a charter division as well, but they weren't offering a jet card. So we were kind of the first to introduce this prepaid, fractional kind of jet card on the NetJet fleet. And I think, you know, for us, NetJets was selling predominantly to corporations at the time. And we expanded that base with a lower ticket item that was easy to digest to a much bigger market.

Right.

And I think looking back on it, you know, we were set up to do that because we were speaking to our generation netjets. Just by definition, their salesforce was a little bit older. The collateral material was targeting a different customer, the whole vibe.

I mean, everybody you look at in a NetJets brochure is a senior person, you know, a senior wealthy person.

Yeah, we just turned it upside down, right?

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. Good. So what do you do before that? Like you talked about how the bio doesn't mention the failures and stuff like that. You know, when you said you learned a lot from those, did you have some other businesses you tried to start before?

Well, yeah, before that I was in the music business. I started out, believe it or not, as a signed to a rap label called Delicious Vinyl in the late 80s, early 90s. And when I mentioned failure, you know, I've had some business, some stuff that hasn't worked obviously, but even failure. And just our first attempt to get a deal with NetJets to use their airplanes. I think the meeting lasted 12 minutes before we were kicked out.

And I remember the exact quote I think was, if you think I'm giving two 29 year olds access to my fleet of 800 airplanes, it's not happening. See you guys later. And I remember leaving the meeting with my partner and the president of NetJets, a guy named Jim Jacobs came out and said that was an amazing meeting. And I said, we got kicked out in 12 minutes. What are you talking about? And he said Rich Santulli was the CEO of NetJeff, said, doesn't give anybody 12 minutes. I said, there's something really here. So we ended up going back and rather than pitching our concept through a PowerPoint, we brought in our own focus group. And one by one they stood up and explained why they would buy a Jet card versus a fraction. Failure very often is part of the journey and part of the process and it just kind of like nudges you a little bit and tells you you're off course.

Jesse, I just want to make sure our listeners understand what you just said. So you had your 12 minute pitch meeting, which you thought was a failure, but you later learned was actually a success because that was a long attention span for a pitch meeting. And then you had a second meeting where you actually brought in focus group people to that meeting and they told the story right.

Then we, you know, we circled up and said, you know, we really believe in this idea. I think maybe we're explaining it wrong. Like, let's bring in the customers and let them explain it. Why are we selling it? Let them explain one by one from different fields, lawyer, athlete, sports agent. Let them get up and explain why they would buy a 25 hour card. Why are we selling? Why are we selling ourselves? And that's what we did, right? And we use that focus group kind of as our deck.

That's fantastic. So why was it prohibitive? I mean, was there any barrier to entry for, you know, back in 2001, for NetJets to just get into this business? I mean, they ended up acquiring you, but what did you really have that they didn't? Was it some magical software? I mean, I know you had the branding and you had the idea, but was there any other unique selling proposition?

Well, I think like anything else, it comes down to one thing, and that was we had a strong emotional connection between my partner and I and the founder CEO of NetJets and I think saw a lot of himself, a younger version of himself in us.

Right.

We had no special sauce other than we believed. And I think he saw that in our eyes, that we could take this product and sell it to a large amount to a lot of people in a younger demographic quickly. And he probably looked around, no knock on their salesforce. They were excellent. We played in this field. This was our space and we were talking to our peers. And you want to go get someone on the New York Knicks to sign up, you have to know them, they have to trust you.

Right?

You have to be able to get to that person to have the meeting. And I think that they saw that we. They believed that we could do it. And we proved to them within a year that we could.

And was this for an acquisition or some funding? I mean, what year was it you founded in 2001? What year is it now when you did the piece pitch?

Like 2000. It took about a year. During the process, we put up our own money. We raised $5 million. Between our money and other friends and family, they basically said, look, if you guys put up your own capital and could get clearance from the Department of Transportation and just do the legwork, we'll give you guys a shot. And I remember my partner and I, when we had to put together our forecast for the year, looking at each other and saying, how many cars do you think you could sell? I think he said, I could probably sell 1525 hour cards. I said, all right, put me in for 16 just to kind of one up them. And sure enough, I think over the course of our journey, we did $5 billion in sales. So we ended up building a great company with a great product, with great partners, and then selling it to NetJets, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway.

Yeah. Fantastic. Wow. Did you get to meet Warren Buffett in the deal?

I met Warren a bunch and since have become quite friendly with him.

That's awesome. That's totally awes. Yeah. Good stuff. Okay, so then you did coconut water, right? Were those back to back? Did you take some time off in between? Did you do something else?

So during my journey at Marquis Jet, I decided I wanted to raise money for charity and do it in a different way, a different style than having a golf event or a dinner party or something like this. So I decided I was going to run 100 miles nonstop in 24 hours, under 24 hours. And I just signed up for the Ultramarathon United States Ultramarathon National Championship because you didn't have to qualify. You could just write a $67 registration ticket and get in. So I entered it. I gave myself 90 days to train. And during the course of the training, I did a lot of research on hydration, nutrition, what do you eat, what do you drink, how many calories do you have to take in if you're going to run for 24 hours straight? And during that process, I became basically the human guinea pig for coconut Water. So I realized that I wanted to kind of experiment with this amazing beverage. And after the race, I finished in 22 hours and 30 minutes. No cramping. Felt relatively okay. Although I was in a wheelchair for four days. I said to myself, you know what? This is kind of like my version of the fountain of youth. I spent a year going to Brazil, Jamaica, traveling the globe, trying to figure out how to import coconut water, thinking that this would be the next big trend in beverage. Coming off of palm. Wonderful. And some of these pomegranate, all these great little kind of every three or four years, a new drink emerges. I thought coconut water would be next. So I realized quickly that the learning curve was too great for me. The space was moving too fast. I'm a marketer, I'm a seller, I'm not an operator. And trying to import this would just take too much time and it wouldn't work. So I partnered with a company called Zico Coconut Water that was maybe three or four years old, doing a couple million dollars in sales with an amazing CEO, a guy named Mark Rampola, who I loved and believed in. And two years later, we sold it to Coke.

Yeah, fantastic. Wow, that's a fantastic exit. What are you doing now? I mean, you've got the book out. Tell us a little bit about your book.

At a fascinating Navy SEAL at a race that I was doing and didn't know he was a Navy SEAL at the time. And I cold called him and flew out to meet with him for 15 minutes. And in the course of our little lunch meeting, I decided that my life would be better off if some of what he had, which I didn't know what it was at the time, rubbed off on me. And I asked him to come live with my family and I for a month. And he basically said, if you're crazy enough to ask a guy like me to come live with you, I'm crazy enough to come. And three days later, he was at our breakfast table. It started this 31 day journey. Incredible transformation for me mentally. And I wanted to document that and share kind of what I learned and some of the lessons I learned living with this incredible man. And that's what I did. It's called living with a seal.

Yeah. And was that pretty tough? Did it increase your discipline? Massively.

Well, what it taught me was that I was like so many of us, a lot of the limitations at work, goals physically, growth, personal development, were self imposed. And it taught me that I had a lot more in my reserve tank. And that while I thought I was operating at a high level. It made me realize that I had so much more to do and so much more in me. And he gave me the tools to kind of tap into this reserve tank when needed to push my limits and get out of my comfort zone. So it was a great experience, but it's led to this whole kind of new mindset that I've been searching for. When he moved in with me, I was in a great place in my life, and I still am. I was married, and I still am. I had a child. I now have four. And I had sold, you know, I'd done okay. And I thought I was operating at a high level for me personally, but like so many of us, I was in this routine. You know, my routine was get up, work out, go, go to work, come home with my family, time dinner, put the kids down, repeat. And was. It was. It was amazing, except it was so comfortable. I was doing it every day. And because I was doing it every day, it became. It became almost like a rut. Like I was so comfortable in that space that I wasn't taking. I stopped taking chances. I stopped dreaming big. I stopped. I started putting things off till tomorrow. I'll do it tomorrow. I want to do this right now. And I wasn't getting better, so I needed to shake it up. And obviously, everyone's not going to hire a Navy SEAL to shake it up, but for me, I learned a lot. And a lot of things I've been able to share and take with me once he left.

That's fantastic. I mean, you've got some interesting chapter heads in the book. And I do want to ask you, if we get just a moment, to ask you about your wife Sarah, who is an amazing, amazing success story in her own right, but oxygen deprivation, no peeing allowed. What is this all about?

He was an unorthodox guy. And he had like, you know, when Rocky. When Rocky hires the trainer and they're chasing chickens and no one really gets it right, he was like, you know, he had me chasing the chickens every day basically by doing a series of. And I didn't understand it at the time. He put me through a series of really unorthodox things. Jumping in frozen lakes. You know, he took a boulder and cracked a hole in a frozen lake and jumped in. And what he was really doing, the Cliff Note version, is he was creating this environment within my head that when things get hard, no matter how hard, I'm going to attack it instead of running away from it. So rejection at work, frustration over coming up with a new idea, deal fatigue, whatever it is, we're going to attack it instead of hiding from it. And by doing things that make you uncomfortable consistently, it doesn't have to be jumping in a frozen lake. It could be as simple as, I don't want to go to the wedding next week cross country. I can easily cancel it by saying my son isn't feeling well. I'm going anyway because it's the right thing to do. I committed to it, and even though it's going to make me uncomfortable and angry, this is what we do. So that was a really big lesson to me through these kind of unorthodox things. So oxygen deprivation was day one when he moved in. Basically early on in our journey, he took all the furniture. I was living in New York at the time, out of his room and pitched a tent that sucked the oxygen out of the room to increase his red blood cell count. Basically, it simulates you on the top of Everest.

Yep, yep. A friend of mine does that kind of training.

It's crazy, but, I mean, during training, this is like he's living with me. So I hear the tent being blown up. My wife is like, what's going on? I don't even know the guy, really. So that was what oxygen deprivation is. The no peeing you're referring to was when we were on a run and I had to go to the. He made me drink all this water because we were doing a lot. He didn't want me to dehydrate. I had a pee on the run. And he made it crystal clear that it was run time and not pee time.

Amazing. Yeah, amazing. So when and how did you meet your wife? Sarah Blakely? I think that'd be interesting for the listeners to know. Tell us a little bit about her.

So Sarah was a customer of mine or of ours at Marquee Jet, and we were having a customer appreciation event, a poker tournament, actually, in Las Vegas, where of the 4,000 customers that we had, each rep per territory was allowed to invite one customer. So we had about 40 invitations. So it was highly selective, very hard to get into. We had limited amount of tickets, so every rep submitted one person. So the Georgia rep sent me a picture of Sarah with a note about her, and I saw the picture. I didn't even read the note. And I said, please make sure she comes. I want to say the fast answer is we were married a year later, but it took a little bit of. A little bit of work on my side.

Fantastic. And she is the founder of Spanx, which is a giant billion dollar enterprise and it's just a great startup story. The two of you are an amazing business dynamic, aren't you?

It is. And it's funny. When I was courting Sarah, we were friends, we were instant friends, but nothing beyond that. And when I was running this hundred mile run, I was trying to get Sarah's attention. So I called up Spanx and I said I needed a testimonial, which I did. But I really just wanted to talk to Sarah for my website about the run. And I said, listen, if Sarah will give me a testimonial and maybe even a donation, I'll run the hundred miles in Spanx. So her assistant put me on which for those that don't know, are like, they're basically ladies leggings. So her assistant put me on hold and said, Sarah, some lunatic is on the phone that wants to run a hundred miles in Spanx. So she said, I think I know that lunatic. And a year later she married the lunatic.

That's fantastic.

You never know where the real. Right. Was it about the run or was it about the run that got. That got me my wife.

Right, exactly, exactly. So, Jesse, what is next for you? You just launched the book, it is killing it in the sales department. What's next for you? You got a new company you're going to start or what's going on?

Well, you know, I love the process of writing this book. I really enjoyed it and I decided that I want to create a series of Living with Interesting People. So it's one thing to read about inspiration and motivation, but it's a complete different thing to live with it. So having lived with probably the toughest human on the planet, I mean, this guy is widely regarded as the toughest man alive. I now want to find a couple of other interesting people. I'm thinking about living with a monk or going radio silent for 30 days and just really trying to tap into areas of self improvement and self growth that I can share with others so they don't have to do the 30 days.

Right. It's kind of like that reality show where he would do something for 30 days. So the monk, the Navy Seal, what else? Anybody else on the horizon?

You know, I read a book that changed my life in the early 90s called Fit for Life by a guy named Harvey Diamond.

Marilyn and Harvey diamond, right? Yeah.

Yeah. So Harvey is an interesting fellow. He's the. I believe he's the only known survivor that was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Probably the most toxic chemical Americans have ever been exposed to. He's still alive because of the way he eats and lives his life. In the book, it challenges you. You talked about this in my bio. Up top. In the book, he challenges the readers for 10 days to only eat fruit until 12 o' clock noon.

Right.

And I did that. And here I am 27 years later. I've continued to do it from that 10 day little challenge that he had. I'm on day 10 plus 27 years.

Right.

Harvey would be a really interesting guy to live with, to remix the principles that he put forth, you know, basically 25 years ago.

That's fantastic. That's awesome. Jesse, any thoughts you want to share with our audience? Just in wrapping up, maybe mostly about business and life, success, obviously starting a company, just whatever, anything. I didn't ask you, maybe.

You know, I think one of the biggest misconceptions, especially in a world where everything is instant, instant everything is instant email gratification, is that building brands take time. A lot of the mistakes that I've made have been rushing, rushing to put products out. We live in a product driven world. The product has to be excellent. If it's not above excellent, there's a good chance it won't work. It's just so competitive out there and it takes time. It's okay to go slowly and make some changes and figure things out as you go. But I think that was a really good lesson to me. I remember when we were pitching Zico to Coca Cola and the president of Coke at the time said it takes about eight years to build a brand in this country. Now of course, some people can get lucky. Rarely, rarely you hear about it, but. And do it quicker. But usually it's a journey. It's a journey of mistakes, it's a journey of trial. It's a journey of trusting your gut and over time getting loyal customers. It's a process and you can't cheat the process, you can't speed up the process. There's no silver bullet. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs these days, especially young, the younger generation, they want it fast. And it doesn't always happen like that.

Yeah, we've got to overcome our addiction to instant gratification, don't we?

We do, yeah.

Good stuff. Well, running 100 miles and doing all the crazy stuff that you do, I mean, that's a testament to that, isn't it?

It teaches you patience. There's a lot of lessons in running. There's a lot of lessons in marathon running and distance running. And one of them for sure is being present. And the other is patience. If you're not in the present moment and you're thinking you have 87 more miles left, you're in trouble.

Right.

And if you're not patient, you can't speed up the clock. No matter what, you're going to be out there doing what you're doing for X amount of many hours. You can't speed it up. It's no different than business.

You got to be in the moment. You got to be patient. Very good points, Jesse. Give out your website and maybe a Twitter handle. Tell people where they can find you.

I am he 100 the number 100 mile man on Instagram and Twitter. My website is the100mileman.com Jesse Itzler, thank.

You so much for joining us.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

If you like today's show, you can hang out and rub shoulders with Jesse itzler in Austin, Texas. Freedom Fast Lane Live is December 9th, 10th and 11th. He'll be joined with Alicia Silverstone, John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, the founder of Quest Nutrition, Tom Bilyeu, Peter Diamandis, the hundred million dollar panel, the investment panel, JP Sears, Mike Dillard, Nathan Latka and the rest of the lineup at Freedom Fast Lane Live. There's nothing that I am more proud of that we do here at Freedom Fast Lane than our year end event. And we have a few spots remaining that you can grab@freedomfastlanelive.com and this is the last time you're gonna hear me talk about it here on the podcast. So head on over there, grab your ticket and we will see you in Austin, Texas. Thanks for listening and supporting the show and I'll see you on the next episode.