Episode 510: Eventually They May Become Your Friend Again with Steven Sashen

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

We're talking with Stephen Sasher and from Broomfield, Colorado. And we're just opening the can of information and insights and worms.

And worms.

Wisdom that he has accumulated over the years and earned. You know what you're talking about? What you've been talking about, Stephen, is information you have earned by working and being on the attack and trying things and how. Go ahead.

Well, there's that. And also, again, just, you know, I guess I have to say this weird thing. I have this weird habit of looking at counterfactuals. When someone, when everyone says, everything is to the right, I go, I wonder what's to the left? I don't know why, it's just something that I do. And when it comes to business and business quote, unquote, again, quote unquote success, everyone's got a story. And I'm just curious to look and see if there's validity to the story. It's a philosophical thing, like if someone says A leads to B, I want to know how many times A leads to C and how many times D leads to B. Because if you don't know the whole picture, you can be easily swayed by someone trying to sell you something, whether they're literally trying to sell you or trying to convince you of something. But I just try to look at the whole picture and that's, that's an unusual thing to do, apparently.

When did you start doing that and what caused you to take, you know, to learn that that was a productive thing to do?

I started doing it when I was a kid, but it became more codified as I got into my 30s. Actually, when I, after I started my software and people were telling me things that I just knew were patently false, I could just feel it from a mile away.

Give me an example. Right off the bat, I mean, early in the game, you knew that's, that's garbage.

Well, the simplest thing was when I came up with an idea for my software company, which is a product that became the industry standard word processor for film and television writers. I reinvented the entirety of how you develop software because I knew nothing about software. And people would tell me that my basic idea for the architecture of the program didn't make any sense. But it was very, very clear in my own head and my competitors. The way I got into the business is I approached my competitors at a trade show to see what they were thinking about what they were going to upgrade in the Software for version 2, 3, and 4. And I could tell none of them were thinking the way I was thinking. And they all told me that what I was doing wouldn't work. And just the fact that everyone believed that what I was doing didn't make any sense. When I knew from a. I have a cognitive psychology background, I knew that what I had done was a radical reinventing of many, many things. Basically, I guess the best way I can say it is I'm hyper aware of what my brain is doing while my body is trying to do other things. So while I was trying to type a script, I could tell where my fingers were, causing a glitch in my brain because my fingers had to do something different other than just get the thought out of my head. I figured out a way to fix that simple thing like, this is going to sound crazy. The, the little dialog box you see when you go to open a script or open a file or save a file, right? In the early days you had, there was nothing like what you now see everywhere, where if you, you have a list of files, you start typing something and it'll match what you're typing. I invented that in 1992. No one had ever done it before because it just made no sense to me that you could type in one place or scroll somewhere else or match somewhere else. Like, why can't you do that all in one box? Or when I was designing just the, the, the little dialog boxes for how to change the format of a particular word processing element, a paragraph, for example, I would, I would write these things in English. Instead of having all the variables on one side and the descriptions on the other, I would make it an English sentence where it made sense for how you would decide how to change these things. And I had programmers say to me, but that's not how they do it. I went, yeah, I know. So, so, so the answer is it's kind of been there all along, but of course it's honed itself out of necessity over the years. Or let me actually, let me give you one more for the fun of it. Whenever I get approached by people who want to sell me some marketing thing, some advertising tool, some advertising technique there, whatever, how do I want to put this? I always say, I just want to know how quickly and cheaply I can find out if your head's up your butt. They go, what? I go, well, no one bats A thousand, so. And all I can control is the risk, how much money I'm spending. Your promises mean nothing to me. When they say, I'm confident it's going to work, I go, I don't really care how you feel. So I just know that, you know, things don't work perfectly. And what I say often is, look, I've been an Internet marketer for 30 plus years. I have a lot of opinions. I just don't give a crap what any of them are. All I care about is the data telling me if it was right or not. And I want to find out if I'm wrong as quickly and cheaply as possible.

And how did you get, how far did you get in the software business? And why did you migrate? You know, you said you've been in marketing and everything, you kind of went from the software design to into marketing. Do you see that as a bigger opportunity or you just, oh, well.

I started my software company in 1992 when the Internet was just barely a thing and I was selling product online. Before there was a way to actually sell things online, there was no way to take credit card payments online, for example. And what happened with the software company, in short, is I was looking to sell it to somebody. And in the process of selling it to this group of three guys, I discovered that one of the three was embezzling from the other two. And so. And then, frankly, one of my competitors did something that I never would have imagined in a million years. It was brilliantly underhanded. They approached what was at that time the only major seller of this kind of product and said, how much margin do we need to give you to stop selling Stephen Sassen's product? And they had an answer. So they, they basically cut me out of the market by just offering a huge, huge discount to this one retailer. I would have never thought of that in a million years because I'm a competitive athlete. But all my sports have always been individual sports. And so in my mind, best man wins, best thing wins. It never would occur to me that when you're pulling the rug out from underneath someone else's livelihood, that they don't just go, sorry, congratulations, or congratulations, you won't. They do everything they can to hold onto what they have, even if it's not good for the customer.

That's something that is very necessary for especially the younger entrepreneurs and idea people to know. Because I remember at various stages of my life where there was a breakthrough and a revolutionary concept in different walks of life. And it's like wow. You know, when the word gets out on this, the people are going to say, man, you know, they're going to drop what they're doing and run to this. Not so much. They're going to kind of try and keep the status quo going and they'll fight you to the death over too, you know.

Oh, look, we're at the point now where we're getting enough attention and the major shoe companies have been following us for a while. They know about us, and we're starting to get more and more attention. I mean, we're growing 50% year over year. We're getting to a point point where we're a big deal. And I've spoken to or had friends speak to C level people at many of these companies who've said, oh, yeah, this natural movement thing that Zero Shoes is doing is legit. But we couldn't do it because it would be admitting we've been lying for the last 50 years. Yeah. And the key phrase, the word in there is admitting. They know that the modern athletic shoe causes the problems they claim to cure. And one of the easiest bits of proof for this is why is there a multi, multi billion dollar aftermarket category for things to add to shoes to make them work better? The shoe companies could have done this on their own if that actually worked.

Well, this is just a side point. Okay, I was over the therapist this morning. I jumped out of my car and I put my right foot down and I wear Nikes. I Love Nikes. Size 12 Nike. Nike fits my foot.

Wait, I'm gonna stop. Wait, I'm gonna stop you right there when you said fits my foot. This is, this is not a Nike shoe. But it's ripped off from a Nike shoe. This is the sh. Your Nike shoe, correct?

Yep.

Is that the shape of your foot? They're supposed to be spread out, right?

Exactly. Well, the other thing is, but, and, but the point is, you know, I'm getting intrigued with your, your brand here. That's what the point I want to make. But I wanted to basically validate the point you made. Like, I'm a big Nike fan, you know, Nike, Nike, Nike. But high school ex, high school basketball player, right ankle always was the one that sprained. And if I get on rocky ground or something like that, occasionally it'll roll out. But this was fairly flat ground. And what caused. I got out of the truck this morning, put the foot down and immediately rolled and almost snapped. And it was not the ground, the ground. I looked at ground like what? You know what? No, it was the edge of the frigging shoe. You know, it's up at an angle this other. And I came down on it. It was what was in the shoe wasn't in my, it wasn't the ground. And so I'm, I'm buying into your concept there. And this is, you know, my favorite brand. This morning almost broke my ankle, you know.

Do you remember, do you remember a number of months ago when the basketball players Ian Williamson blew out of his Nike shoe? Absolutely. Well, that wasn't the interesting part. The interesting part was what happened with his other foot that led to him blowing out the shoe. So he blew out of his left foot or his left shoe. But the reason why is because he did the same thing you just did. He tripped over the edge of that Nike shoe and had to catch himself. And so. But it was all because the edge of the shoe. There's no reason to have a flared sole where there's an edge that you can catch that creates what's. If we're going to be physics about it creates a moment arm of torque that. Right. Put your body in jeopardy.

Yeah. And I just experiment experienced that. Clear. And it's not the only time, by the way. But it was just, you know, the fact that you're talking about that.

Well, it's the same thing when you're not on even ground. When you're on like let's say you're hiking up in the mountains where you are and you've got rocks and various things. If you have a soul that's stiff laterally stiff left to right when you step, if you step on something on either edge, it makes your foot twist. If you have a flexible soul, it lets your foot adapt to that naturally. So there's quote ankle support in hiking boots because they make a stiff sole that puts your. That compromises your ankle integrity. Without a stiff sole, you don't have that. If you look at what Edmund Hillary climbed Everest in, it was a flexible shoe. Not a big, thick, stiff thing.

Really interesting stuff. Yeah, they didn't have those things back then.

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