Spending 24 hours with billionaire nba team owner, Ryan smith

Your success is directly correlated with your pain threshold.

This is Ryan Smith. He built a $10 billion company from his dad's basement. Then he bought an NBA team, and now he's building his own city from scratch. He's living large and he's really living the dream of every 12-year-old boy out there. So I flew out to Utah with my crew to see what a day in his life is really like. We recorded a podcast, we got a tour of the stadium he's rebuilding, and of course we played some basketball. I'm Sean, and I want to take you behind the pod.

What's up?

What's up? Yeah, big dog. Stayed up for us, man.

I did.

1 AM. We got basketball. We're leaving here at 5:30 in the morning, so we got a solid 4 and a half hours of sleep. That'll do. I feel like we're NBA players. Got off the flight, we got a game tonight, we got a doubleheader.

This is it.

We're living the dream.

I need a bulldog.

You need a water bottle? Alright, 4 hours of sleep later, it's time for the big day.

I woke up early.

And was trying to get the knees ready. I got old man double knee brace. I got made fun of in my school pickup line the other day for wearing these. Some guy goes, man, that's some old shit right there. And I couldn't disagree, it truly is. And I don't know what's with these billionaires, 5 AM, you guys are killing me out here. What's up, fellas?

Gonna make 10 threes today.

Roll. What's up?

I'm Ryan.

Sean.

Sean, what's up, man?

How are you?

Ben, nice to meet you.

Ben, what's up, guys?

You guys local? You all fly in?

We all flew in. Jeez, that's insane.

Winners seem to win in a bunch of areas. Not every area, nobody's perfect, but they have, it's never just one. There's these great stories about Travis from Uber, how he was also like the number 1 or 2 ranked Wii tennis player in the world. LeBron is a top 100 Madden player. Luka Dončić is a top 500 Overwatch player. Almost everyone I know who's had extreme success on the business side out of our guests, there's at least 1 or 2 other areas where they're like surprisingly elite. And I think that's just 'cause how you do anything is how you do everything. Is fucking good. He's got to be the best NBA team owner that actually plays ball. He's very low-key about it. Look at this guy, athletic. Nothing more fun than playing basketball, dude. We could talk business all we want, but it's so much more fun. How many days a week are you playing now?

What are we playing, 3?

2, 3, depends on the week.

Sometimes we'll go 4. Who started this whole thing?

You kind of established this?

Like, B, how long have we been going? 15 years? Same group.

Yeah, 15. Damn, it's been good.

All summer, all winter.

Oh hey, all during COVID finding church houses, really playing, playing 6 in the morning, 2-on-2, 3-on-3, whatever, whatever we could do. Whatever. Wearing masks, 4 of us in a little church gym wearing masks. It was classic.

Can we end on a first one to miss runs a suicide between you and Sean?

Oh yeah, let's go.

All right, let's go. We got here You're in the YouTube comments right now. Somebody comments wish, I'll Venmo you $1,000. First one to finish basically has to pay $1,000 to somebody in the comments who says swish. Behind the blue lines, you gotta get range.

First one to make or miss.

You make and I miss? You're ready? Okay, you're ready. Tax evasion. Hey! See what we got. Wow. I'm a Taurus. You're going to let me come into your gym? You can match that. You can match that. We left the basketball court and had to get ready for the podcast. Now, these podcasts don't just happen, right? We're going for the most successful, interesting people we could find, and those people happen to be pretty busy. So my secret weapon is my business partner, Ben. Ben's the connector. He's a guy who's great with people and he's a hustler. He makes stuff happen. Happen. People don't really realize how relentless you have to be with follow-ups to make these podcasts happen.

24 emails on April 8th. The first email, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Took 9 follow-ups. Took 9 follow-ups to get a yes, and here we are. I said, hey Ryan, I can promise this will be one of the best conversations you've had. We'll come to your 6 AM game and I'll hit at least one 3-pointer. Let me know. "I just played basketball with Hayes Barnard. He said you're the man. Let's make this happen. Isaiah Collier looked good in summer league. We should record a podcast." Let me know. And he said, "Hey Ben, happy to do it if you guys really come to 6 AM morning ball.

Let's do it." I feel like most people, nobody follows up 8 times, you know what I mean? People, even when they follow up, they follow up once, twice, and the key to Ben is Ben doesn't take it personal. It's as simple as that. You know, they're busy, they get 1,000 emails a day. Even from those, those aren't like the most sweet Suave, finessed emails, right? Heard you hit a 3-pointer today. Would you like to do a podcast? All right, it's podcast time, and we just got to his family office. I gotta go see the setup, make sure it's all good, and do my little pregame routine before the podcast. So here we go. As we showered up and I started doing my last minute prep and tweaks before the podcast, we found ourselves in an unexpected situation.

During COVID we, we really had to think about like, okay, this work from home— I, I don't work from home. Like, I— it's like the worst place for me to work. And I, I think, you know, with 5 kids, it's a little distracting. But I, I need to work with people, and I need to be in a spot to create. I think Utah is a very unique spot. You guys saw that this morning when you went and you woke up and there's like these mountains. Like, it is literally good for the soul. I think the part for me that's like This is what, this is what we get to wake up to. If you're sitting here like, like this is like a movie. Yeah, it's like a backdrop where you're like, okay, and there's just something about it.

This looks like AI.

About this, uh, this sign, what's the, uh, yeah, like when we designed this, I, I think everything that's happened in my life, like it was pretty much wrong at first. We're, we're in the business of like constant iteration. If you look at Qualtrics, like We were early on competing with people who had more money. We had this, we were in Utah, no one had really done it in Utah, and it was like, all right, you've got to set your goal and you've got to be confident what you're doing, and you have to play the long game. Your success is directly correlated with your pain threshold. How much pain can you handle? Everyone's like, oh, you bootstrapped your business for 10 years. Taking money was the easy thing.

Right.

Can you handle the pain of going through it? And, you know, we're seeing that a little bit in sports. Like, you watch OKC, it's like they handled a lot of pain, right? More than a lot of other markets could. And look at what they've got.

I needed a vision. I needed ambition. I needed a mission to be this submission with no intermission. I see the collision, the crash, and the distance. They coming off track. No, no. When they ask what the motive, don't talk like a show. They all about to see what I mean in the moment. I got to keep going. I'm shaking the dice and they're kicking the rolling. They already know. Ryan, we got one thing for you. We wanted to give you this. This was our favorite pic as we were doing research. Oh, that's sweet. Just the one that stuck with us. Tune out the noise, play the long game.

Oh, you guys are awesome.

I know you got photos everywhere, but I just—

No, but I don't have one up here. I'll put it up here, actually. Thanks, guys. That's super thoughtful of you guys.

After the podcast wrapped up, when we were in the truck, I decided that it was time to finally pop the question. I wanted to invite Ryan to this year's Hoop Group, a basketball event I throw with 25 of the best people I know. My ideal conference would be a place I go and I play ball for like 3, 4 hours til we're dead. We go hit the sauna, the plunge, we sort of recover. But it's a group of, you know, just 20, 25 of the most inspiring, interesting people we know.

We should, we should do it here. Like, I'll show you, but, um, it'd actually be fun to do it at the Jazz facility.

Yeah.

And like, you could totally plan when they're on the road. And like, because it's, it's really clear. Like, there's just windows, and then you've got it all right there with the chefs. Like, everything. And like, it's the craziest thing you've ever seen. The whole operation.

I mean, if I'm being honest, I had no idea Ryan would say that, but now I was excited to go see the Jazz facility, which was also cool because Ryan's a guy who spent most of his career in software building apps. It's a reminder that you always got to keep learning and reinventing yourself.

You've got to become an expert in every business that you're a part of. You think about a sports team, you're a payments company, you're a security company, um, your events company, you're in events, you're in the music business. I mean, it's not about streaming anymore. It's definitely about touring, right? And so you're, you're in that business, media business. Yeah, you're in the digital media as well as online. You're a social media brand. Like, you actually are the sum of all these businesses. You know, we're an audience for a lot of this.

So this is, this is Sean. He runs college scouting for them. Give me the, give me the scouting report on Ryan's game. Listen, right now you can see Ryan is I'm tired, so you won't see the best version of Ryan right now because fatigue is gonna— you see that? Oh my gosh, he heard me talking, just banks in the 3. So we have a tradition after every podcast, we feast. We usually don't eat very much before, but afterwards we go feast, and we try to do it of something where the guest is. So we'll ask them for their favorite restaurant, a sandwich shop nearby, or something that's local that we get to go have as an experience as a team together, because, you know, You do a bunch of work, you're not just here to work, you're here to enjoy. So this one, we're at the practice facility. He's playing basketball right there. This is how the team eats. They have a chef here, so we're getting to eat like the players do, which is the kind of core experience, core memory that I'm gonna remember from the end of this. We got a little surprise, surprise and delight for 'em. Retro, vintage, Karl Malone, John Stockton, Chip Hornacek. We're converted. We're fully converted.

Look at this.

You spent one day with this guy.

All right, is that where— hey, we're building the brand one brick at a time.

My request is bring the retro warm-ups back for one game. All right.

Oh yeah, for sure.

Fans would go crazy.

Bring everything back. We got a winner this time though. The only one happy about those finals is MJ.

We got a ways to go. Fair enough, fair enough.

But no, it was a cool moment. You guys good?

Yeah, we're good, man. We're wrapped up. That's it. That's Behind the Pod Episode 2. Ryan, thank you for doing it, man. We really appreciate you having us out here.

A lot of hoops today.

Yeah, a lot of hoops.