PodCrash with Matt Ebert

Shadi Bakour had negative $400 in the bank and 15,000 unsold bottles of water collecting dust in an investor's warehouse. Eleven years later PATHWATER is in every Chanel in the US, in all 50 states, and has kept more than 750 million single-use plastic bottles out of landfills and oceans.

In this episode he breaks down the parts most founders never talk about: the year he made zero dollars driving Uber and waiting tables, the morning he and his co-founder mapped every 7-Eleven in Northern California at 4am, the free-case shelf-space deal that worked every single time, and how the team got into San Francisco International by booking flights on Expedia and cancelling them — every day, for months — just to get past security and pitch the retailers inside.

He also explains why being "super naive" was the advantage, why he'd rather get a fast no, why Coca-Cola and Pepsi left them alone for years, and the one metric he runs the company by instead of revenue.

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0:00 Cold open
1:07 Intro
1:51 Growing up, immigrant parents, hating consulting
3:15 The CVS parking lot idea
5:31 "We were super naive" and why it helped
8:25 The 10-year-old calculating a doctor's revenue
11:03 Zero dollars, driving Uber, waiting tables
14:38 Negative $400 and 15,000 bottles in a warehouse
16:57 The 7-Eleven pivot: every store in NorCal
18:49 The free-case shelf-space play
20:38 Why Whole Foods failed and 7-Eleven worked
21:50 The JP Morgan moment he almost took
24:19 90 employees and dividing the roles
25:32 The SFO takeover and the Expedia hack
29:48 Why a fast no is better than a slow maybe
33:23 Kevin Hart, Guy Fieri and the first celebrity yes
36:48 What stops Coca-Cola from copying this
39:02 Salesforce, Chanel and 1,200 co-brand partners
42:54 Learning to be extroverted on purpose
46:04 Brainwashing himself on the commute
46:44 $27K year one and taking seven people to Tony Robbins
50:03 "You are the bottleneck for your business"
51:12 What he would take back
52:47 Paul Polman and the 10-billion-bottle goal
56:27 Would he ever run a public company
58:35 Fatherhood, swim lessons and the phone lockbox
1:02:24 Who he would champion

In December 2008, James D. White took over a public company that had almost no cash left. The previous management team had burned through $100 million, made a string of bad real estate deals, and left the market cap heading one direction. He walked into the Great Recession with a smoothie chain that didn't sell anything hot, in cities where it was winter.

He told the board he needed six months to figure it out. Inside 45 days he'd moved on two executives. Inside seven years the market cap was up 500%.

In this conversation he goes through all of it: how he raised money for a company with none, the anonymous index-card exercise he ran in his first week, the pitch he made to get the job in the first place — "you can give me any 10 people and I'll get more out of them than nine out of ten people on the planet" — and the executives he admits he kept far too long because he's loyal to a fault.

Before Jamba: Coca-Cola, Ralston Purina, SVP at Gillette, and an $8 billion business at Safeway. Since: twenty-plus years in boardrooms, including Cava, and two books written with his daughter Christa.

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00:00 "You can give me any 10 people"
01:30 The résumé: Coke, Purina, Gillette, Safeway, CEO
05:00 The fifth-grade class that almost decided his life
08:00 Why he hunts for the superpower, not the flaw
09:30 Running a team 15 years older than him at 24
12:00 Being the boss vs. actually being followed
15:00 The pitch that got him the CEO job
17:30 How he reads a company in his first week
20:00 120 anonymous index cards and four questions
23:30 Taking over a company with no cash in December 2008
25:00 The $100 million his predecessors burned
27:00 Selling oatmeal in a blizzard to stay alive
29:30 The executives gone inside 45 days
32:00 "Loyal to a fault" — the call he should have made
35:00 When your management team outgrows the company
37:30 Human capital is financial capital
40:00 The bathroom test
41:30 Picking up the trash in the parking lot
43:00 Culture when you're not in the room
46:00 "Good intentions don't drive outcomes"
48:30 Coaching CEOs who don't know what their people think
51:00 Bad boards, useless directors, and "shadow government"
54:00 What he tells people who want the chair
56:30 The books he's handed out by the thousand
59:00 His father worked as a skycap until 89
62:30 The sister he'd put up against anyone

John Paul DeJoria started John Paul Mitchell Systems with $700 while living in his car with his two-year-old son. Thirty-eight years later he sold Patrón to Bacardi in a deal valued at $5.1 billion.

He tells Matt what actually happened in between: foster care at nine, on his own at eleven, homeless twice, selling encyclopedias door to door for $150 a week, and the string of jobs he says made the whole thing possible — "I couldn't have started John Paul Mitchell Systems in 1980 with $10 million, let alone $700, if I hadn't learned what I learned first."

Also: why the first check he wrote after the Patrón sale was for $50 million and went straight to charity, why he locked Paul Mitchell into a 360-year trust so that nobody — including his own family — can ever sell it, the number he threw out that made the buyers laugh at him, and how a guy who rode with the Hells Angels ended up building a $5 billion tequila brand.

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Steven Galanis had the idea for Cameo at his grandmother's funeral. Four years later the company had gone from roughly $300,000 to $100 million in revenue with no marketing spend, was the fastest-growing consumer marketplace in the world, and hit a $1 billion valuation. Then the vaccines came out, demand dropped 60% almost overnight, and a banker sat him down in Miami with a binder he called "the sea of red."

In this conversation he walks through all of it without spin: the launch night where nobody bought anything and his only investor quit, the board member who told him to cut half the company and was right when he only cut 25%, what $165 million of preferred stock does to your employees' equity when the valuation collapses, and what it actually takes to recapitalize and get profitable again.

Plus why the internet created a generation of people more famous than rich, why 15 minutes of fame now lasts 15 years, and the line from a board member that changed how he ran the company: "You've been Michael Jordan. It's time to be Phil Jackson."

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Jay Abraham has consulted in over 1,000 industries and 7,124 niches, almost all of it on the front lines rather than from a stage. He got married at 18, had two kids at 20, had no education, and nobody in his family had ever made more than $25,000 a year — so the only people who'd hire him were entrepreneurs who paid on results. That's where he found the thing that made him: nobody in any industry has a clue how any other industry actually works.

In this conversation he walks through how that one realization grew Icy Hot 21,000% in a year, pulled $9 million out of Entrepreneur magazine's dead archive, and quintupled a PVC pipe company's sales by giving salespeople 100% of the first sale. He explains the 30 leverage points hiding in a business you already own, why a bottom-line 10X should always come before a top-line one, and why he thinks almost every company is using zero of the 125 referral systems that exist.

Then at 68:49 the interview flips, and Jay spends the second half interviewing Matt — the wrecked car at seventeen, the $100,000 in credit card cash advances that went into four Subway franchises, and what actually happened in the room when he stopped looking for debt and started talking to private equity.

Dr. Doug Brackmann is a psychologist who works with Navy SEALs, PGA pros and founders — and he teaches meditation by putting a rifle in your hands and asking you to hit a target a mile away.

He was a high school dropout living in a car. Now he's the guy those people call when the money arrives and the emptiness doesn't go away. In this conversation he explains the genetics behind the entrepreneurial brain, why 87% of lottery winners are bankrupt within five years, why hunting organizations physically cannot scale, and what happens to a founder's identity the day the phone stops ringing after an exit.

Matt gets into his own version of it — what he's watched happen to sellers through the Crash Champions acquisitions, and why the check was never the hard part.

Find Dr. Brackmann and take the driven assessment at iamdriven.com. Books: Driven and Sheep and Wolves.

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00:00 INTRO
01:50 Why entrepreneurs are unemployable
04:43 High school dropout who lived in a car
07:48 The alcoholism gene and the genetics of "driven"
11:05 Inside the driven brain: 9 to 13 thoughts at once
15:12 Hunters vs. farmers, and why school was built for farmers
18:54 The boredom gene and reward deficiency
21:46 What happens when you ask a driven person who they are
24:51 Why you can only scale a farm, never a hunt
28:21 Hiring farmers around you, and talking to your CFO
31:38 The wolf pack, the herd, and why drivens end up alone
35:32 Self-sabotage: 87% of lottery winners go bankrupt
38:37 Losing your identity after you sell the company
41:30 Trauma, somatic healing, and what the body records
45:36 Boredom is a lie
48:04 Sleep, willpower, and what meditation actually is
51:09 Energy, intuition, and the spidey sense
54:02 The shadow, Carl Jung, and the midlife turn inward
56:42 Where to find Dr. Brackmann and the driven assessment
58:33 Closing: the person he'd champion

Mick Hunt - USA Today bestselling author, host of Mick Unplugged, and founder who sold his first insurance agency for $17 million three years after starting it from scratch - sits down to talk about where emotional intelligence actually comes from. For him it wasn't a leadership seminar; it was being ten years old and learning to read his father's moods to protect his mother and sister. He makes the case that your "why" is meaningless until you find your "because," that composure is a trainable skill rather than a personality trait, and that the whole cult of the difficult journey is a trap - if there's an elevator, take it. Plus: how he landed Damon John, Chris Voss and Robert Irvine as mentors by simply asking, why he'll never use AI to replace a person but will replace the parts of their job they refuse to automate, the interview question that reveals who someone really is, and why he'd rather you tell him no fast than yes slowly.

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Jack Raines - writer, Slow Ventures investor, and author of the new book Young Money - built his career by going viral making fun of LinkedIn, then turned it into a job helping invest over a billion dollars in startups and creators. In this episode he makes the case against "follow your passion," explains why he backpacked the world at 24 on purpose (with an exit ramp built in), and lays out why creators with engaged audiences are the next generation of startup founders. He also tells the story of the satirical post - claiming he ate free at 527 Manhattan hotels - that got him tagged to the NYPD and summoned to his business-school dean's office. Part career playbook, part comedy, part contrarian investing thesis on where money and media are headed.

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Netflix comedian Ralph Barbosa sits down for one of his most honest interviews yet. 

He gets into his blue-collar roots learning auto body in his dad's Dallas shop, how wrecking his own cars pushed him into the trade, and knocking out every comedy goal he ever set. 

Now he's chasing something completely different - cars, his YouTube channel Formula Bean, and starting his career over on his own terms.

It's a candid conversation about ambition, knowing when you've "made it," and why the grind everyone glorifies isn't always worth chasing.

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