• 10 months ago
0:00 From Refugee To Sriracha Billionaire: The Man Behind One Of America’s Favorite Condiments
9:45 Billionaire Gautam Adani Loses More Than $60 Billion This Year Following Fraud Allegations
17:07 The Birkin Bag's Iconic History And Why It's So Expensive
21:48 How South African Billionaire Christo Wiese Sued His Way Back Into The Billionaire Ranks
26:32 How Alabama’s Only Billionaire "Yella Fella" Jimmy Rane Saved His Hometown
41:03 How A College Dropout Built A $2.9 Billion Real Estate Empire
50:40 Meet The Billionaire King Of Rolling Papers
1:05:48 From Pints to Joints: Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder’s New Cannabis Company
1:16:42 The Mysterious Death Of Forbes Under 30 African Entrepreneur Christian Kazadi
1:30: 52 This Entrepreneur Did His Homework On Airport Restaurants Next Came The Profits
Transcript
00:00:00 So the US hot sauce market is estimated to be around $1.5 billion as of 2021.
00:00:05 The largest in that business is Tabasco, which is made by McElhenney, a family-owned company.
00:00:10 Second is McCormick, which is publicly traded.
00:00:12 They own Frank's Red Hot and they also own Cholula, which they purchased for $800 million in late 2020.
00:00:19 And then after that, we have Huifang, which is around 9 or 10% of the market.
00:00:24 So they're still much smaller than the two biggest players in the market,
00:00:28 but they have grown a lot in the last two decades or so until now.
00:00:32 So Huifang Foods is a company that's best known for its biggest product, sriracha.
00:00:37 They're based in Orindale, California.
00:00:39 They were founded by David Tran, who came to the US as a Vietnamese immigrant in 1979.
00:00:45 And obviously their biggest product is sriracha.
00:00:48 That's what everyone knows them for, the iconic rooster logo on the bottle with the green squeeze cap.
00:00:53 They also have two other products that they make.
00:00:55 One is called sambal oelek, which is very similar to the sriracha hot sauce, but it's not blended.
00:01:02 And then chili garlic, which is very similar, but also without the vinegar and the sugar.
00:01:07 So what's really interesting about Huifang is that it's never done any direct advertising.
00:01:12 It's only pretty much grown through word of mouth.
00:01:14 Initially, its main customers were Chinese-American, Vietnamese-American communities, restaurants, markets in LA and Southern California.
00:01:22 And it's just spread organically since then.
00:01:26 You can actually sort of see its growth based on the factories that it's had.
00:01:29 It started out with a 2,500 square foot facility in Chinatown.
00:01:33 In 1987, they moved to a much larger one.
00:01:36 He eventually expanded that to around more than 200,000 square feet.
00:01:39 And then in 2013, they moved to what is now their main facility in Orindale, east of LA.
00:01:44 That's 650,000 square feet.
00:01:47 They can make up to 18,000 bottles of sriracha an hour.
00:01:50 Sriracha is now everywhere, right?
00:01:52 It's really become a cult product.
00:01:53 And it's a very unique example of a product that has gone from being, I guess, fairly niche initially,
00:02:00 to being so widely used to the point that it's now the third largest hot sauce in the country,
00:02:06 according to market research from IbisWorld.
00:02:09 And it's only behind Tabasco, which has been around since 1868.
00:02:14 And then Frank's Red Hot, which is owned by McCormick, right?
00:02:17 A publicly traded spices giant.
00:02:19 So for a company like Huifang that was only founded in 1980 to reach that level,
00:02:24 competing with a company that's got more than 150 years of history at Tabasco,
00:02:28 and then a massive publicly traded corporation is really astounding.
00:02:33 So David Tran, he's the founder of Huifang Foods.
00:02:38 He first came to the US in the summer of 1979.
00:02:42 He was born and grew up in Vietnam.
00:02:44 During the Vietnam War, he was in the South Vietnamese army.
00:02:48 He didn't fight, but he was drafted to it like everyone of his age was at the time.
00:02:52 He had actually started producing a hot sauce using the chilies that were grown on his brother's land
00:02:58 in South Vietnam after the war ended.
00:03:01 In 1978, there was a lot of pressure from the communist Vietnamese government
00:03:04 on citizens of Chinese origin, like David Tran and his family, to leave the country.
00:03:09 And so he and his son and his wife, as well as other members of his family,
00:03:14 ended up leaving Vietnam as refugees.
00:03:16 They had to leave on different trawlers.
00:03:19 He left on a freighter called Huifang in December 1978,
00:03:23 which is actually how he got the name of the company eventually.
00:03:25 All that he brought with him was a locket and 100 ounces of gold that he hid in cans of condensed milk
00:03:31 so that they couldn't be taken by the communist authorities.
00:03:35 He landed up in Hong Kong after a brief journey on the freighter.
00:03:40 In Hong Kong, he was at a refugee camp for eight months.
00:03:44 And then in the summer of 1979, he was resettled to Boston.
00:03:47 However, Boston was cold.
00:03:49 They didn't really end up liking it that much.
00:03:51 And his brother-in-law had actually resettled to L.A.
00:03:55 He mentioned that he would call his brother-in-law,
00:03:58 and his brother-in-law had told him there were chilies available in the markets in L.A.,
00:04:03 which he was not able to find in Boston.
00:04:06 So they ended up moving to L.A. in January of 1980.
00:04:10 That's when he started looking for freshly grown chilies, jalapenos in local markets in L.A.
00:04:16 He sold some of the gold he had brought with him to open up a 2,500-square-foot factory in Chinatown,
00:04:22 started producing the hot sauce that we now know as sriracha,
00:04:26 which was similar to the recipe he had been making back in Vietnam.
00:04:29 In the first two months of business in 1980, the company brought in $2,300.
00:04:34 And he would actually sell the bottles of hot sauce out of a blue Chevy van,
00:04:39 driving around L.A. to different Vietnamese and Chinese markets to sell it.
00:04:44 So Huifang, I think because it started out as a product that was mainly used by
00:04:53 various types of Asian restaurants and Asian communities in the U.S.,
00:04:56 it sort of grew out organically from those communities and those customers.
00:05:00 It wasn't sort of advertised or pitched to a lot of different places.
00:05:04 It's used by a lot of sushi restaurants around the U.S.
00:05:07 There was actually a study made in 2015 by the NPD Group,
00:05:10 which showed that nearly one in ten households in the U.S. stock sriracha,
00:05:15 and actually higher than that if you look at households with people under the age of 35.
00:05:21 It's also kind of iconic, right? Everyone knows the rooster logo, the squeeze cap.
00:05:26 It's sort of dependable as a very spicy hot sauce you'll find anywhere.
00:05:30 And it's interesting, there was a documentary made in 2013 on sriracha by Griffin Hammond.
00:05:36 He talks to all these people who are big fans, and a lot of people don't even know that sriracha is made in the U.S.
00:05:42 If you look at the bottle, it's written in Vietnamese and Chinese.
00:05:45 People have this idea that it's more authentic because they might believe that it comes from outside the U.S.
00:05:51 It's not, right? It's a product made by David Tran and his family, he's American.
00:05:56 But obviously he came from Vietnam, he started making it in Vietnam.
00:05:59 It has that authenticity and that simple recipe and the ingredients that he's used have never changed.
00:06:05 The recipe's always been the same, and you know what you're getting when you're getting sriracha, right?
00:06:09 It's very identifiable, and they focus on that product, right?
00:06:13 They also have hasan malalek and chili garlic, but they're a much smaller source of revenue for them.
00:06:19 It's really mainly sriracha that they sell, and they're so highly identified with that product.
00:06:24 Over the years, Uyghur has had to deal with some challenges, including some lawsuits, shortages of chilies,
00:06:30 and also counterfeiters that have tried to sell their product illegally.
00:06:34 One of the first ones that sort of got a lot of news coverage was when the city of Irwindale,
00:06:38 which is where their facility is located, sued Huy Fong for basically odors that the factory was emitting.
00:06:46 And this ended up going on for a little while. Huy Fong actually opened up their factory to the whole community.
00:06:51 They started doing factory tours. Eventually the city dropped this lawsuit.
00:06:55 It's interesting, this actually got a lot of coverage around the U.S.
00:06:59 Senator Ted Cruz actually asked Huy Fong if they wanted to move to Texas to get away from Irwindale.
00:07:05 That didn't end up happening. And then another lawsuit that happened was in 2021.
00:07:09 Huy Fong used to have an exclusive chili producer up until a few years ago called Underwood Ranches,
00:07:14 based in California, and they would produce all of the jalapenos that Huy Fong needed.
00:07:19 There was a lawsuit over sort of the agreements that they'd had with Underwood Ranches.
00:07:23 The lawsuit has since concluded. And what's interesting about sort of the production process
00:07:27 is that the chili growing season is pretty short. And so if the harvest goes bad,
00:07:32 that means that they're not going to have enough chilies to produce the sauce for the rest of the year.
00:07:36 And so they had all the production with this one producer.
00:07:39 Now they have multiple producers, I believe, in California and in northern Mexico.
00:07:44 So that's in the past now. But that was a major challenge for them in terms of having to deal with that lawsuit
00:07:49 and also on sort of how they were going to get their chili production.
00:07:53 More recently, in 2022, there was a severe chili shortage in the spring.
00:07:59 Huy Fong actually sent out a notice to a lot of their customers saying that it was going to severely impact
00:08:05 their ability to produce any sriracha. And so there's a lot of news articles around the U.S. about the sriracha shortage.
00:08:11 I actually spoke to an analyst who was looking at Nielsen data that showed that sales initially spiked
00:08:16 after this announcement, as people were trying to hoard all the sriracha. That's passed now.
00:08:20 They've been able to sort of get back to regular production.
00:08:24 And also the fact now that they have sort of a diversified sourcing for their chilies.
00:08:29 But when there are severe weather events like happened in 2022, and there's only one chili growing season,
00:08:34 that can sort of severely impact how much you're able to produce for the rest of the year.
00:08:39 David Tran, by all accounts, is a very humble person. He is fairly press shy.
00:08:45 He has done a few interviews over the years.
00:08:47 And what's really interesting is one of his main phrases I've seen a lot of that he said to me also over email,
00:08:52 is that he's just focused on making a rich man's hot sauce at a poor man's price.
00:08:56 He's not changing the ingredients. He's just trying to keep making the same product and make more of it as long as more people want it.
00:09:02 He's also said in the past that his American dream was never to become a billionaire.
00:09:07 You know, he said in the past that he's received offers over time to buy the company and he's not interested.
00:09:12 He just wants to pass it on to his family and to keep growing it as much as possible.
00:09:15 And that's what's happened over the last 40 plus years that the company's been in business.
00:09:19 Especially in the last 20 years, the company's grown so much.
00:09:22 And in some years, even they've grown even by around 20 percent each year.
00:09:27 In some years, it's this phenomenal growth and a very humble backstory.
00:09:31 An immigrant refugee from Vietnam built this company, grew it organically and is not interested in selling it
00:09:37 or bringing out new products or changing the recipe that has brought the company and the family so much success.
00:09:45 Gautam Adami is the chairman of the Adani Group.
00:09:49 It's an Indian conglomerate that has interest in nearly every sector of the Indian economy,
00:09:54 from ports and shipping to media, construction and energy.
00:09:59 Adani was originally a college dropout.
00:10:02 His dad ran a textile shop, but he spurned his father's footsteps and launched his own commodities export firm.
00:10:09 And over the last three and a half decades, Adani has expanded his business interest through savvy dealmaking,
00:10:16 as well as by cultivating ties with Narendra Modi, India's prime minister and former chief minister of Gujarat,
00:10:23 an Indian state where Adani made his fortune.
00:10:26 At the peak of Adani's net worth, which was just in December, Forbes valued him at around $135 billion,
00:10:34 making him the third richest person in the world at the time.
00:10:38 In 2022 alone, Adani gained $50 billion to his net worth.
00:10:44 Even while other stocks fell, all the Adani Group companies did well.
00:10:49 Hindenburg Research alleges in a stunning 32,000 word report that the Adani Group has been engaged in a decades-long scheme
00:10:58 of stock manipulation and accounting fraud designed to enrich themselves, the Adani principals, at the expense of outside shareholders.
00:11:07 Since Hindenburg's report, the Adani Group has lost over $100 billion in market value,
00:11:13 a stunning collapse over a period of just eight or nine days.
00:11:18 Some of the key allegations made by Hindenburg are one, that Adani has enlisted a vast network of allies and offshore proxies
00:11:26 to hold stock in his publicly listed companies.
00:11:29 The purpose of this maneuver, Hindenburg alleges, is so that Adani can skirt Indian regulations
00:11:35 that require any publicly traded firm to have at least 25% of its flow, meaning 25% of all outstanding stock,
00:11:43 held by non-promoters, people who are not employed by or affiliated with the Adani Group.
00:11:49 Hindenburg honed in on Vinod Adani, his brother, who specifically manages a labyrinth of offshore shell entities,
00:11:58 many of them registered in Mauritius.
00:12:01 Secondly, Hindenburg alleges that the Adani Group uses offshore entities and proxies
00:12:06 to move money around between the Adani Group's various subsidiaries.
00:12:11 Hindenburg alleges the purpose of this is to misconstrue the actual state of the various Adani companies' finances.
00:12:18 Now, Hindenburg presented several examples of offshore shells sending money through onshore private Adani companies
00:12:26 onto the listed public companies, seemingly for the purpose, according to Hindenburg, of engineering Adani's accounting,
00:12:35 such as bolstering its reported profit and cash flows and cushioning its capital balances,
00:12:41 and essentially making these entities seem more creditworthy than they actually are,
00:12:47 which is a key part of how Adani has grown is by issuing vast amounts of debt.
00:12:53 It has about $20 billion in net debt.
00:12:57 The Adani Group has denied Hindenburg's report, calling it a malicious combination of selective misinformation and concealed fact.
00:13:04 Adani has also said that its financial practices and intercompany dealings are in line with applicable accounting standards and applicable law.
00:13:13 I think in the US and Europe, the reaction was by and large one of shock.
00:13:18 Investors and business people have been aware of the Adani Group and of its meteoric rise over the last few years,
00:13:24 but most were ignorant to some of the accounting irregularities, extreme debt loads,
00:13:30 and other questionable corporate governance matters that were bubbling under the surface.
00:13:35 In India, meanwhile, the Hindenburg allegations were shocking but less surprising.
00:13:40 That's because India's Securities and Exchange Board, its main financial regulator,
00:13:45 has investigated companies under the Adani Group umbrella previously.
00:13:50 Those investigations did not find evidence of any wrongdoing.
00:13:54 What's been most pronounced in India is the diverging opinion among the broader public.
00:14:00 On the one hand, there are those who identify with the Adani Group's embrace of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Indian nationalism,
00:14:08 a theme that the Adani Group has turned to during this difficult period.
00:14:12 But there are plenty of others, such as members of the media, intellectuals, lawyers, the like,
00:14:19 who have been criticizing the Adani Group and its business practices for a while now.
00:14:24 They're using the Hindenburg allegations and the international attention those allegations have drawn
00:14:29 to press for action from India's financial regulator.
00:14:33 Adani has cultivated allies, not just at home but also abroad.
00:14:38 We saw this on display just last week when one of his companies, Adani Enterprises,
00:14:44 was trying to push through a $2.5 billion stock sale.
00:14:49 This sale was thrown into question by Hindenburg's report, with there being fewer subscribers to the stock.
00:14:57 But we saw Abu Dhabi come to the rescue with a $400 million injection of capital on January 31st.
00:15:06 This ultimately wasn't enough to prevent the collapse of the stock sale, which the Adani Group abruptly and somewhat mysteriously canceled the following day.
00:15:17 But also last week, we saw Guatemala Adani in Israel shaking hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
00:15:24 for the ceremonial signing of the Adani Group's takeover of the Haifa port, Israel's largest port.
00:15:31 So just due to the sheer size and scale of the Adani Group's enterprise, it does have allies abroad
00:15:39 whose goodwill and whose financial clout might prove dire for the Adani Group in the days ahead.
00:15:47 On the one hand, Hindenburg's allegations haven't done much to affect Adani Group companies.
00:15:52 The ports are still receiving ships. Energy companies are still producing energy.
00:15:57 On the other hand, the Hindenburg allegations have really upended the Adani Group's financial picture.
00:16:03 The stocks have crashed, which means Adani personally is less wealthy.
00:16:07 But more critically for the businesses themselves, banks such as Citigroup have already said they're no longer going to be accepting Adani stock as collateral for loans.
00:16:18 The Adani Group depends on loans as part of its growth strategy, and it's a highly leveraged business.
00:16:25 So we could see this affects the company's financial picture.
00:16:30 Similarly, the Adani Group has already faced margin calls on loans that it has outstanding for which it's posted Adani company stock as collateral.
00:16:41 Because of the collapse in price of that stock, it's going to have to post more collateral on those loans.
00:16:47 Going forward, the markets are going to be keeping a close eye on the Adani Group's existing debt pile.
00:16:54 But also they're going to be keeping an eye on India's political situation and whether financial regulators in India start to investigate the Adani Group.
00:17:05 The top handbag collectors in the world are interested in handbags made by Hermès.
00:17:17 Hermès is a designer brand today, but it was founded in 1837 as a harness workshop.
00:17:22 In the 1880s, Hermès expanded into saddles.
00:17:26 And then at the turn of the century, when the automobile was invented, it was very important for Hermès to diversify their offerings in order to maintain relevance in this changing world.
00:17:35 And one of the pieces that were created by Hermès were handbags.
00:17:40 I am the head of sales here at Sufis for handbags and accessories.
00:17:46 We have both a buy now and an auction platform for our handbags and accessories.
00:17:52 Sufis is the premier destination for luxury and artwork.
00:17:57 For us in handbags and accessories, we established ourselves in 2018 with our very first auction.
00:18:04 And then we launched our buy now platform in 2020.
00:18:08 So one thing that differentiates us from other competitors is that we offer both buy now and auction for our clients.
00:18:16 So the Birkin has been around since 1984.
00:18:19 And it's named after Jane Birkin, who is a French celebrity who met actually at the time the creative director for Hermès and family member.
00:18:31 The Hermès Birkin is one of the most collectible bags made by Hermès.
00:18:34 It was designed in the 1980s.
00:18:36 It was created when Jane Birkin was seated next to an Hermès executive on a flight.
00:18:42 She had her signature straw tote bag.
00:18:44 She was shoving it in an overhead compartment and it fell out, it tumbled out, everything fell to the floor.
00:18:49 And the gentleman sitting next to her said, "Why don't you have a bag with pockets?"
00:18:53 And she said, "I will when Hermès makes me one."
00:18:55 She just so happened to be sitting next to the CEO of Hermès.
00:18:58 And the two of them together sketched up the idea of the Birkin bag.
00:19:02 This was in 1984 and three years later, this bag was then released to the public.
00:19:07 It has a cult following.
00:19:10 It's supposed to be the easiest to use bag, the thing that is such a symbol of status for some people.
00:19:17 My responsibilities at Christie's include advising clients around the world on their handbag collections.
00:19:25 I put together handbag auctions, whether it's from one single client or from multiple clients,
00:19:30 put together to create sales during special moments at Christie's like luxury week.
00:19:35 I advise clients on their purchases.
00:19:37 The one great thing about a Birkin is its silhouette will never change, essentially.
00:19:43 It's classic in every sense of the word.
00:19:46 But one of the things that they're known for is the different sizes and colors.
00:19:50 So each season they release a new size, a new color,
00:19:55 and that's kind of what people look for when they're trying to find one of the Birkins for themselves.
00:20:02 And the designers that created these handbags 50 years, no, 100 years ago were ingenious,
00:20:08 and they've created iconic forms that today are still resonating with collectors and handbag shoppers around the world.
00:20:14 It's iconic because when you look at it, it doesn't scream Hermès, it doesn't scream a brand,
00:20:20 but you know that it's a Birkin and you know that it's Hermès.
00:20:23 So, you know, it's hard to obtain because there's only so many made each year,
00:20:28 and the want for it kind of outweighs the accessibility.
00:20:32 These are made in such an exquisite way that not only is it the materials
00:20:38 and the craftsmen that are expert in this method, and these forms are essential.
00:20:43 So the Birkin looks exactly as it did in the 1980s.
00:20:46 The Kelly has the same form as it did when it was first created in the 1930s.
00:20:50 And if you purchase one of these pieces, not only will the condition stay in an exquisite form,
00:20:56 but also the style will never become outdated.
00:20:59 You know, the Birkin really has been able to stand the test of time, and it's really due to how classic it is.
00:21:06 You know, even though trends come and go, because it is something that is so beautifully made and it is so classic,
00:21:13 it's been able to really outlive some of its other competitors.
00:21:16 So one of the most expensive bags sold at Sotheby's, we have an example of it here, is the Himalaya Kelly.
00:21:23 In our auction that happened this past September, we had one hammered for $350,000, roughly.
00:21:32 You know, and with this sale, Sotheby's set a record for a handbag being sold at auction within the United States and Europe.
00:21:39 The thing about handbags are they're such personal objects and such a reflection on your own style,
00:21:44 perhaps your job, where you live, that there really is something for everyone.
00:21:49 So Chris Tombisa is a retailing tycoon from South Africa.
00:21:53 And what makes him interesting is he was on the Forbes Billionaires List and our list of richest Africans up until 2018.
00:22:01 And then this huge Enron-like accounting scandal happened at his major asset, which was called Steinhoff International.
00:22:10 That knocked him off the billionaires list starting in March of 2018. And now he's back on the list.
00:22:15 Visa was worth $5.6 billion in early 2017.
00:22:19 By the time this accounting scandal was revealed in the end of 2017, in December 2017, the shares of Steinhoff fell like 90%.
00:22:28 I mean, he lost almost all the value.
00:22:30 So Visa's fortune fell first down to like $1.1 billion. And then he fell off the list altogether by March of 2018.
00:22:38 So the Steinhoff was kind of interesting. It was founded by a German who was building furniture.
00:22:44 And he was sourcing from East Germany. This is when the wall was still up between East and West Germany.
00:22:48 And he was sourcing from East Germany and selling to all over.
00:22:51 And then he heard that a lot of wood was growing in South Africa.
00:22:54 So he went to South Africa to see if he could get the supplies for furniture from there.
00:22:58 And then he opened, he got into doing furniture retail in South Africa.
00:23:02 And so there was a German billionaire, Bruno Steinhoff, also tied to this company.
00:23:07 But Steinhoff kept its European operations. And that's where most of the fraud allegedly was happening.
00:23:14 So Visa was the chairman of Steinhoff, not the CEO.
00:23:18 An outside forensic audit by PricewaterhousePwC found that he was not involved in the accounting fraud at all.
00:23:26 Since he came in, you know, after it had been going on for years.
00:23:30 The person who's going to be tried apparently in Germany, reportedly in Germany in April, is the former CEO, this guy Marcus Juste.
00:23:38 And he apparently organized most of the fraud, according to what I've read.
00:23:43 Most of it happened in the European arm of this company.
00:23:46 So the thing that kind of sticks in my brain is I read this really interesting book called Steinheist, which is about the accounting fraud at Steinhoff.
00:23:55 And it points out that in 2007, an analyst at the South African arm of JP Morgan put out a 56-page report highlighting the accounting issues and questions and concerns about transactions with Steinhoff.
00:24:14 And then two years later, in 2009, the book recounts a meeting that Visa had with another analyst at another firm who had a 40-slide presentation detailing his concerns about shoddy transactions, suspiciously low tax rates, all kinds of things that didn't really add up.
00:24:35 And so in a sense, you know, I feel like Visa was warned that there was something amiss with this company.
00:24:42 But yet, six years after he met with his analyst, he sold his company to Steinhoff anyway.
00:24:50 I don't mean to say he had it coming to him, but it's sort of interesting what we choose to pay attention to and what we choose to ignore.
00:24:56 I think when people have questions, it's good to kind of follow your instincts on these questions and pay attention to the doubters.
00:25:09 So in addition to his settlement with Steinhoff that gives him cash and shares in the company, in PEPCOR, in the clothing chain, he's got about 10% of ShopRite, the supermarket chain that's like a Walmart of Southern Africa.
00:25:25 And he's also got holdings in a few other companies.
00:25:28 One of them is called Invicta, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and has investments in China, Singapore, and the UK.
00:25:37 Another firm, Tradehold, has industrial businesses in South Africa and also commercial property in the UK.
00:25:43 And then he's got a Luxembourg-listed firm called Brait, which owns stakes in the Virgin Active health clubs and in two South African firms, a fashion label and a consumer goods business.
00:25:55 Most of those investments are not nearly as valuable right now as his ShopRite stake, which is the most valuable thing he owns right now.
00:26:02 Avisa is 81 years old.
00:26:05 He basically said that he was shocked that this fraud made it past all of these gatekeepers, the internal auditors, the external auditors, the South African Reserve Bank, the foreign banks that were lending money to Steinhoff.
00:26:21 For somebody whose fortune got mostly wiped out in 2018, and he went through four years of a lawsuit before a settlement, he seems pretty much at peace with the world.
00:26:34 [music]
00:26:42 Jimmy Rain is the founder and CEO of Great Southern Wood Preserving, based in Abbeville, Alabama.
00:26:49 Great Southern is one of the country's largest treaters of lumber.
00:26:53 So basically, they take raw lumber from other companies' sawmills primarily and apply chemical preservatives to ensure that it lasts a lifetime.
00:27:03 And based on Great Southern's $2 billion of 2022 sales, we estimate that the company is worth about $1 billion.
00:27:10 [music]
00:27:12 Jimmy actually took over the company when the father of his first wife tragically died in a car accident in 1970.
00:27:21 He was a farmer, and like most farmers, he was land-rich but cash-poor.
00:27:27 So the CPA that was advising the family said, "Sell the tractors, sell the plows, sell all the personal property, but don't sell any land."
00:27:38 And this little treating plant sat on six and a half acres of land next to the farm.
00:27:44 And so they did that.
00:27:46 They sold everything except this one little treating plant.
00:27:51 And they had one offer from Mr. Ralph Reynolds here in Abbeville.
00:27:54 He was a pulpwood dealer.
00:27:56 He offered them $14,000 for the little treating plant and the six and a half acres that it sat on.
00:28:04 The brother wanted to take it.
00:28:06 My wife was trying to do what the CPA told her.
00:28:10 So they kind of got in a disagreement, and I was in law school trying to mediate my first case.
00:28:16 So I came up with the idea that I would lease the land and sell the equipment.
00:28:22 So I made an offer to them.
00:28:24 Well, I'll buy the equipment for $10,000, and I'll lease the land, and everything will go away, and I'll stay in law school, and I'll finish.
00:28:32 So my father said, "Jimmy, that's a very good idea, but what happens if you can't sell it?
00:28:37 You're going to sign a note for $10,000, but if you can't--oh, Dad, I can sell it.
00:28:41 I'm sure I can sell it.
00:28:43 But what if you can't?"
00:28:44 Anyway, he was right.
00:28:45 I couldn't sell it.
00:28:47 So now I've got a treating plant.
00:28:50 So I finished law school and came back here and opened a one-room law office on the 4th Avenue Square.
00:28:56 Two black telephones.
00:28:57 This would ring, I'd say, "Jimmy Ray in law office."
00:28:59 This would ring, I'd say, "Great Southern Wood Preserve."
00:29:02 So that's how it started, me and one other fellow, Lawson Curry.
00:29:06 Back then, the company was doing less than $100,000 of sales, so a fraction of what it does today.
00:29:12 I had no cash, no money, and money is the lifeblood of any business, and I struggled for a long, long time.
00:29:22 Trying to run the business, I would get up at 4:30 in the morning and go out and meet Lawson,
00:29:27 and we would get everything ready and start treating, come back and take a shower, practice law.
00:29:33 Till 4:30, then I'd go back and stay with him until we got finished.
00:29:38 Things really started to take off in the mid-'80s when Jimmy attended a Harvard Business School program
00:29:43 for the owners and managers of family-owned private companies.
00:29:47 And he was inspired by a case that he studied there about how Frank Perdue used marketing effectively
00:29:54 to turn "commodity chicken" into a household name.
00:29:58 Every time I would walk into a building supply store and try to talk to them about my product,
00:30:05 the only question they asked, "What's your price?"
00:30:08 And I knew we had the best product.
00:30:12 I knew we had the highest quality.
00:30:14 I knew the extent that we were going to to make a high-quality product and to give service, but it didn't matter.
00:30:21 So I needed some way to get the attention of that dealer.
00:30:25 I wanted to find some emotional thread that would weave through my area, and that was college football.
00:30:33 Jimmy had this insight based on his love of college football and the love of college football across the South
00:30:39 that if he were to bring in the big college football coaches, not only at his alma mater, Auburn,
00:30:45 but at rival Alabama and others throughout the South, if he were to bring them in as spokespeople,
00:30:50 that would really help grow his brand, and that certainly turned out to be the case.
00:30:55 I had known Pat for a long time.
00:30:57 We became friends, but when he got the job at Auburn in '81, and I went to Harvard in '84, '85, and '86,
00:31:06 and the idea came to me when I was at Harvard to try and use marketing to differentiate my product.
00:31:14 So I came back and I talked to Pat about it first, and he said, "Well, we'll try it.
00:31:19 We'll try it. See how it works."
00:31:21 This fence built with Osmo's pressure-treated pine from Great Southern Wood, the lumber with a 40-year guarantee.
00:31:28 Speaking of extra defense, ring and let me keep this.
00:31:32 So after years of doing commercials with the coaches, he'd sort of actually created this own character and brand for himself.
00:31:39 And you could argue maybe at that point he didn't really need the coaches as much.
00:31:42 So when he was thinking about, you know, with his marketing team what the next phase of the company's advertising would look like,
00:31:50 he ended up drawing on his love for old westerns and created this character called the Yellowfella, who is a cowboy played by Jimmy.
00:32:01 When we first started, we were using actors, and nothing was catching on.
00:32:07 Marty Marshall was my marketing professor at Harvard, and so I talked to Marty, and he said,
00:32:13 "Well," he said, "I think the problem you're having is that people are not connecting. It's just another commercial."
00:32:21 I really didn't have any plans to be on camera, but they walked in one day and had this storyboard for this cartoon cowboy.
00:32:31 And I said, "Do you really want me to do that?"
00:32:34 It was really, I thought, hokey, cartoonish, and it sort of evolved into Yellowfella.
00:32:42 Who are you, Mr. Fella?
00:32:45 Yellowfella.
00:32:47 I thought you were dead.
00:32:51 Not hardly.
00:32:52 I wanted to replicate the Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne figures of my youth.
00:33:02 Being in your 60s and out playing cowboys and Indians was a lot of fun.
00:33:06 I mean, we were shooting these commercials in the location that John Ford and John Wayne used.
00:33:11 It was like being a kid again, riding horses and shooting guns.
00:33:16 You just don't think about the other side effects.
00:33:20 Okay, now when people see this, they're going to recognize you, but that was kind of different for me.
00:33:27 I said I came here to rebuild the town with yellowwood, best there is for building outdoors.
00:33:33 Abbeville, Alabama, where Jimmy lives today and where he started the company and has kept it ever since,
00:33:43 is probably not exactly where you would expect to find the richest guy in Alabama.
00:33:49 It's a small town of 2,000 people, about a three-hour drive from Atlanta.
00:33:54 Jimmy grew up there. His family had been there long before he was born,
00:33:59 and he's chosen to keep his company there and live there today.
00:34:03 I think a big part of the attachment that he feels is the critical role that his own dad,
00:34:08 and everyone in Abbeville knows as Mr. Tony, played in the town's development in the 1950s.
00:34:14 My dad was a real entrepreneur. He came back here after World War II.
00:34:19 He wanted to open a nice restaurant, and he did. It was called the Village Inn.
00:34:23 Mr. Homer Carter was president of pepper manufacturing in Opelika.
00:34:28 And so he used to come through Abbeville on his way to his beach house at Panama City,
00:34:34 and he loved to stop at the restaurant and eat Dad's spaghetti.
00:34:39 So Mr. Homer came in one day, and he started asking Dad, he said,
00:34:43 "Tony," he said, "what kind of town do y'all have here? What kind of water supply? What kind of mayor?"
00:34:48 He said, "I've got a plant that I want to build and open. It's a textile plant,
00:34:53 and I'm trying to find a location to put it."
00:34:57 So they started talking and giving him all this information.
00:35:00 He said, "Well, can you get the president of the Chamber of Commerce?"
00:35:04 And he said, "We don't have a chairman." He said, "Oh, well, I'm sorry. We can't come anyplace.
00:35:08 They don't have a chairman." And Dad said, "Oh, boy, we'll get you one."
00:35:12 So they organized one, and he became the first president.
00:35:15 Mr. Carter's decision was between Abbeville and Cuthbert, Georgia.
00:35:20 And I always say that Dad's spaghetti is the one that won it, so he chose Abbeville,
00:35:24 and they came to town with 25 employees, and they started sowing uptown on the square.
00:35:31 And they grew that plant from 25 to 1,400.
00:35:35 To live here and grow up here was idyllic.
00:35:42 I mean, it was everything that you've ever seen in old movies.
00:35:46 That was what it was like.
00:35:48 And then NAFTA came along and destroyed it.
00:35:51 At that time, that building sat on 53 acres and 550,000 square feet under roof.
00:35:59 Huge plant. I mean, it was terrible.
00:36:02 And from then through the '90s, if you rode through Abbeville in 1996,
00:36:08 it would have locked your door and kept going.
00:36:10 They would have burned out buildings and boarded up buildings.
00:36:13 It was just a devastated community.
00:36:16 So within the last few years, that plant was still sitting empty.
00:36:21 And years ago, to avoid it being sold to a salvager,
00:36:25 Jimmy bought the plant and paid years' worth of taxes and interest and the like
00:36:31 before he could figure out what to do with it.
00:36:33 And then in 2018, Hurricane Michael happened,
00:36:37 and demand for wood basically went through the roof.
00:36:40 And the company went to its suppliers, the sawmills,
00:36:43 and said, "We need X amount of wood," and they couldn't meet that demand.
00:36:47 So in order to cushion the company against future situations like that,
00:36:52 Jimmy actually opened one of his company's first sawmills
00:36:56 at the old Pebrel plant in Abbeville in 2019.
00:36:59 I think that was a moment of pride for him.
00:37:02 It went from being idle for years to now we've got about 110 people out there
00:37:09 making an average of $22 an hour.
00:37:13 So that's been sort of a great inspiration to me,
00:37:16 that we were able to bring that back and bring that kind of prosperity back.
00:37:21 And it's made a big difference in the town.
00:37:23 When you look at our sales tax revenue and just the whole economy around Abbeville,
00:37:28 it's really been improved because of that facility.
00:37:32 Thanks to the success Jimmy's had, he's been able to really give back to that community,
00:37:38 and he's spent millions of his own dollars to revitalize the town
00:37:43 to look like it did when he was a kid.
00:37:46 I wanted to build Hug and Mollings because it brought back a time for me
00:37:50 that was very special when I was a kid.
00:37:53 I would go uptown on the square to Central Drugstore,
00:37:57 and you'd go in there after school and you'd get a fountain drink.
00:38:01 So we tried to replicate Central Drugstore with Hug and Mollies,
00:38:06 with the soda fountain and the stools and the carbonated water and the drinks.
00:38:11 Most of the buildings downtown have been replicated
00:38:14 back to the way they were originally constructed.
00:38:17 And rather than build one giant big office building,
00:38:20 we would put different offices in some of the buildings.
00:38:24 So it would bring the building back to life, and it would bring the town back to life.
00:38:28 And we tried to go back and restore them as I remembered them in the '50s.
00:38:34 [music]
00:38:39 Jimmy started this foundation called the Jimmy Rain Foundation,
00:38:42 which is education-focused and funds partial scholarships for college students.
00:38:48 And the way that the foundation funds itself is primarily through a charity golf tournament
00:38:53 that it runs every year.
00:38:55 One of our employees, she had a daughter and a son.
00:39:00 I knew both of them very well.
00:39:02 And the little girl was just such a bright, shining child.
00:39:08 Her whole life, all she talked about was, "I want to be a doctor."
00:39:12 And she never wavered from kindergarten through grade school through high school.
00:39:16 So she went to Auburn, and her father ran an entire store here,
00:39:20 and her mother worked for us in accounting.
00:39:23 And at that time, Auburn didn't have a great scholarship program,
00:39:28 but I tried to help her, and she got a small one.
00:39:33 I guess I became distracted. I don't know.
00:39:37 But her father had died, passed away, and before I really knew it,
00:39:43 she had dropped out of college because she couldn't afford it.
00:39:49 That just broke my heart and devastated me.
00:39:53 And I said, "This is not right. It's not right. We can't--we've got to do something.
00:39:58 I don't know what, but we're going to do something."
00:40:01 So we decided right then and there that we were going to start this foundation,
00:40:06 and we were going to make sure the best we could.
00:40:09 That wasn't going to happen again.
00:40:11 Jimmy has been able to draw on the relationships that he made over so many years
00:40:16 working with the college coaches to bring in big names like Peyton Manning,
00:40:21 whose dad was in a commercial with Jimmy,
00:40:24 Herschel Walker, who was a big name, Georgia running back.
00:40:28 So his ability to bring those big names is really a big draw
00:40:31 for people who want to pay to play in the tournament.
00:40:33 And as a result of that, the foundation's been able to fund
00:40:37 more than 500 partial scholarships to date.
00:40:40 In the first year, we raised money. We didn't have enough money to give a scholarship.
00:40:44 The next year we gave one, and then the next year we gave two.
00:40:48 And now we give over 50 a year, and we've given out over 560.
00:40:53 And I said that first night, I said, "I hope I'm standing here,"
00:40:57 and we give out 1,000.
00:40:59 God willing, I will.
00:41:01 [music]
00:41:07 I was always intrigued about real estate and investing in real estate,
00:41:11 and I'd read articles.
00:41:13 When I was 13 years old, I bought my own subscription to Wall Street Journal,
00:41:16 and so it did interest me, a possible career in real estate.
00:41:19 But I really didn't know which direction I wanted to go
00:41:22 until really I was in high school and first year of college.
00:41:26 My name is Roy Carroll, and I'm the CEO/President of the Carroll Companies.
00:41:30 [music]
00:41:43 Growing up as a very lower-middle-class upbringing, both my parents worked.
00:41:48 My father was a meat cutter, a grocery store man.
00:41:51 He did a little bit of remodeling on the side,
00:41:53 so I'd go help him after school and on weekends with the remodel jobs.
00:41:57 So that's how I got my hands in construction a little bit.
00:42:00 We actually lived in rental homes.
00:42:03 We didn't even own our own homes until I was in high school.
00:42:06 After my father bought his first house, he decided to buy some more rental homes
00:42:10 and get an opportunity to buy two homes up in Danville, Virginia.
00:42:14 And I'd saved up money mowing lawns, doing odd jobs and such,
00:42:17 and so I'd saved $1,000.
00:42:19 And so this was a very modest home.
00:42:22 And so he asked me if I wanted to buy the one home,
00:42:25 and so I put $1,000 down, and owner finance, I think that's $4,000 or so.
00:42:30 So it was a $5,000 home.
00:42:32 And I rented it for a year and sold it for a profit to buy a car,
00:42:37 which is a bad investment because cars depreciate value, right?
00:42:40 I should have kept that house. [laughs]
00:42:43 So I was in college, and my father got laid off from his grocery store business
00:42:47 after 20-some years.
00:42:49 It was the early '80s, a terrible time to go into real estate.
00:42:52 Interest rates were very high.
00:42:54 And so I had a set of friends that wanted a house built,
00:42:57 and so they knew my father had done some renovations on the side,
00:43:00 and so they asked my father if he wanted to build their house.
00:43:03 I was going to school here locally, and so I would help after school
00:43:06 and on weekends, and he and I did a lot of the work hands-on.
00:43:11 And when I say did the work, we nailed the nails and swept the floors
00:43:14 and did things like that and built the first house.
00:43:17 And by the time we'd finished that home,
00:43:19 actually had another set of friends that said,
00:43:21 "Hey, you did a good job with that home.
00:43:23 We'd be interested in building us a home."
00:43:25 And so after building the second house, he and I kind of sat down and said,
00:43:28 "You know, we may be able to make a career out of this."
00:43:31 And so we formed our little company and started doing custom homes
00:43:35 on scattered lots around the Greensboro area.
00:43:39 We kind of divvied up the worlds.
00:43:41 He would run the crews on the job site more so,
00:43:43 and I would do more of the estimating and selections with the customers.
00:43:48 We still both got out there and drove nails at the end of the day,
00:43:51 and it was very rewarding and everything,
00:43:53 those early years starting the business with my father.
00:43:56 Real estate business has a lot of risk associated,
00:44:01 and from the first year that we started the business,
00:44:04 we decided that we would--
00:44:06 my father had a little bit of retirement savings that he lived on.
00:44:09 I was a college student, so it didn't take much for me to live on.
00:44:12 So we decided we'd pay our sales once a year at the end of the year.
00:44:15 So we basically put a third of the profits back into the business to grow it,
00:44:19 and we'll each take a third.
00:44:21 And so as long as he was in the business up until the early '90s,
00:44:24 that's the way we paid our sales.
00:44:26 And so I think that was one of the things that kind of was a catalyst
00:44:30 for us to be as successful as we were,
00:44:32 is just that very conservative approach, which I carry on today.
00:44:36 We've got a Hyatt Place Hotel right downtown.
00:44:39 We have 300 apartments associated with it.
00:44:41 We're getting ready to start up AC Hotel across the street from it,
00:44:45 a rooftop restaurant, another 300 apartment associated.
00:44:49 We've got--I don't know how many bee safes we have in town here.
00:44:52 And whenever we start a new venture, a new project, a new idea,
00:44:55 we always like to try it out in our backyard
00:44:57 where we can kind of tweak it a little bit,
00:44:59 get the formula just right before we take it on the road.
00:45:02 We're always looking for markets that are emerging
00:45:07 and areas where there's new growth and opportunity.
00:45:10 And we're also looking for value.
00:45:12 We're not going to go out there and be the guys that bid
00:45:15 and pay top dollar for a real estate asset.
00:45:18 We really beat the bushes hard, so to speak,
00:45:21 and try to find value and then try to add to that value
00:45:24 by executing in the vertical construction,
00:45:26 or if it's an existing building, we'll go in and renovate
00:45:30 and invest dollars and, you know, reposition it to a nice place.
00:45:35 Well, remodeling a building is a lot more brain damage associated
00:45:40 because you don't know what you're going to get into.
00:45:42 And the building we're sitting in here, a 17-story building,
00:45:45 is an old Wachovia Bank building.
00:45:47 It was built between '63 and '64,
00:45:50 and then it was basically abandoned in the early '80s.
00:45:53 And so it had gone through bankruptcy a couple times,
00:45:56 and the insurance company next door, Lincoln Financial,
00:45:58 had purchased the building,
00:46:00 and they really purchased it to protect their assets
00:46:03 because they own several buildings downtown
00:46:05 and several other properties,
00:46:07 and this is kind of sitting in the middle of them.
00:46:09 And so I met with the CEO of the company and convinced him
00:46:12 that, you know, we could execute this project.
00:46:14 It turned into something that Greensboro would be proud of.
00:46:17 And so we lined up that we were going to do condos.
00:46:20 This was mid-2005, 2006.
00:46:24 We were doing the planning.
00:46:26 People lined up to buy condos from us,
00:46:28 and so we started construction.
00:46:30 We had about half the condos pre-sold, and then 2008 hit.
00:46:34 In 2009, you were hearing just about every day
00:46:37 that a developer did a condo project,
00:46:39 and they got sideways,
00:46:41 and they were turning it back over to the bank.
00:46:43 And I told people, I said,
00:46:45 "I will not give this building back to the bank."
00:46:47 I was speaking to the CFO one morning, and I said,
00:46:50 "You know, I think it would help us sell more condos
00:46:53 "and just take that cloud from over the Carroll Companies
00:46:56 "if we just paid off this building."
00:46:58 In hindsight, it was one of the smartest things we could have done
00:47:00 because word got on the street that, you know,
00:47:02 that's how we conduct business.
00:47:04 We're not going to walk away from one of our obligations.
00:47:06 And, you know, we never reduced the price of one condo
00:47:09 in this building, and, you know,
00:47:11 we're close to sold out and everything.
00:47:14 And I live here, so all my neighbors are happy with me
00:47:17 because I didn't reduce the price or give it back to the bank.
00:47:20 So it turned out well for everyone here.
00:47:22 Well, cell storage is kind of like a close cousin
00:47:31 to multifamily, anyway, is the way I see it.
00:47:33 And a lot of our communities, we already had garages,
00:47:35 we had storage units on site.
00:47:37 So I studied the business, and I said,
00:47:39 "Let's come up with something that's a little bit unique."
00:47:42 There's a lot of good cell storage operators out there today.
00:47:45 And so we came up with the BeSafe brand,
00:47:48 and where we tried to position BeSafe
00:47:50 is that it is top end of the market.
00:47:54 Our lighting's a little brighter,
00:47:56 we temper the temperatures inside a little bit more
00:47:59 than most cell storage operators,
00:48:01 and we put a lot of money in the exterior facade,
00:48:03 and a lot of our exteriors in the BeSafe are stone and brick,
00:48:07 and they really look like an office building,
00:48:09 so they fit in well in the upscale communities
00:48:11 that we're trying to be in.
00:48:13 So that's been a good business model for us,
00:48:15 and we're spread out pretty much everywhere
00:48:17 where we're already with the multifamily.
00:48:19 We're also looking to put BeSafe cell storage facilities.
00:48:23 Car storage is something that we've studied.
00:48:32 There's a number of different variations of car storage
00:48:35 across the country.
00:48:36 Where we're a little bit different,
00:48:38 we're doing it instead of doing like a condo
00:48:40 or one big open space where we're placing cars
00:48:42 and a big open room,
00:48:44 these are individual two-story units that we lease.
00:48:48 We give you an upfit allowance where you can personalize it,
00:48:51 whatever theme you want to come up with.
00:48:53 I'm into cars a little bit, so I'm collecting,
00:48:57 and thought it would go well with some of the other car events
00:49:01 that I attend and be able to promote it
00:49:04 with some of our BeSafe racing.
00:49:06 I guess about five years ago, I bought a Ferrari Challenge car.
00:49:12 We'll take it up.
00:49:13 There's a racetrack about an hour north of here in Virginia,
00:49:16 and was running it around one day,
00:49:18 and a race team was looking to form down in Charlotte,
00:49:23 and they asked me if I'd be interested in joining them
00:49:26 on a Ferrari Challenge series, and so I said sure.
00:49:29 And so one thing led to another, and joined a team,
00:49:33 and met a lot of great people.
00:49:35 Being involved with that, it's great to be involved with Ferrari.
00:49:39 It's helped us brand.
00:49:40 It's also helped with employee engagement,
00:49:42 and Carroll Companies, several employees like to follow
00:49:45 our racing program, and it's great that it's kind of
00:49:48 pulled a lot of our Carroll Companies employees together
00:49:51 and everything around the racing program.
00:49:53 We had a car in Le Mans this year, partnered with Ferrari,
00:49:57 the Ferrari racing program built a Ferrari 488 GTE
00:50:01 for us to run in Le Mans, and we had a good experience with that.
00:50:05 Came in fifth in our class, so we'll be back at some point
00:50:08 in the future and be on the podium one day.
00:50:12 Well, this community, Greensboro, has been very good to me
00:50:17 and my family over the years, obviously, and so, you know,
00:50:20 we're very blessed to be able to give back to the community,
00:50:22 and it is rewarding to look out the window of our home here
00:50:26 and see various projects we have ongoing.
00:50:29 Sometimes I look out the window and see something, though,
00:50:31 that, hey, that needs to be changed.
00:50:34 Greensboro's a beautiful place. It's a great place to live,
00:50:37 great place to grow up, and real blessed to be here.
00:50:40 What we are in the industry is the leader, I think.
00:50:50 I mean, as far as innovation, as far as production,
00:50:54 I think that we're the biggest, but I can't tell you that.
00:50:58 My name is Don Levin, and I founded
00:51:06 and I'm the chairman of The Republic Group.
00:51:09 The Republic Group is a group of companies
00:51:13 that are located in Western Europe, Canada, and the United States
00:51:17 that all are involved with the rolling paper business.
00:51:23 (music)
00:51:25 The main brand is OCV for our branding,
00:51:35 and we have ZigZag, we have JAH, we have Abadi, we have Easy Wider.
00:51:40 We're the, we call it plant to puff when we talk about the paper industry.
00:51:45 Our hemp paper all comes from Champagne, France,
00:51:49 so we go to a cooperative and we actually know the farmers.
00:51:52 We can say, "This is the farmer that's growing our hemp."
00:51:55 And so that hemp, we know where it came from, we know what field it came from,
00:52:00 and we know, because tracing, we can tell you in which booklet it's in
00:52:05 and tell you where it went.
00:52:07 So we go from plant to puff. We're the whole supply chain.
00:52:11 (music)
00:52:14 (music)
00:52:16 I was working for Nortel Oldsmobile in Chicago in 1969,
00:52:28 and for a number of reasons.
00:52:30 I didn't like working in the car business.
00:52:32 It was pretty staid. It was pretty suit and tie.
00:52:35 I had gotten out of the Marines recently,
00:52:37 and a friend of mine named Shelly Miller, who'd just gotten out of the Navy,
00:52:41 he and I were talking, and there was a store that he knew of
00:52:45 that was owned by a guy like Neil Swibish, and Neil's son was Adam.
00:52:50 And he had made this little store. It was a boutique, I thought,
00:52:53 and his daughter's name was Adam's Apple, son's name.
00:52:55 And he had a beautiful psychedelic sign painted on the window.
00:52:59 And he was moving to Colorado.
00:53:01 So we decided we'd buy that store, and we did buy that store,
00:53:04 and because of the beautiful window, we didn't change the name.
00:53:07 I remember when I was doing this, my father, who was a used car dealer,
00:53:10 thought it was on my mind. What are you doing? You're leaving.
00:53:12 You can work for General Motors.
00:53:14 It was an opportunity for me to be entrepreneurial, and I was entrepreneurial.
00:53:18 And I loved it. I still love it.
00:53:22 During the next few years, we had a retail store,
00:53:24 and I found that I wasn't much into retail.
00:53:28 But more importantly, days after we opened the store,
00:53:31 I bought everything in the store, everything else except the cigarette papers.
00:53:35 No rolling papers. I said I didn't want any part of it.
00:53:37 I'd been out of the Marines. I didn't even know what they were.
00:53:39 So everybody came in the store from everywhere saying, "I want rolling papers."
00:53:43 And after about three days of that, I called Neil and said,
00:53:45 "Neil, I need the cigarette papers."
00:53:47 And we started selling those.
00:53:49 There was bamboo. There was marfil. There was blankly narrow.
00:53:53 All came from New York.
00:53:55 But we'd order them. You had to send money, and then two or three months later,
00:53:58 you'd get the papers. And I didn't understand that.
00:54:01 So what I came to find out is that they got a bunch of money,
00:54:05 and then eventually order it. It would come to New York,
00:54:07 and they'd send it to you and mark it up a lot.
00:54:10 And just being an entrepreneurial, I said, "I can go to Europe and buy it.
00:54:14 I don't need to buy it from a guy in New York." And I did.
00:54:17 The problem was, when you bought it from Europe, you had to buy so many.
00:54:20 Now I had to figure out a way to get rid of them
00:54:22 because I didn't have that many retail customers.
00:54:25 So Adam's Apple Distributing Company was formed.
00:54:34 So we did that, and then the weekend I'd travel to various different places
00:54:38 to sell these papers and get them.
00:54:40 Time goes on. I keep going back and forth.
00:54:43 And I'm in Madrid, Spain, which is the headquarters of Papal Ars Reunidas,
00:54:48 which is the paper company that made bamboo.
00:54:51 And I'm going to Holland for the weekend.
00:54:53 So you stop in a place called Perpignan, France.
00:54:56 Every train stopped there because they had to change the rails or change trains.
00:55:01 In Perpignan, I see that they make cigarette papers there, and they make Job.
00:55:04 I'm thinking, "Well, the French cigarette paper is the big one in the United States, it's ZigZag."
00:55:08 And I'm going now to Paris.
00:55:11 So I get to Paris, and I look in the phone book, and I can read ZigZag in French because it's ZigZag.
00:55:16 And I call up the office and say, "I'm interested in importing papers in the United States.
00:55:21 Can somebody talk to me? I'm at the train station.
00:55:23 I have four or five hours before I have to be on the train to Holland."
00:55:28 So they said, "Come over." I meet a man named Patrick Emery,
00:55:31 and I'm talking about bringing cigarette papers to the United States.
00:55:34 I'm like, "You're exclusive on cigarette papers."
00:55:36 We're talking about five minutes, and I finally said the name is ZigZag.
00:55:39 He said, "No, no, no. ZigZag's on the fourth floor. You're on the third floor. This is Job."
00:55:44 I said, "Oh, I'm in the wrong places, but wait."
00:55:48 I said, "Okay, I'll wait."
00:55:49 He said, "We made these papers called Roll-It-Sweet.
00:55:52 We have 5,000 boxes of each one.
00:55:55 And those 5,000 boxes were made for somebody in California that gave us a letter of credit,
00:56:01 but it was a phony letter of credit.
00:56:04 So we got them. If you'll take these, we'll give you the exclusive on Job in the United States."
00:56:08 I said, "Okay."
00:56:09 We write a contract, we sign it, and I'm off on now the exclusive distributor, Job, in the United States.
00:56:13 Time goes on selling Job, and it's doing really well.
00:56:21 The '80s come around, and a fellow named Vasant Bholare, he rolls up all the cigarette paper companies.
00:56:28 But he closes the ZigZag production facility.
00:56:30 He closes all the other production facilities, because Job has the best production facility in Perpignan.
00:56:35 So he does the roll-up.
00:56:38 Everything's fine.
00:56:39 I have a good relationship with the factory, and they're making me money, and we're bringing them projects.
00:56:44 And the workers get screwed.
00:56:46 And the workers are going to strike, and they've never seen this.
00:56:48 This is bad. If they strike, it's going to close me down.
00:56:52 So I decide to go meet Mr. Bholare.
00:56:54 I don't know who he is, and I've got a big mouth.
00:57:10 And so I go in, and I--actually, I'm very rude in telling him that he's not the smartest guy,
00:57:16 and he's doing--screwing this up, and sell me the company, because I care about it, and he doesn't.
00:57:21 And he says, "Okay."
00:57:23 He says, "Nobody's ever spoken to me like this."
00:57:25 I said, "Well, somebody should talk to you like that."
00:57:27 I am, till this day--sorry I said those words--turned out to be the smartest man I've ever met.
00:57:33 So he says, "What should I do?" I tell him what I'll do, and then he explains that OCB--the last letter is Bholare,
00:57:40 and it's his family business, and they started in 1800-something.
00:57:45 He said, "You'll never sell it, because it's his family business, no matter what else he does."
00:57:49 I said, "Okay, that's fine."
00:57:51 But he says, "What should I do?"
00:57:53 I said, "Well, you should get rid of this guy and bring in somebody else and do--"
00:57:57 And he does all the things I suggest, and everything works out fine.
00:58:01 But before I leave that day, he says, "If I ever sell it, I'm going to sell it to you."
00:58:05 Okay, you're never going to sell it. I don't think about it.
00:58:09 2000 comes around, and I get a phone call.
00:58:11 He says, "Okay, I'm selling you the brand. I'm selling you the company."
00:58:14 He says, "Come to Paris. I've got you a loan from BNP. This is how much it is.
00:58:19 This is what we'll do. Don't worry about it. Just come.
00:58:21 You just have to have this little money to put down, and you're going to have it."
00:58:25 I said, "Are we negotiating?" He says, "No."
00:58:28 He said a number. I said, "Dollars or euros?"
00:58:31 He said, "Dollars." I said, "Euros," because euros were 82 cents.
00:58:34 He said, "Okay, euros."
00:58:37 And went to France, and he had met the people from BNP who I'd never met before.
00:58:41 And they said, "Here, I'll sign this paper for you."
00:58:44 I hadn't met them before, but they had met the company.
00:58:46 So we got on his plane. We fly to Paris, France.
00:58:49 And he explains to them that, "Okay, I just sold the company to him.
00:58:52 I'm leaving. Take care."
00:58:55 And they're upset.
00:58:57 And I said, "Okay, I've been dealing with you people for 1972.
00:59:01 It's 2000. You know me. It's not like it's going to be a new people.
00:59:05 But I'm going to stand on the factory floor,
00:59:08 and I'm going to answer any question you're going to ask me.
00:59:11 I'm going to talk to every employee here. I'm going to every employee out there."
00:59:14 It took me 2 days standing there to answer everybody's question.
00:59:18 And since then, it's been just wonderful.
00:59:22 I started in 1969, and Normo started in 1970.
00:59:37 National Organization for Marijuana Laws.
00:59:39 I've been a marijuana smoker, and only because,
00:59:42 if I do, I sit in the corner and drool.
00:59:44 I would just never have been that.
00:59:46 It just doesn't react well with my body.
00:59:49 It bothered me. I never could, but I don't.
00:59:51 But I was always the designated driver, and it was always fun to be around anyway.
00:59:54 So after we started getting job papers, we started selling to stores.
01:00:00 And stores go on, and stores are saying, "Gee, besides papers, I need roll clips."
01:00:06 And I said, "Oh, okay, so we can make roll clips."
01:00:09 We smelled rolls.
01:00:10 And then, "You ever have a bong?"
01:00:12 I said, "Not really, but what is it? I can get it."
01:00:14 And chillums, and then we had pipes.
01:00:18 So we became the seers of paraphernalia.
01:00:21 We were the big boy in town for that.
01:00:23 So we got into that, but then Jimmy Carter did the paraphernalia stuff.
01:00:27 It started in the south in Georgia, I want to think.
01:00:30 They started enforcing it, and I had one friend
01:00:35 get house arrested.
01:00:36 One person I knew wasn't a friend of mine got 104 months in prison.
01:00:42 Another one in Pennsylvania had 77-year-old parents that worked in his business with him.
01:00:48 And the feds said to him, "If you don't plead guilty to this, we're going to arrest your parents."
01:00:53 But we fought. We formed an association.
01:00:56 We hired William Kunstler as an attorney.
01:01:00 He did the Chicago 7. He did Bobby Rush.
01:01:03 For the time, he was a big-time lawyer.
01:01:05 So we fought and we fought and we fought. It didn't work out.
01:01:09 We were threatened. We were raided by the DEA.
01:01:12 We had like 40 or 50 people in our warehouse.
01:01:15 And I said, "Okay, I'm out."
01:01:17 And we got rid of everything except papers.
01:01:21 Because in the law, in the written paraphernalia law,
01:01:26 it said if it was papers, we're okay.
01:01:31 And the decision was that white papers were okay.
01:01:34 So then it went on and we became Republic Tobacco
01:01:37 because we wanted to disengage from this paraphernalia because it was really difficult.
01:01:43 I remember coming into the country and coming through customs and being pulled aside and going into rooms.
01:01:48 It was not a fun time to have your name on a list.
01:01:50 Things loosened up.
01:01:58 The paraphernalia or vape stores or what are you going to call it, smoke shops have opened.
01:02:02 Hopefully, as this gets more sophisticated and becomes more centralized,
01:02:09 it'll be a more normalized business.
01:02:11 It should be legal. That's my opinion.
01:02:15 It's an underground environment. It makes people disregard the law.
01:02:20 They don't like the laws. They don't like police because of it.
01:02:23 There's a lot of racial innuendo to this kind of enforcement.
01:02:27 Is there a benefit to making it legal?
01:02:30 Yeah, you probably make the courts a lot freer.
01:02:33 You probably make the police a lot freer.
01:02:35 It's not like when they go legal all of a sudden,
01:02:37 gee, I'm going to sell so many more papers.
01:02:39 It doesn't work that way.
01:02:40 It's there. Everybody knows it's there.
01:02:43 Why are we being difficult? I don't know.
01:02:46 A legalization is going to change things dramatically.
01:02:49 I don't know who it'll be good for or who it'll be bad for.
01:02:53 But I think it's going to happen,
01:02:55 but I think the result is going to be different than people think.
01:02:58 The end result will be that distribution will go to
01:03:02 a very organized distribution system, be it alcohol or tobacco.
01:03:06 I can't imagine that the U.S. government's going to open up and say to somebody,
01:03:10 "Okay, you have to reestablish all these things that already exist."
01:03:13 The deciding factor is going to be taxes.
01:03:16 Taxes are going to be an important part of legalization.
01:03:20 They're going to want their taxes, and they know that cigarette companies will do that.
01:03:26 The liquor companies, they'll pay the taxes.
01:03:28 They know how to do it. They already get set up.
01:03:30 It's going to be a lot of money, a lot of money.
01:03:32 The difference between success and failure is taking a risk.
01:03:46 So why is our company the way our company is?
01:03:51 I think because I was willing to take a risk both ways,
01:03:54 be it for something or against something.
01:03:57 The people come to me with things and say, "Well, this is the greatest thing ever."
01:04:01 And I said, "But does it fit in with me selling job cigarette papers?
01:04:05 Does it fit in with that?
01:04:07 Do I have the same people? Is it the same customer?
01:04:10 Do I have the same phone call?"
01:04:12 And if it didn't, I wouldn't do it.
01:04:14 I didn't get into manufacturing certain other things.
01:04:18 Bernie Karp was the first guy. They had bongs.
01:04:21 Rather than try to compete with them and say I could do everything,
01:04:24 I would buy theirs and just add them on to the things I sold.
01:04:28 And then to get out was another risk.
01:04:30 You say, "Okay, I'm making this much money, but the risk is I'll go to jail."
01:04:34 So I said, "Okay, I'm going to take the risk the other way and get out."
01:04:38 So the secret to all of this is just when you see something,
01:04:42 most people don't do anything about it.
01:04:44 It's like saying, "Boy, that stock went down. I should have bought it."
01:04:47 Well, why didn't you buy it then?
01:04:49 Life is just a series of decisions, and if you're willing to take risk,
01:04:54 I think you can succeed.
01:04:56 If you're not willing to take risk, don't do it.
01:04:59 Entrepreneurship is risk-taking.
01:05:01 Being where I am now is much more than I ever expected,
01:05:06 and it's important to know why.
01:05:08 The why is my ability is to find smart people and leave them alone.
01:05:12 I am good at finding good people, and just support them.
01:05:17 They do all the work.
01:05:19 There was a story I heard about Walt Disney many, many years ago,
01:05:21 and I don't know how true it is, but it may not be true.
01:05:23 So he's talking to a young girl, and this could be all BS.
01:05:26 But basically, he said, "Mr. Disney, do you still draw Mickey Mouse?"
01:05:29 She said, "No, I don't."
01:05:31 She said, "Well, do you still do this?"
01:05:33 He said, "No, I don't."
01:05:34 "Well, do you still do that?"
01:05:35 She said, "Mr. Disney, what do you do?"
01:05:37 And he said, "Well, I'm like a butterfly.
01:05:40 I go from plant to plant, and I make things bloom."
01:05:44 That's my legacy, and that's where I am today,
01:05:46 but it's not where I expected to be.
01:05:48 I thought I'd be selling cars on Western Avenue in Chicago.
01:05:51 Since I started getting into the cannabis business,
01:05:59 it did occur to me that it would have made more sense
01:06:02 to do cannabis first and stimulate the demand,
01:06:05 but there was the problem of legalities.
01:06:09 But it would be interesting to know
01:06:11 whether legal weed increases ice cream sales.
01:06:15 I'm Ben, the Ben & Jerry's guy,
01:06:20 and we're introducing B3, which is Ben's Best Blends.
01:06:24 It's a new cannabis brand.
01:06:27 Jerry and I, we started Ben & Jerry's in 1978
01:06:32 as a homemade ice cream shop
01:06:35 in an old gas station in Burlington, Vermont.
01:06:39 He does some things on his own, I do some things on my own.
01:06:43 I guess I'm more into cannabis than he is.
01:06:46 The usual and more common belief at the time
01:06:54 was that business could not use its resources
01:07:01 to deal with social issues.
01:07:03 It wasn't possible for business to do that.
01:07:06 If business did that, it would go out of business.
01:07:09 What we found at Ben & Jerry's was that there's a way
01:07:12 to integrate your social values
01:07:15 into your day-to-day business activities,
01:07:19 and that's what we're doing.
01:07:28 The idea for B3 came about when a friend of mine and I
01:07:32 were sitting around a campfire smoking a J,
01:07:35 and we were saying, "The problem with today's pot
01:07:38 is it's just too strong."
01:07:40 When we were in our college years,
01:07:44 you would be able to spend a bunch of time smoking a J.
01:07:48 You could do it casually,
01:07:50 you could pass it around amongst friends.
01:07:53 We wanted that experience.
01:07:55 The idea just kind of stuck with me,
01:07:59 and I just felt like I had to do it.
01:08:02 It's an interesting structure.
01:08:05 So B3, the parent organization,
01:08:09 is registered with the state of Vermont
01:08:12 as a non-profit organization,
01:08:15 and it's a licensor,
01:08:17 so we license our formulas and our brand
01:08:22 and our trademarks and our packaging
01:08:25 to a licensee,
01:08:28 who then has the exclusive rights to it.
01:08:31 B3, the parent company, gets a royalty,
01:08:35 and we use those royalties
01:08:38 to provide loans and grants
01:08:44 to black cannabis entrepreneurs
01:08:47 and also to support the Vermont Racial Justice Center
01:08:53 and the Last Prisoner Project.
01:08:56 Here in Vermont, Chris and Craig, C&C Higher Love,
01:09:00 they're responsible for getting the product made
01:09:03 and selling it and distributing it.
01:09:06 My name is Christopher Walsh.
01:09:12 I've been doing operations for Ben for the last two years,
01:09:15 and I also did all the formulas for all the products.
01:09:18 And my name is Craig Mitchell,
01:09:20 and I am in charge of sales.
01:09:23 Being a licensee in the state of Vermont,
01:09:25 which we're the first state to license Ben's Best,
01:09:28 means that we are the exclusive distributor
01:09:31 and promoter of the brand in the state.
01:09:34 I signed up because of the mission more than anything else.
01:09:38 Secondly, I had just come off a year in Jamaica studying terpenes,
01:09:42 so Ben said, "Hey, I want to make effects-based formulas.
01:09:46 How do I do this consistently and repeatably in every state?"
01:09:50 So I came up with these terpene formulas,
01:09:52 and as we're putting the ideology of our products out there,
01:09:57 people are coming out of the woodwork saying,
01:09:59 "Finally, I don't want 30% THC.
01:10:03 I want to treat this like my glass of wine."
01:10:06 Chris and I, we met in Jamaica.
01:10:09 I used to DJ Spring Break. He ran a Spring Break company.
01:10:11 And me DJing down there is really the only time
01:10:14 that I would be able to enjoy a joint,
01:10:16 because you can smoke a whole joint and not be out of your mind.
01:10:19 Ben was a disruptor in ice cream before that term was even used,
01:10:24 and he's definitely being a disruptor in cannabis
01:10:27 because this whole terpene-forward, low-THC idea that he had
01:10:32 is actually really accurate,
01:10:35 and it's the way the plant's meant to be used.
01:10:37 Part of what we were doing is inspiration.
01:10:40 Part of it was science, and a lot of it was just throwing stuff at the wall.
01:10:43 And I think we're going to get past that
01:10:45 and really become a data-driven company
01:10:47 that makes really precise products.
01:10:49 We are in Brandon, Vermont, and this is Grassroots.
01:11:00 Grassroots started about 10 years ago.
01:11:03 It's a great space. It's got radiant floors.
01:11:05 It's got plenty of space for us to expand into.
01:11:09 It used to be a furniture manufacturer,
01:11:12 and it's primarily a cultivation facility,
01:11:14 but we also do all of our processing, manufacturing,
01:11:17 and up front is a very small medical dispensary
01:11:20 that by next week will also be an adult-use dispensary.
01:11:24 It'll be mixed-use.
01:11:25 We'll have medical patients, and we'll have adult-use patients.
01:11:28 This is the kitchen. This is where we make our edibles.
01:11:31 It's totally climate-controlled.
01:11:33 This is a challenging room
01:11:35 because we have to adhere to all the regulations of cannabis,
01:11:38 but we also have to adhere to all the regulations
01:11:40 of the health department.
01:11:41 So the one aspect of cannabis that's most challenging
01:11:45 are edibles because flour, the other derivatives,
01:11:49 you don't literally put in your body,
01:11:52 so you only have to adhere to the regulations
01:11:55 of the Cannabis Board.
01:11:56 This we're answering to the health department too,
01:11:59 so it's an ongoing challenge.
01:12:01 This is a technology.
01:12:05 It's a little pharmaceutical for most cannabis companies,
01:12:09 but we use a torquer to put the perfect tension on a cap.
01:12:16 Each cap has a foil built into it
01:12:20 that the torquer puts just enough pressure, seal,
01:12:25 so that when you run a cap under this induction sealer,
01:12:29 it's hermetically sealed.
01:12:30 There's no degradation and no oxidation whatsoever
01:12:34 with the flour from not only terpenes,
01:12:37 but you don't lose any of the cannabinoid potency as well.
01:12:40 The definition of Schedule 1 is no medicinal value,
01:12:44 so our philosophy is if beer doesn't have medicinal value,
01:12:49 why isn't that Schedule 1?
01:12:51 That's the message on the jars.
01:12:54 And then the box that the jars go in
01:12:57 talks about Harry Ainslinger,
01:12:59 who was the first head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau,
01:13:02 which is a precursor to the DEA,
01:13:05 who made pot illegal and pushed mandatory minimum sentencing.
01:13:09 And so basically today his legacy persists,
01:13:13 and cannabis is still a Schedule 1 drug
01:13:16 that is in the category of things that have no medicinal value.
01:13:20 And I think all it takes is somebody to try cannabis once
01:13:24 to immediately feel that there's something medicinal going on.
01:13:29 [music]
01:13:31 The problem in the industry is that
01:13:39 it's mostly black people who ended up in jail
01:13:43 for this product that's now legal,
01:13:46 and yet it's mostly white people
01:13:52 that are making the money off the legalized industry.
01:13:58 A lot of states, as they're legalizing,
01:14:00 are now setting up these social equity programs
01:14:04 so that they give priority for licenses
01:14:08 to people who are negatively impacted.
01:14:11 But the problem is that because of all the discrimination
01:14:18 against black people that's gone on in the banking industry,
01:14:23 the real estate industry, education, housing,
01:14:28 you know, getting financing or jobs,
01:14:33 many black people don't have the capital
01:14:36 to actually start a business and use that license.
01:14:40 And so we're trying to use our profits
01:14:47 to provide capital for black cannabis entrepreneurs.
01:14:53 I'm not going to make any money off B3.
01:15:01 At the end of our first 12 months in business,
01:15:04 we've made a guarantee to do what we can
01:15:08 to help right the wrongs of the war on drugs.
01:15:12 At a minimum, we're going to provide at least $100,000
01:15:17 to a new project to fund these black cannabis entrepreneurs.
01:15:24 It goes to the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance,
01:15:27 which is a Vermont organization
01:15:29 that works on the issues of racial justice.
01:15:32 And it goes to the Last Prisoner Project,
01:15:35 which is kind of the preeminent national organization
01:15:38 in the country working to get people that are in jail
01:15:43 for pot out of jail and to help expunge records
01:15:48 and to help people re-enter the society.
01:15:52 If we were wildly successful,
01:16:01 you know, the product would sell really well
01:16:05 and there'd be black cannabis entrepreneurs
01:16:11 in most legal states that wanted to license this brand
01:16:17 and we would license it to them.
01:16:20 We want to expand through black cannabis entrepreneurs
01:16:27 that are owners.
01:16:29 The way to do that is to license the brand.
01:16:33 The idea is to provide the opportunity
01:16:36 for black cannabis entrepreneurs to have equity.
01:16:40 On April 28, 2022, Christian Casati posted this photo
01:16:52 from Botswana to Instagram,
01:16:54 calling it a bucket list experience.
01:16:56 The 29-year-old entrepreneur and founder was in the country
01:16:59 attending the first-ever Forbes Under 30 Africa Summit.
01:17:03 But in a mysterious and baffling sequence of events,
01:17:06 Casati was found dead in police custody,
01:17:09 over 1,000 miles away in Kinshasa,
01:17:12 the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
01:17:15 One year later, Casati's family are still looking
01:17:18 for an official explanation to why a dream business trip
01:17:21 ended in a nightmare.
01:17:24 [Casati's story]
01:17:28 Christian Casati was a 29-year-old entrepreneur
01:17:34 and founder of a social media and digital marketing agency
01:17:37 based in Johannesburg, South Africa,
01:17:39 called Click Media Productions.
01:17:41 He founded it a few years ago.
01:17:43 One of his dreams was to appear on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
01:17:46 For 2022, he had applied to the Forbes Africa 30 Under 30 list.
01:17:50 And as part of that application, even though he didn't make it
01:17:52 onto the final list, he was invited to go to the first-ever
01:17:56 Forbes 30 Under 30 Africa Summit in Botswana,
01:17:59 which took place at the end of April of last year.
01:18:02 It was something that was basically well-known in the States,
01:18:05 like social media management, managing clients' social media,
01:18:08 and all that. It's not something that's very, very well-known in Africa.
01:18:12 It's something that's probably well-known in the States
01:18:14 because you guys originated it, and you guys basically create
01:18:17 all of these apps, and it's a market that's very viable in the States.
01:18:20 But in Africa, it's not that viable.
01:18:23 Like, not all corporate companies have, like, socials
01:18:26 or anything like that. They don't have Google praises.
01:18:28 They don't have SEOs. So that was a field that Chris saw a gap in,
01:18:32 and he was like, "Oh, let's build a company, and let me chase that,"
01:18:35 because it was something that he was well-knowledged in,
01:18:37 and he loved social media, and he understood social media.
01:18:40 One of the first big breaks was in 2017, when he helped do
01:18:43 social media content for the NBA Africa game,
01:18:46 which basically brought some of the NBA's biggest stars at the time
01:18:49 to Johannesburg. Dirk Nowitzki was there, Serge Ibaka,
01:18:53 LeRoy Dang. There's also a photo of Chris with Chris Paul as well.
01:18:57 The Forbes Under 30 Africa Summit ended the same day
01:19:06 Christian posted his last photo to Instagram.
01:19:09 He stayed in Botswana for another two days before returning to South Africa.
01:19:13 On April 30th, Christian arrived in Johannesburg at 10.45 a.m.
01:19:18 on an Airbotswana flight, but was denied entry by immigration.
01:19:22 He was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but in 2001,
01:19:25 he immigrated to South Africa with his mother and brothers
01:19:28 to join his father, and they sought asylum as refugees.
01:19:32 Christian had never returned to Congo since then.
01:19:35 Do you remember when you heard from him that he was having trouble entering,
01:19:39 and if he had any idea why it happened?
01:19:41 I know that in past times he had left South Africa
01:19:44 and come back without any issue, but do you remember sort of
01:19:47 what he told you about that and what was going on then?
01:19:50 I had scanned copies of his passport and his work visa.
01:19:54 Sunday morning, the first message he sent me was like,
01:19:56 "Hey bro, send me those copies." So I was like, "Okay, no problem."
01:19:59 I sent him the copies, and then I waited a while, I waited a while,
01:20:03 and then I messaged him again. I was like, "Yo, what's up?
01:20:05 What time are you landing? When should we come get you?"
01:20:07 But that time I had known he had landed already,
01:20:09 but they're not giving him a problem.
01:20:11 They're saying his work permit is invalid.
01:20:14 And that's the issue he was having, so that's why he asked me to send him those documents.
01:20:18 We saw his work visa, a photocopy of it, and the work visa was valid.
01:20:24 It ran from 2020 until 2023, so it was valid at that time.
01:20:28 According to the latest human rights report on South Africa
01:20:31 published by the U.S. State Department, unfortunately it's not uncommon
01:20:35 for immigrants in South Africa, asylum seekers,
01:20:38 to face difficulties at the border, reentering,
01:20:41 and it seems like that's what occurred to Christian that day.
01:20:45 He told me that they were holding him in a holding cell,
01:20:47 because I think it's procedure in terms of people passing terms
01:20:50 and their documents not arrived.
01:20:52 He advised that the best thing to do in that situation would be
01:20:55 to basically go back to Congo and go to the department
01:20:59 and have them sort it out immediately, and he'd be back within a day.
01:21:06 On May 1st, Christian decided to go to the Congo to sort out the work permit issue.
01:21:11 He missed his initial flight to Labambashi,
01:21:14 and was booked on a later flight to Kinshasa, with a layover in Ethiopia.
01:21:18 The plan was to then fly from Kinshasa to Labambashi
01:21:22 and deal with the work permit there,
01:21:24 as Labambashi is closer to Johannesburg,
01:21:26 and one of Christian's brothers happened to be there
01:21:28 sorting out passport issues to travel to the U.S.
01:21:31 Christian arrived in Kinshasa just after midnight on May 2nd
01:21:35 and sent a text message to Patrick at 1 a.m.
01:21:38 Patrick says he saw the message when he woke up at 4 a.m. and responded.
01:21:42 Around 9 a.m. that Monday now,
01:21:45 that's when a friend of ours who was supposed to receive him at the airport
01:21:49 calls me on video call, and he's with Chris.
01:21:52 Then Chris tells me, "Oh no, I've landed, and everything's all right."
01:21:56 So like an hour later, the friend he was with calls me again on video call,
01:22:01 and he's like, "Yo, Pat, do me a favor, check up on Chris."
01:22:05 So I'm like, "What do you mean?"
01:22:06 He's like, "He was with Chris just now, and Chris looks a bit shaken up,
01:22:10 and he had bruises on his hands."
01:22:12 And then I'm like, "Nah, I don't understand. What do you mean?"
01:22:14 He's like, "Last night, he didn't pick up Chris,
01:22:16 because he was supposed to actually fetch Chris at the airport."
01:22:19 He's like, "Chris didn't call him when he arrived.
01:22:21 Chris only called him this morning."
01:22:23 So that's when I asked him, I was like, "Yo, do you know where he slept?"
01:22:26 and stuff like that. He also didn't know where Chris spent the night.
01:22:29 But Chris only called him this morning, and when he arrived,
01:22:32 Chris already had two other people waiting for him in a separate car.
01:22:35 Chris told him that, "No, he got out. He's playing with these people
01:22:38 because apparently they knew the way," or something like that.
01:22:41 At this point, the plan was for Christian to come back to the airport
01:22:44 later in the afternoon to catch his next flight and land in Lombabashi
01:22:48 around 6 p.m.
01:22:49 But later that evening, Patrick began to worry,
01:22:52 as he found out from a family friend that was supposed to pick up Christian
01:22:55 at the airport in Lombabashi, that Christian was not on the flight.
01:22:59 This family friend messages Patrick, Christian's brother,
01:23:02 this video that had begun circulating,
01:23:05 showing Christian acting erratically, very bizarrely, at a funeral,
01:23:09 where he appears to be getting inside a casket and shouting,
01:23:13 and then he's sort of pulled away and arrested.
01:23:16 And this was completely out of the ordinary for someone like Christian.
01:23:19 And it was extremely unclear to the family at that time
01:23:22 why Christian hadn't been picked up by that family friend,
01:23:25 what had happened in the ensuing hours.
01:23:27 So when I saw that, I was mad confused.
01:23:29 I was like, "No, man, what's going on here?"
01:23:31 Because at first I thought, "No, that can't be him."
01:23:33 But then I looked at his clothing, I was like, "That's definitely his clothes,
01:23:35 and that is him."
01:23:36 So then I was confused. I was like, "OK, this is very, very, very weird and bizarre."
01:23:41 So when I see that, the first thing that comes to mind, I'm thinking,
01:23:44 I'm like, "This person's not in his right state of mind."
01:23:46 Like, Chris is basically-- his eyes even are not, like, focused or anything.
01:23:50 Like, you can see he's not aware of the surroundings, like, or any way that he is.
01:23:54 And the things he's doing are uncoordinated.
01:23:57 This is not Chris in any sense of the word.
01:24:01 They eventually learned he had been held in a military detention center
01:24:04 on the outskirts of Kinshasa.
01:24:06 That night, someone with this family friend who was supposed to pick up Christian
01:24:10 went to the detention center to speak with the guards there.
01:24:13 It was late at night, past 10 p.m.
01:24:15 The guards told him that Christian Kazadi had been arrested there
01:24:20 and was being held there, but they weren't able to see him
01:24:22 because the visiting hours were over.
01:24:24 Also, he wasn't a member of the family, so he wouldn't have been able to see him anyway.
01:24:28 So at that same time, also, I do not share the news with moms
01:24:31 because that's definitely going to freak her the hell out.
01:24:33 So I keep it to myself, and nobody in the family actually knows.
01:24:36 So that whole night, I just sit back and I pray, and I pray, I pray that night.
01:24:43 On the morning of May 3rd, the friend in Lumbabashi told Patrick
01:24:47 that he knows a general who works at the camp where Christian is being held.
01:24:51 The friend received an update from his contact and phoned Patrick.
01:24:54 So he's like, "Oh, Pat, I'm so sorry and whatnot. I'm sorry to let you know this."
01:24:59 I'm like, "What do you mean?"
01:25:00 And he's like, "No, Chris has been found, but he's dead."
01:25:03 And now I'm shocked. I'm like, "What do you mean Chris is dead?"
01:25:06 And he's like, "No, Chris is dead. His body has been found,
01:25:09 and it's outside the police station, and he was murdered."
01:25:13 "What is body doing outside the police station?"
01:25:18 He goes, "That was in the police cell."
01:25:20 So now I'm just trying to get a hold of everybody in Dini.
01:25:22 And while I'm trying to get a hold of them, that's when this guy sends me the video
01:25:26 of Chris's life plus body laying there, and they recorded him.
01:25:30 That was just like confirmation to basically--
01:25:33 And then from the video, you can see that this person has been beaten, beaten, beaten, beaten, beaten.
01:25:38 [♪♪]
01:25:41 The questions that are still unanswered today are,
01:25:51 why wasn't Christian able to reenter South Africa?
01:25:55 What happened to him on that day that he was in Congo?
01:25:58 Why was he at that funeral? Why was he arrested?
01:26:02 What happened to him at the detention center? And then how did he die?
01:26:05 And those are the questions that, unfortunately, despite the investigation ongoing in Congo
01:26:11 and the public records request filed by his family in South Africa
01:26:15 and the dozens of calls and efforts to reach out to people,
01:26:19 both the police in Congo and the ministry in South Africa,
01:26:23 those are the questions that we still haven't been able to answer,
01:26:26 now more than a year after his tragic death.
01:26:30 In the days after Christian's death, I called at least a dozen officials
01:26:36 at the Home Affairs Ministry and the airport over multiple days.
01:26:40 And eventually what we were recommended to do was to file a public records request in South Africa.
01:26:46 In July of 2022, Christian's family, his mother and brother, filed this public records request.
01:26:52 And under South African law, government agencies must respond within 30 days,
01:26:57 and they can apply for one extension only of another 30 days.
01:27:02 And it's now been several months since July of last year.
01:27:06 The ministry has told me and his family repeatedly that they will have a response,
01:27:12 but they have never responded to the request.
01:27:15 They haven't provided any information on why Christian was an admitted entry.
01:27:19 Last year, Christian's family hired a lawyer in Congo to follow the case.
01:27:24 He initially was able to sort of track down the police officers that were in charge of the case.
01:27:31 However, they told him that they couldn't find the actual case file.
01:27:35 The case file that showed which officers were being investigated for what happened to Christian.
01:27:42 He definitely did not have any personal enemies, because what he was pushing was his own blame.
01:27:47 It's not like he's doing mining and in competition with the other mine that has been around.
01:27:52 No, social media is something that nobody hardly does here.
01:27:56 And the people that are doing it actually like competition,
01:27:59 because what you do is you let the next people know that this is important.
01:28:03 Click Media is now run by Patrick, Chris's brother, who runs the company as CEO.
01:28:11 He was one of the co-founders back in 2016.
01:28:14 And his role, while Chris was still here and was still leading the company,
01:28:19 was more of a backroom role managing the operations and the business side,
01:28:23 while Chris was really the public face, the one getting the clients and maintaining the relationships.
01:28:28 Since Chris's passing, he's had to face the difficulties of retaining clients
01:28:33 and growing the company in the face of the conspiracy theories that were spread about Chris and his death.
01:28:40 It's a smear campaign where everybody's like, "Yeah, he's a witch, he's a witch,
01:28:44 and he deserved what came to him, and he deserved what came to him."
01:28:47 So that whole thing also messed up his reputation,
01:28:50 because even his close friends, everybody, business entourage, everybody,
01:28:54 because at first people are shocked, "Christian died! Christian! The Christian we know! Christian died!"
01:28:58 People are sympathetic, and then that story comes out, and then everybody just backs away.
01:29:02 So all of his friends, business partners, everybody starts backing away and disassociating themselves with him.
01:29:08 So that whole thing was also a dilemma for my mom, because now she's trying to mourn her child,
01:29:12 but she's being attacked in terms of, "Yeah, you sacrificed your child.
01:29:15 You were teaching your child witchcraft and stuff like that."
01:29:18 I spoke to several musicians that Chris represented at Click Media
01:29:23 who were able to get their music out there a lot more and become a lot better known
01:29:29 and have a lot more success in the years after they worked with Chris at Click Media.
01:29:33 And he touched so many lives through not just his work with Click Media,
01:29:38 but also, as his brother Patrick has told me many times, the fact that he was always willing to help,
01:29:43 even at the cost of taking time out of his own day and his own work.
01:29:47 For me, the thing that hurts me the most is Chris never came back from Forbes for me.
01:29:52 He never came back. Like, we had planned that whole trip of, "Dawg, you made it. You made it.
01:29:57 Go there, show these people, and come back, and let's re-plan, and let's re-structure."
01:30:02 He never came back. He respected you guys, and he went to you guys, basically, to showcase and let you guys know that,
01:30:09 "Hey, I'm out here, and you guys will hear a lot more from me as time goes on."
01:30:13 And everybody else has failed him because everybody has failed him.
01:30:17 [Music]
01:30:20 [Music]
01:30:23 [Music]
01:30:26 [Music]
01:30:29 [Music]
01:30:32 [Music]
01:31:01 Atlanta's home. I've been here over 20 years now.
01:31:03 Moving around like that, I had never just rooted somewhere.
01:31:06 When I got here, almost immediately, I knew this is where I was going to be.
01:31:10 So this is home. My family's from the South, so I'm naturally a Southern bore.
01:31:13 Those are my roots, but Atlanta is home, and I'm a live and die here.
01:31:17 And so we've come a long way. We started with one street-side location in downtown Atlanta, in a historic district.
01:31:25 We really didn't know that we'd end up in the airport concession space.
01:31:28 We just started opening one restaurant. We worked that business, learned the operations,
01:31:33 and we worked it to the point that it got noticed by other stakeholders around the city
01:31:37 that were looking to bring in new entrepreneurs into the Atlanta-Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.
01:31:42 And the more that we found out about that, the more we became interested in the airport concession space.
01:31:47 And we got an opportunity to partner with one of the companies here, across 10 stores, in a joint venture.
01:31:53 And we did that, and we were successful.
01:31:55 And so since then, we've been growing the business as an airport concessions company,
01:31:59 and we license and franchise brands, and we operate them in airports.
01:32:03 Our home base is here in Atlanta. It's never going to change. It'll never take me out of here alive.
01:32:07 But we're also in Texas, we're in Washington, D.C., and we got a couple of opportunities kind of bubbling up in other markets.
01:32:13 But what we do is a full-service, food and beverage, airport concessions operations company. That's what we do today.
01:32:20 The airport space is a little bit different in that you got a captive audience, right?
01:32:25 Foot traffic.
01:32:26 Foot traffic. So airlines make it easy to have customers, because they bring them in to you.
01:32:32 So that was one thing.
01:32:34 The second thing is that often the airport would say, "Listen, we want a burger place, but we want a national brand."
01:32:40 So then again, we're going to franchise that are already established, that already have a system that works,
01:32:44 which means your rate of failure is a lot lower. So that was very attractive.
01:32:49 Once we started putting those pieces together and seeing how then you could create success, it started making a lot more sense.
01:32:55 And just from a purely business model standpoint, it was something that we felt we could build.
01:32:59 So that's why we kind of kept going with it and continue to go with it.
01:33:03 It's a really high-touch business.
01:33:05 You know, they have some, for example, tech companies that might be, you know, a billion-dollar valuation company.
01:33:12 It'd be like 20 people, you know, in a basement somewhere running it.
01:33:16 Like, to make this Shake Shack work, I have 40 employees on any given day to get to sell burgers, fries, waters, and Coca-Cola.
01:33:26 So there are a lot of moving parts that go into this business, which means you've got to have really, really tight management and controls on everything.
01:33:35 Because there are just a lot of moving parts.
01:33:37 So that was the biggest surprise to me, is you really, it's management intensive, which means it's people intensive, and you've really got to have that accounted for.
01:33:45 One of the things I enjoy the most is watching someone come into the business that might start as like a cashier.
01:33:51 And you fast forward, and they're running multiple stores as a gentleman.
01:33:55 I mean, seeing the, like, personal and professional growth, I think, is a real gift for me.
01:34:01 So I very much enjoyed that.
01:34:04 Another positive surprise is that there's really, you hear this all the time, but there's really no magic to it.
01:34:10 People that have created success that we think are some kind of special, they got some kind of, you know, genius, but they really don't.
01:34:17 It's folks that have leaned in and just done the work and taken the time to study and figure it out.
01:34:22 So the positive surprise is that it is true that it's all possible.
01:34:26 Like, if you lean in, if you apply yourself, you really can get to where these other folks have gotten.
01:34:32 It's not a mystery about it.
01:34:38 I'm a big fan of franchises.
01:34:40 So franchises are businesses that have been around for a while, that have developed the track record, have developed the playbook, developed the system, developed the training.
01:34:50 And they give you that and tell you to copy and paste this and just do this.
01:34:54 And what that does is take all the guesswork out of figuring out how to operate a successful restaurant.
01:34:59 When we first got started, we had this idea to build a restaurant and have a bar and figure out a menu.
01:35:06 And all of it was, we were doing it from scratch.
01:35:08 So as we opened and operated, we caught a lot of lumps.
01:35:11 We made a lot of mistakes because we didn't know what we were doing.
01:35:14 Well, franchises eliminate all of that.
01:35:16 So now if the airport says to me, "Hey, H&H Hospitality, we want a new burger place."
01:35:21 We'll go find the best burger place we can and take their playbook and just press play.
01:35:26 And that's the magic of franchising.
01:35:34 Undergrad was management information systems.
01:35:37 I'm a little older, so this is when the internet and all that was kind of popping.
01:35:41 And so we wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to be a part of that.
01:35:44 So I got into management for the business side, but also information systems for the IT side.
01:35:49 And then I stayed and got my MBA in microeconomics.
01:35:52 I didn't use any of it.
01:35:54 I came out working in corporate America, worked for a big Fortune 100 company in consumer packaged goods.
01:36:00 I did some sales and category analytics and some branding.
01:36:04 Realized that corporate America just wasn't for me.
01:36:06 I'm just not designed to work for anybody else.
01:36:09 But while I was in corporate America, I was also investing in real estate.
01:36:13 And this is when the market was really good, 2005, 2006.
01:36:17 So it wasn't hard to buy low and sell high.
01:36:19 And I had done that enough to put some money aside.
01:36:23 I left corporate America.
01:36:25 And before I blew all my money just being single and out in Atlanta, I figured I wanted to invest in a business.
01:36:33 And me and my business partner, because we spent so much time in restaurants and lounges, we thought we could do it ourselves.
01:36:39 So we pulled our money and decided we would open up our first restaurant business.
01:36:43 Between he and I, the savings we had, the real estate kind of investments that I made that worked, and he was working on Wall Street.
01:36:51 We put down half a million dollars in the first business.
01:36:54 That's why I would never do that again.
01:36:56 It was a restaurant in downtown Atlanta.
01:36:59 It's owned by another group now.
01:37:01 We sold it when we got to the airport to capitalize ourselves.
01:37:03 But yeah, we put a half a million dollars into opening this shell of a location.
01:37:10 Had nothing in it, red clay floors, cinder block walls, and built it from scratch.
01:37:15 Which I would not do again.
01:37:17 I just absolutely wouldn't do it again.
01:37:18 [Music]
01:37:24 So my dad was in the military.
01:37:25 My mom, because of how much we moved, didn't really establish a career.
01:37:29 So most of the time she was taking care of us, me and my brother.
01:37:32 Mostly a stay-at-home mom.
01:37:34 My dad being in the military, I learned a lot about discipline and structure.
01:37:39 We did things a certain way.
01:37:42 We prided ourselves on a certain level of standards.
01:37:44 I think I took that with me.
01:37:46 Also moving around a lot, adaptability.
01:37:49 I mean, moving from north to south, to east to west.
01:37:54 I had to learn different cultures, different ways of mixing in with different communities.
01:37:58 So I learned that a lot.
01:38:00 My mom taught me always being there, knowing that home was a solid place.
01:38:05 Taught me the value of stability and security in that regard.
01:38:08 So I feel like I got a good blend for both of them.
01:38:11 [Music]
01:38:14 I just knew that I wanted to own a business.
01:38:17 Because somewhere along the way, it seemed like the people that owned businesses had more wealth.
01:38:23 Had more access to opportunity, had more access in general.
01:38:26 And something about that was alluring to me.
01:38:29 I didn't know that I'd be in restaurants.
01:38:31 It was more so about business and becoming an employer.
01:38:34 And being able to build something that I could either pass down or lift people up with.
01:38:38 Restaurants is kind of what we landed on.
01:38:40 [Music]
01:38:42 There is no regular day as CEO in this business.
01:38:45 I would start with that.
01:38:46 But I'll tell you, for example, the way I start my week, my Mondays.
01:38:49 So on a good day, I'll get up at 5 o'clock.
01:38:52 I'm in the gym by 5.45, 6.
01:38:55 Work out for an hour.
01:38:56 I come back to my home.
01:38:58 I shower, meditate, journal.
01:39:01 That kind of primes my mind to take on the day.
01:39:04 Then my assistant will run down my schedule for the week.
01:39:08 So I can just kind of get ahead of what's coming.
01:39:10 And then I'll often either have meetings or calls or some desk work or contracts I have to review.
01:39:17 Then I will have a team meeting where my leadership team gets together.
01:39:21 We go over the numbers of our stores.
01:39:23 We go over the high priority items.
01:39:25 What do we want to accomplish this week?
01:39:26 What are we setting out to do in the next month?
01:39:28 And we'll do that, kind of run through everything we have on our plate.
01:39:32 And then give the marching orders on what we're going to do going forward.
01:39:36 And then everybody kind of break and handle their responsibility.
01:39:39 Beyond that, if I'm working on a deal or a new contract, I will handle that.
01:39:44 So it just kind of depends.
01:39:46 But a lot of what I focus on outside of just making sure that we're hitting all the things we need to hit as a business and operations is focus on how I can grow.
01:39:54 Where is the next opportunity?
01:39:56 How do we get to it?
01:40:04 The best advice that I have gotten and never took was to work in someone else's restaurant for 30 days.
01:40:11 Like if you want to get in this business, just like anything, you really got to understand it.
01:40:16 The first thing I would do is get into a restaurant and work in every position to understand on the ground level what you're getting into.
01:40:23 That's the first thing.
01:40:24 Like do your homework, know what you're doing when you get in and start that process by getting into a restaurant and working.
01:40:30 I had no experience when I jumped at it.
01:40:32 And it showed by how many mistakes were made and how many extra expenses we had and all that.
01:40:37 The second thing is I would highly, highly, highly encourage the franchise route.
01:40:42 Again, these are proven business models.
01:40:44 They've already figured out what works and what doesn't.
01:40:47 You save yourself a lot of headache by going that route.
01:40:50 Just a quick stat.
01:40:51 So the SBA says that over five years, 65 percent of new businesses fail where franchises over the same time period have a 90 percent success rate.
01:41:02 So I can't stress going around getting a proven business will save a lot of headache and increase the likelihood of success.
01:41:09 I would say those two things.
01:41:10 I do your homework, get in on the ground level, figure out what it takes to run a business and then borrow from other folks.
01:41:16 Some of the greatest successes are just copycats of something that's already been here.
01:41:20 I think one of the things that Atlanta is known for, not just the airport, the city, is making sure that we have minority participation, female participation.
01:41:29 So without giving too much of a history lesson, our first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, came in and said, if anybody wants to do business with this city, 25 percent of the business opportunity has to go to black folks.
01:41:41 Which was like revolutionary at that point.
01:41:44 And that kind of set the precedent for other cities and states across the country doing the same thing.
01:41:50 And so what that means is that, you know, big players, whether it's, you know, multinational companies, multi-billion dollar companies, when they consider doing business with this city, they have to be thinking of the community and the business owners therein and inviting them to the table.
01:42:06 And if not, and sometimes it's us that's inviting the major players to the table.
01:42:11 What it does is give us a voice and give us real leverage in the economic pie here in this city.
01:42:17 And that is critically important.
01:42:18 You talk about the great kind of equalizer in terms of opportunity, access, resources, all of that.
01:42:25 A lot of it has to do with economics.
01:42:27 So when Atlanta is a city that says here in this town, everybody's going to have a seat, it makes for a different opportunity for everybody.
01:42:36 It makes a different access for everybody, different possibilities for everybody.
01:42:39 So it's really, really special.
01:42:41 We are a cultural center.
01:42:43 I feel like a cultural export for the country in a lot of ways that's built on what black folks produce.
01:42:48 I think that's kind of unique.
01:42:49 But I do think to your question that having that level of intentionality around how we are dividing up this economic pie is critical.
01:42:59 And it means that there's opportunity for folks like me, like on purpose.
01:43:05 And it also creates a greater likelihood that we'll be reaching back to folks like me that was where I was, say, 20 years ago and continuing that legacy.
01:43:15 So it is pretty critical.
01:43:17 I don't know that it's everything, but it is a center point of why Atlanta is so special to me.
01:43:23 Some people are just about a culinary experience.
01:43:41 You know, some restaurants that want a certain like atmospheric or environmental experience.
01:43:48 So you go in there and there's a certain kind of energy about it.
01:43:51 Some people want to go because they want to feel like they're getting good value.
01:43:54 But I think at the end of the day, operations have to be tight and you've got to be people centric.
01:44:00 You've got to be people centric.
01:44:02 And if you're doing that and providing good food for what people are paying for, whether it's top notch, high end or just kind of middle of the road, but it's quality.
01:44:10 I think you'll have a good combination for success.
01:44:13 I'm going to head for the BLK Summit.
01:44:15 Know that this is the busiest airport in the world.
01:44:17 Like, know that. That's what we do here.
01:44:20 I think a cool fact, and it's nothing to be baffled about or back away from, is that, you know, black people run this airport.
01:44:29 And I think that means something in terms of what is possible just within our community.
01:44:35 And it's not to say that that should be the case, has to be the case everywhere, but I think it's unique to Atlanta.
01:44:40 And I think that's something to kind of take note.
01:44:42 And then we've got the best food and beverage program and operators, you know, in the country.
01:44:47 So walk around, check out the sites, try some of our foods, enjoy it and then get out into the city and see what we're about.
01:44:54 [Music]
01:44:59 [Silence]

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