This is Bloomberg business Week from Bloomberg Radio. His bio says he only eats fruit till noon. I'm sure everybody who covers him says this because it's a great line in your bio. He's a former rapper. He's also author of the New York Times bestseller Living with a Seal thirty one Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet. He co founded the private jet card company Marquis Jet, that was sold to Berkshire Hathaway. He has done so much in his life. Owner of the NBA Atlanta Hawks
father for now, He's a millionaire life coach. He was recently the subject of the opener of the Pursuit section of Business Week magazine, and Jesse Hitler is joining us. I'm so delighted to have you here with us. Thank you, And you're not done yet? Are you know? What is it about your DNA, because you've gone a lot of different places. What is it that kind of drives you in your life? Uh? I'm a big check the box
and move on guy. So I really just want to have a big appreciation for where I am in my life, and I believe in building my life. Resume more than my traditional resume. So I'm just always kind of like finished something and onto the next, never looking back. No, you know what, Carol, I want to go through this life like i'm and at the end of the journey be like I don't want to look back and be
like I was the eight percent version of myself. So I really am sensitive to how much time I have left and just you know, trying to do as much as I can. Right because you could write you're financially set that you could kind of just do whatever the heck you want, but you continue to help other people. Talk to me about this life coaching that you're doing. We talked about this, wrote about it, Andrew's Mellon wrote about it in the magazine Tell me what you're doing
and why you're doing it. Well, I've had a very unorthodox business journey, you know. I started out in the music business. I had private jet company, the coconut Order with a company called Zico, which we sold the coca cola and everything in my life. Um, it wasn't really planned. I kind of just fell into it and started the process and turned it into a business. And this is
not this is no different. I wrote a book called living with the Seal about a Navy seal that came to live with my family and myself for thirty one days. And it led to um speaking engagements and this and that, which turned into people wanting more. They want to know more about Well, what's it like? You know, we're all wired too and told to like be around like minded people,
and like minded people tell us like minded things. And we learned from stepping into the unknown and being around people that aren't like us, so a little uncomfortable, I think, yeah, So when I look back at my life and the various life experiences, I believe like the more you experienced,
the more you have to offer. And um, it just morphed into people asking me a lot of questions about business, about parenting, about I lived with on a monastery for for almost a month, and it just led to a lot of questions that, you know, how could I help the most amount of people and share my experiences in these different buckets. And it turned to coaching program. We'll tell us about this coaching program. Who actually, I think you know, who actually are the people who come to
do it? These are very successful people, right, there's walks of life, Well, it's people from all different stages of life. It's from CEO s two moms and dads that are just feel overwhelmed and are looking for guidance. It's called Build your Life Resume, and it's really it's It's interesting because it's not a business coaching course, although I offer business strategies and tips from my journey. It's really about
most of us play defense in our life. Like our calendars fill up with appointments and meetings and weddings and all these different things than our calendar is full, and like the year goes by, and like what do we do this year? And this is really about playing offense.
It's about what do you want to do, What are the things that you want to prioritize, What are the races you want to run, what are the adventures you want to take, what's the r V trip you want to take with your family, and scheduling that first, prioritizing yourself first, and letting those other appointments fill in around that. So at the end of the year, when you look back, you're like, WHOA, I accomplished da da da da da, instead of Wow, I'm living in routine. I'm going through
like this life like this. Then all of a sudden, I'm seven to eight and I'm like, whoa, I can't run that marathon anymore. You know, it's very much more on the offensive, right, that's what you're saying, and not being a defensive What's interesting though, is it's it's physical, right. This is the equivalent of kind of I think the way we wrote it in the story, Andrews wrote it equivalent to kind of climbing Mount Everest. Well, I have an event called yeah, yeah, um, you know that's separate.
It's separate, it's separate. I'm a really big There's an old Japanese ritual I learned about this from a guy named Kyle Corver played for the Hawks, called the Missaggi. And the notion around the Missaggi as you put one thing on your calendar so hard every year that the benett that kind of defines the year, and the benefits last the entire three sixty four other days of the year. And I was thinking, well, you know, looking for something I could do with my wife and my friends in
the endurance sports kind of category. Because us I'm an endurance athlete. I love the celebration around endurance. How it makes you feel when you accomplish that, et cetera. I want to share that with more people. But I was frustrated because a lot of the options required you to be a great swimmer, an obstacle course racer, or a great runner, and that eliminates a big pool of people had to do so much to get to that point, right, So I wanted something that could reach a wider group
of a wider audience. We created this event called nine, which basically is we rent a mountain, you hike up the mountain, you take the gondola down, and you repeat until you climb the equivalent amount everest right, and you do it within a set amount of thirty six hours. So we've had eight sold out events and my wife has participated. I know, you know, my wife, Sarah Blakely,
founder of Spanks. Yeah. Yeah, And there's no winner. It's just kind of like a you verse you challenge, and it's really something where, um what I love about endurance events, no no go, go go if they forced you to be where you feed are, and they forced you to be super present in a really busy world. And um, these challenges have been amazingly successful because they're outdoors and they come down to one thing. Will not like you on this amazing Olympic athlete, but like, do I have
the will to stay in and do this right? Because it's lengthy, right, I think you know, you have to have patience to do it right. Like, you know, it's not something you're gonna be done in four hours, right, You've got to keep going right, Yeah, the last one
took me twenty seven hours. Well, what do you make of my coach Jason Kelly and I We have a lot of guests on you know, we are both um just kind of in a what's going on in the wellness and fitness world, And I do think it's evolving to a place where even the medical community is realizing how much how important this is. It's not just to go to the gym once a week and you know, eat crop the rest of the week, you know what I mean? And I think you play into that that
people are really thinking about this is important. Set your goals at the beginning of the year, but it's it's something that's going to have a much more lasting impact on you. See. I don't even like the word goals around wellness. It's lifestyle because if you start thinking goals and deprivation that never works. And you know, it's about lifestyle. When I have a goal, if that becomes my life right now, that's my lifestyle until the goal is done and then I go back to my regular life. But
I don't look at as a chore. I don't look at it like I'm depriving myself. I have like this is what I'm doing and it's part of my daily routine. This month, I'm doing something called the Calendar Club that I coined, where every day I run the amount of miles the corresponds to the day of the month it is. Today is the's February as we speak, I'll run twenty four miles and it's hard, brutally hard. But it's my lifestyle. It's a commitment that I'm going through and I don't
negotiate those goals. They don't I don't negotiate my goals like it's just that's baked into what I'm doing today. And I'm so yeah, I'm just surprised that people are all of a sudden are like, wow, the benefits of this was like, you know, look how you feel you accomplish, But do you know what I mean, it's not just like go to the aerobics class and just have some fun with your friends and then kick back the rest
of the week or whatever. Like, I do feel like we're thinking more holistically about taking care care of this incredible machine that we've been given, right, and that we tend to abuse a lot. I think there's a big trend in that, obviously, And I think there's a big trend in experiences. And I think the days of vacationing on the beach are starting to go a little bit like this, and people want more, they want experiences, they
want to learn. You know, it's like Gandhi said, it's like, um, live like you're gonna learn like you're gonna live forever. And wait, what did you say, learn like you're gonna live forever, Live like you're gonna die tomorrow. Yeah. Right, It makes you think about things differently. You know, you've gone through so many different stages in your life. I feel like, you know, I mean, it's fun to read your bio and I'm sure everybody asked you, you you know
rapper and started these companies. I mean, what have you take us back to one of those moments? I mean, I don't know whether it was, um, you know, the jet company, or whether it was the drink company, Like, is there a moment in time that really just made a market difference on you in terms of your perspective on life. I've had so many of those moments, you know, and most of those big moments are around failure. And I remember when my music career started, I was on
a show called Club MTV. At the time, it was like a big deal at on top of the world. And then I went to do my first performance in Pittsburgh and I got off the plane and on the cover and a magazine rack. When I walked off the plane was a magazine called Rap Pages and my picture was on the cover of Rap Pages. It was like the equivalent of being on like a find like you know,
like this. It was unbelievable. So I'm like, oh my god, I gotta buy all these and send them to my family, and my parents are gonna So I bought all these magazines and I'm at the check out and I look at the headline and says a white rappers ruining hip hop and it was my picture. And I didn't want to leave. For six months, I felt like I didn't eve want to go out in the public, you know. But guess what nobody w members that. A couple of years later, we were doing a hundred fifty million dollars
at Marquis Jet. Like your life in any second can shift and you can have this, you know, your one idea, idea away from this life changing moment. And in that time that I felt like the biggest failure, you know, and I felt like the whole world was looking at me. But I needed that as a twenty one year old kid, because it made me realize that, like people have their own stuff going on, and I'm gonna have setbacks like this, and I have to get over it. I'm twenty one,
I have sixty seventy more years of life. I can't live in this moment. And we often get stuck and where we are right now, I think we're never going to get past where we are right now. But we get out of it, and we evolved and we grow and we get better and we have companies. And I realized, like, all right, I'm gonna have setbacks, but I'm gonna get through it. How How do you go from I mean, Jesse, it's just a case of being at the right place at the right time, or I don't know, go from
somebody who was rapper. Right, you wrote a song. I think they got an Emmy. Correct, well, yeah, Emmy, Emmy okay, and Emmy and then like and then you you create several companies. How do you go from step to step? You know, it's not necessarily that logical pathway. I don't know. Logical is probably a cheap word, but you know what I mean? Is it Is it a case of that you're always looking for something else, or it was an interest or being, like I said, at the right place
at the right time. I want to say, right place at the right time. I think you create your own luck by putting yourself in the position where luck can find you. Um. But I've always just when I get excited about I love newness, and when I get excited about something, I'm kind of like a ready fire aim entrepreneur. Um. I like to get my foot in the door and figure it out as I go. But um, I always go to the end of the movie. So I say to myself, in four or five years, what's the end
of the movie. Look of this script look like a Marquis jet Um. If you would have said to me Carol Um. You have to get Department of Transportation approval f A A approval, You have to get investors and build a sales team and then find customers. I'd be like, I was a kiddie pool attendant four years ago, how am I going to get f A approval. I would have been like, no way. But I love challenges, and
I said, Okay, let me take this big. Let's find the lawyer that can get f A approval, and then when we get that, let's go to the next task. I like those challenges, and that's maybe that's one of the reasons why I'm drawing to endurance sports and the challenge, right. I like challenges, and I like and so I just think that, you know, when I find something that I go to the end of the movie and I say, Okay, we're going to build a big jet company. We're gonna
sell it. Then it's just filling in the script and the plot changes and the script changes, but that end of the movie is unwavering. But it's interesting. Jesse, like, you know, some might say, okay, you start a jet company and then you sell it. Maybe you would do something similar in that industry, but it's not what you do, and it's not about staying in the business right like you, it sounds like you've always thought I'm gonna build this and then I'm gonna sell it. Same thing with a
drink company. I'm assuming right, maybe the plan was never to stay with it, right. It's like this is how I look at it, um and it goes back to my relationship with time. The average American lives to be seventy eight years old. I'm fifty one. If I'm average, I have twenty seven years left. Okay. If I'm not doing something that I'm excited about, I have to get
out of it. I have to make a shift. And if I do something and I accomplish it, I don't want to sit there and clap my hands and celebrate it because I have thirty more years left on earth to maximize. And everything that I've done in my life from here to fifty one, it's done. No one cares who won the NBA Championship five years ago, it's done. What I care about is from here until my ride is done? And how do I maximize this amount of time?
So when I look at businesses, where I look at adventures or challenges, if I have an opportunity to create a moment or a memory, or get into a business I'm excited about. I take it because I don't want to look back and be like, oh my god, why didn't I do that? Why did I Why didn't? It goes back that we said at the beginning of this I don't want to be I don't and so that's how I live my life and I've always done that. So what's next? I don't know. Well, what do you
find that's interesting in this world? Because it does seem like you're on trends you know that become pretty established, whether it was the jet company or whether it's you know, different kinds of drinks that you know, and now we see so many. So what is what are some of the trends that are out there that you think are interested? Well?
I like what we've started with this nine because people want experiences, they want to feel challenged, and this event makes people feel like world class athletes, you know, without having to have that background. So I like what we're doing in that space. But I also think to myself often like if I took all the energy that I've used in my life as an entrepreneur, you know, all the late nights and the meetings and the embarrassment on
the magazine cover and all those kind of things. And I channeled all of that now with the people that I know, with the resources that I have, into doing something that could really help the world. That would be amazing. You know, like we use so much energy as entrepreneurs, but like if we could just use more of that to do good. So with four kids, four young kids,
that's something that's that's very important to me. I don't know what that looks like yet, but that's definitely something that's that's on my radar, and like how can I you know, you start to think about legacy, and you start to think about, you know what, what's the story your your kids want to tell about you? And you want to leave behind right the lasting impact. And I
do go back to the challenge that you do with people. UM, you know, I do wonder if you see some kind of outcome when people do that those endurance testing and they spend the thirty six or forty eight hours right climbing, Like, what what do they get out of it? Because these are you know, it's funny and had an interesting line in a story about it. UM that these are people
who have worked really hard. They're making a lot of money to be able to enjoy the comforts of life, right, and then they put themselves in these situations where they really test themselves. And I'm curious, what do you see these people who go through it? I think two things. I think for starts, if I were to ask you, Carol, what did you do in two thousand and twelve that was big you probably most people would struggle what you do eight days ago? Most people would not be able
to tell you. This is a memory that's that you can that lasts forever. You're proud of yourself. There are lessons that you carry into business, into parenting, etcetera. So there's enormous takeaways. I mean, there's a lot of studies around the benefits of challenges like this um and so that's one. And the second thing is like most of us live in routine, you know, so this forces and we feel overwhelmed and busy, and this forces you to be super present, and it forces you to tap into
this reserve tank that we all have. We all have so much more, we just don't want to access it because it's uncomfortable. These kind of challenges forced you to recognize, like, whoa, I have more in my tank, So maybe that means I'm gonna stay home and do more emails because instead of watching the game, I can sit here. It just forces you to get more out of all the buckets
in your life. And that's why I love challenges like that in terms of the buckets that you've done, um, you know, starting businesses versus you know, endurance, UM training or you know, various challenges. What do you like more? Is there something that you like? I mean, do you like starting businesses? I do? I do, But I'm really drawn to the personal development and personal challenges. It sounds like it. Yeah, And um, you know, if you think about it, if you work forty hours a week, right,
the average Americans works it right? Well, most people work nine to five. Um, you know that's x amount of hours, But there's so many more hours when you add the weekends and nighttime. And how do we we focus so much on those forty hours? What is there a hundred and fifties something other hours? How do what do we do at that time? And that to me is really important. You know, I started this talking to you about like kind of what's in your d n A. What was
it about out? I mean, I'm just curious. I was loved going back to I think about my childhood. You grew up in Long Island. What was it about. What were you like as a kid. What do you remember while I was the youngest of four and my parents really gave me a long leash, you know, if I was They let me try everything, and that was the greatest gift that they gave me. They didn't steer me or put pressure, and they always praised the effort. They always it was never about the success. It was always
about the effort. And that's something that I tried to do with our children. Is really emphasized, like, wow, it's not about how many points you score. But I loved watching how hard you tried and and that kind of stuff. And you know, disappointment has been stripped from kids today. There's participation trophies. Everybody makes every team. And my parents were really good at balancing the disappointment that they let.
Of course they want to shield me from that, but also allowing me to feel the hurt, because that's a lesson in itself. As you said, failure, it's one of the biggest, most important things is how do you how do you deal with a kind of disappointment? Do you short circuit or do you grow? I think it is a perfect ending, came full circle. Um. I cannot wait to see what you do next, to be quite honest, and I think you're living life fully and it's a
great lesson for everybody else. So Jesse, thank you so much. Thank you. What's on your bucket list? Carol? What's on my bucket list? Um? I'm a sailor, so I would love to kind of do some serious sailing where I'm kind of living on a boat. Do you have it scheduled? Not yet? I know, I know, but that's it. But it's funny. I do a lot of yoga and I think about when I do a retreat that is my like I often will set my year around those dates. Like I said that, before anything else, I just leave
you with one quick story about sailing. Why it's important I think to schedule it and really commit to it. Write it down. You know. I have a friend of mine I was going through a tough time and I asked him, if you could do anything in your life if I gave you ten million dollars. Someone wired you ten million dollars, what would you do? He's like, I would move to California immediately. He's like a fifty five year old guy. And I said to him, I was like,
nobody's wanting you ten million dollars. Why don't you move to California anyway? Like you can do that right now, I know what you know, six months, save up, move out there, give it a year because if you don't do it, you're fifty and you're gonna be sixty. You're never going to do it. So if you want to go sailing, you know, you just never know the injury, the change of circumstances. My parents, I have elderly parents, Like life changes, and it's just it's so important to actually,
like just commit to it and do it. Just do it, you know, I just gotta get the kid off. So next year, when we next year, when we sit, you'll tell them about your sailing. I will, I will know you. But you're absolutely right, Like it's a it's a smarter way of living. And I think this whole idea of you just don't get it back, like I'm only going to be fifty one once. I don't get it back. But it's setting intentions like I think about that whenever
at right and then everything else. Thank you so much. Will you come back? Yeah, I gotta go run. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me pleasure, let us know things are going. I would you up to well, okay, thank you yeah,