Lenny & Larry’s Protein Snacks: Barry Turner

When Barry Turner co-founded Lenny & Larry’s, the idea of selling a protein-packed breakfast muffin was practically unheard of: it was the early 1990’s, and protein-fortified food was not yet a thing. But when Barry was sidelined from a promising gig as an American Gladiator, he and his bodybuilding buddy Benny Graham decided to infuse baked goods with protein powder and sell them around L. A. Soon they were selling brownies, cookies, and cinnamon rolls, but mostly anonymously, as a white label business. Barry eventually sold the company, but returned years later to build the brand he’d always wanted, and to focus on one product, The Complete Cookie. Today a majority of Lenny and Larry’s belongs to Lion Capital, and the high-protein cookies—and other treats—can be found in over 30 countries worldwide. This episode was produced by J. C. Howard, with music by Ramtin Arablouei Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile, regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Len Hoffman was a retired baker from Entiman's Bakery. And the first thing he said, he goes, "Stop calling these recipes." He goes, "These are formulas." And I was like, "Okay." He goes, "This is scientific now, boys." So we get Len to start helping us with these products that we're working on. And we're also starting to do some private label for a pretty large coffee chain here in Southern California. And they're like, "Well, hey, I wonder what else these guys do?" So they ask us about doing some scones. And we told them we made the best scones in the city. Which was not a total lie. Which was not true, just completely. You did not even make scones. The guy wouldn't even know what the hell a scone was.

• 6:09Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:21Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a former American gladiator found his true calling, lost it, and then found it again by building a top-selling protein cookie brand, Lenny and Larry's.

• 6:40Guy Raz?

  If you follow food trends, protein right now is an exploding category. Just to put it in perspective, in 2024, the global market size for protein-fortified foods was around $27 billion. But by the end of this decade, it's expected to reach close to $50 billion. Just take a look at the aisles of Whole Foods or even Costco, you will start to notice more and more products that tout their protein content, whether it's crackers, or nut butter, or even ice cream. But back in the days when protein was kind of out of fashion, in the 90s, two former bodybuilders entered the space with a pretty revolutionary product. It was a protein-packed muffin.

• 7:25Guy Raz?

  This was in 1993, when Barry Turner and his friend Benny Graham were out of work and struggling to make it in Hollywood. A few months earlier, Barry finally caught a lucky break when he was cast on the TV show American Gladiators. But just a few episodes in, he got injured, and that was the end of his TV career as an American gladiator. So one afternoon, Barry and Benny were talking about how boring their bodybuilding diets were, mainly chicken breasts and egg whites. And they wondered, could you take protein powder and just mix it into things that are more interesting, like muffins or brownies? A few days later, they started to experiment,

• 8:08Guy Raz?

  literally dumping protein powder into muffin mixes. And eventually, they found a recipe that worked. They decided to start a small business selling their muffins to local coffee shops around Los Angeles. The muffins did pretty well, but the business never really took off. So in 2001, they sold Lenny and Larry's for a small amount of money and moved on.

• 8:32Guy Raz?

  But Barry Turner would come to regret that decision almost immediately. And it would take him six years to buy most of the business back. And that's when he started to turn Lenny and Larry's into a national brand of cookies, brownies, and other protein-packed treats. Today, you'll find Lenny and Larry's snacks at thousands of locations across the country. The brand was really a pioneer in protein-fortified food. And Barry's path to building that brand was a windy one. He grew up in the 1960s and 70s in Hickory, North Carolina. He was a pretty talented baseball player, but an injury on the field left him deaf in one ear.

• 9:12Guy Raz?

  So when he started college in Georgia, he set his sights on wrestling.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  I was living in a little town called Cartersville, Georgia. And my mom had seen a guy had a wrestling ring in his backyard, and she told me about it. So I kept going to his house every day for two straight weeks, leaving notes, knocking on his door. And I kept saying, I want you to train me. I want you to train me. And he doesn't respond. So finally, he calls me one time, and he just said, he goes, look, dude, I've been traveling, I've been on the road wrestling. All I kept saying was, just see me. I sort of kept, just see me, and maybe you'd want to train me. So I show up, and he sees me, goes, you know, I think I could probably help you. So we trained for two weeks, nonstop, seven days a week, we're just training. And I learned, I learned everything I can about professional wrestling, you know, how

• 10:00Speaker 01

  to fall, how to do a sunset flip, how to come off the, you know, the top rope, fly elbows, everything. And it was so much fun. And so, within two weeks, he gets me a match.

• 10:12Guy Raz?

  And you became a character? Or were you, were you Barry Turner?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  No. Well, when I showed up, I was Barry Turner. But when the promoter saw me, he goes, this guy's too pretty. We got to put a mask on him, because I can't look better than the actual guy who's going to beat me. And the coolest thing about that is, man, when they put a mask on you, you just become someone else.

• 10:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  So they put a mask on me, they called me Mr. Olympia, and they gave me a manager. I got a guy's name's Diamond Dave, he's wearing a red tuxedo with a red top hat on. It was, it was full on like a major production. And I, I was getting picked up by a bigger group. They were gonna send me on the road like immediately. And this was like NWA, WCW type wrestling at the time. And that's, that's where I was heading. And that's what I really thought my career was gonna be. I was gonna become a professional wrestler and be very successful at it.

• 11:01Guy Raz?

  So what happened?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  My girlfriend at the time thought wrestling was beneath me. I thought I could be, I could do better. So I chose a girlfriend and didn't work out, so.

• 11:14Guy Raz?

  Right, but you, you did, did take her advice not to be a pro wrestler, right? And I guess instead you, you decided to go back to school to, to Georgia State University, or you wound up meeting this guy Benny Graham, who would of course factor into this story. So who, who was Benny?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Well Benny was, I actually met him at a gym. And he said, hey, I heard you, you're, you're doing, you're, you're used to a little bit of pro wrestling, would you want to consider it again? Cause I really want to get into it. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. So he and I started training together and we just became instant friends. We were just kind of goofballs and having fun. And he was a personal trainer too at the time. And so he said, I'm training this lady and she's, has this movie script written for two guys, it would be you and I. And she'll move us to California, she'll pay for everything. Do you want to go? And I go, sure, let me finish my schooling so I can get my degree. He goes, we gotta go next month. And I was like, hmm, let's go for it. And so we packed up and we went to California.

• 12:13Guy Raz?

  Wait, let's just unpack this. Somebody was working on a movie script?

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, she had a, this lady, she was a, she had a little bit of money. So people, people find people with money at that time. Everybody's pitching a movie script around the country. You know that guy.

• 12:28Guy Raz?

  What was the premise of the movie?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  It was similar to the movie Warrior. If you remember the movie with Tom Hardy and Edgerton Guy, back then it was about like, that was like UFC type fighting for that movie.

• 12:43Guy Raz?

  All right.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And so it's kind of similar to that. It was like, you know, two guys, we were gonna be wrestling.

• 12:48Guy Raz?

  And so the idea was that you and Benny might star in it, like you might be the warriors?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, we might be the guys, we might be the main characters and-

• 12:55Guy Raz?

  Kicking some ass and-

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Kicking some ass and we're big, we're big guys. We're growing our hair really long. So we just, we had, we had a look. So yeah, it was just, it was just one of the things where you just go, you know what? It's, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity to move to California. I never in my heart believed a movie would ever get made, but I'd ever star in this movie. I just had an opportunity to go to California.

• 13:16Guy Raz?

  And you were a semester away from graduating, from getting your degree?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, cause at that time I was like, it was one of those things. I'm still kind of young. I'm about 29 or something at that time.

• 13:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I can, I can finish later.

• 13:28Guy Raz?

  All right. So you get to LA, 1991.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:31Guy Raz?

  And with the hopes and dreams of being in this film, what happens?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Well, obviously the film never gets made. So we're literally, Benny and I are just being paid by this person to just work out. We worked out twice a day. We ate. That's all we did was just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 13:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  And yeah, seriously.

• 13:54Guy Raz?

  Like, can you give me a sense of how big, like-

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:57Guy Raz?

  What's your height and, and what was your weight at the time?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Well, six feet. The biggest I ever got weight wise was 250, 250 pounds.

• 14:04Guy Raz?

  Wow, that's insane. I mean, I mean, can I ask you, this is not a very polite question.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  No, it's okay. I'm honest.

• 14:11Guy Raz?

  Were you using steroids to get that big?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  At that, to get, yes, yes.

• 14:15Guy Raz?

  You have to, you can't, you can't eat food and-

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You can't.

• 14:18Guy Raz?

  Protein powders without-

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Cannot. My natural body, my natural body, I could get to, I got to about 217, I think, was the biggest I got to naturally. And-

• 14:26Guy Raz?

  That's still a lot.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  It was just still big. It's right.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  That's still a professional athlete.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And most people will not tell you the truth when you ask questions like that. But I just believe in being honest about everything.

• 14:37Guy Raz?

  And by the way, does it have long-term consequences?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  I think it does for people who use it for a long time. I didn't like it. It would, mood swings galore. I mean, you could be- He could be happy one day and you could just be, you know, throwing stuff at a wall the next.

• 14:51Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not, it's like, especially if you're a pretty high strung person anyway, or just very aggressive.

• 14:58Guy Raz?

  Volatile.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Volatile.

• 15:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you, but that was your job is to get really jacked for this, for this movie.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Big.

• 15:06Guy Raz?

  How long, how long did it, did that last before it became clear that this movie was never going to pan out?

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I got paid for about a year.

• 15:15Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:17Guy Raz?

  It's a pretty good deal?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Not bad.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  Meantime, okay, so once you kind of find out this is not going to happen, you're already in LA.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:27Guy Raz?

  This Jack dude, and you have long hair. Tell me about your hair.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I kept growing my hair to the point where it got down to my waist.

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  Who was that guy? Fabio?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Fabio, yeah.

• 15:37Guy Raz?

  Were you like Fabio?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, he had, he had cool hair. His hair was, his hair wasn't as wavy as mine.

• 15:45Guy Raz?

  He was like massive with long hair?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Guy Raz?

  Uh, so he had this really long hair and that was your look?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it.

• 15:51Guy Raz?

  And meantime, Benny was also doing this, right?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, correct.

• 15:54Guy Raz?

  And you, and you guys were sort of on this parallel path of, you're in LA, so you might as well keep auditioning for parts, right?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I was, one thing I'll tell you is I'm not an actor. And I never, I didn't want to become an actor. I just, I had a look. I was big with long hair. You could, you could put me in, in things. So I could audition for parts.

• 16:15Guy Raz?

  I read that you were on, uh, Doogie Howser.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I was a guy in a pool with a girl on my shoulders. I mean, Benny and I both were on Doogie Howser. We did, uh, we did The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner, Whitney Houston.

• 16:27Guy Raz?

  You were in The Bodyguard. What'd you play?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  We were, uh, kind of nightclub kind of bouncers. Uh, there's a scene where they're coming in, uh, from the limousine and coming to the Amian Theater downtown LA. And we're kind of holding back the crowd because they're trying to get to them, whatever. And then in the scene when she's performing, we're, we're right there at the stage.

• 16:46Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:47Guy Raz?

  So how many seconds do you get on screen during The Bodyguard?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Honestly, it's maybe three, four seconds, five seconds max. Yeah. I was in another movie too called Death Becomes Her and I still get residuals for that.

• 16:58Guy Raz?

  Is that with Meryl Streep?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis. Yeah, it's like, uh, Bruce Willis, Barry Turner, Meryl Streep. We were, we were all featured actors.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  But, uh, if you had a look, they could, they could use you. So it's funny, in Death Becomes Her. Our titles were Beefy Guy. I'm not kidding you. So I was Beefy, I think I was Beefy Guy number eight. And we got, it was, it was such, I had so much fun because the other Beefy Guys in the movie, we were all just, just big hams on the set and we didn't have to work that much. We, it was a lot of hurry up and wait. And we just, we hung out. That's all we did. We hung out, we ate and we just messed around. It was, it was a lot of fun.

• 17:38Guy Raz?

  All right. So this is also the era of, and, and those of you under the age of 40 will have a harder time remembering this, but American Gladiators. This is a show on television where you had a, a bunch of like really strong men and women. And then you have contestants who'd have to battle them out in different scenarios, like trying to get a touchdown or trying to win a wrestling match or a jousting match. This was a huge, massive show. You find out about an open casting call in 1992.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  And, and, and when you find out about it, what did you think?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I thought was I'm going to go become an American Gladiator. Prior to that, I auditioned for a show called Knights and Warriors.

• 18:24Guy Raz?

  It was like a, it was like a knockoff show.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, knockoff show, medieval setting. It lasted one, it lasted one year. And Benny and I both go and audition for, for Knights and Warriors.

• 18:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And they wanted both of us. And I said, no, thank you. I said, I'm going to go become an American Gladiator.

• 18:42Guy Raz?

  Huh. So what was it? Was it a one day audition and they were going to make a decision at the end of the day? Or was it a multi-day thing?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Well, it, it turned out to be a multi-day, multi-month process. And we do all the events. We're, we're doing Powerball. We're doing jousting. We ran two 40-yard dashes in front of these executives.

• 18:59Guy Raz?

  Okay. But it wasn't, but Gladiators wasn't like boxing and stuff.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. It was more like-

• 19:04Guy Raz?

  It wasn't violent. It was like jousting with like padded jousts and wrestling.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  But God, that, that is violence.

• 19:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I guess you're right.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  You hit somebody with a, with a giant Q-tip, we'll call it. And it's, it doesn't matter if it's padded. It's like when you're hitting it, that's speed. Very violent show. And so that day, we went through all these different events and I could do them all. And so they narrowed it down to 10 people that day and I was one of the 10 people. And then we all kind of come back and do some things and they narrow it down to three people. I expected to be in that top 10, but now when you get to like, you're got a 33% chance of being on the show, your heart's racing a little bit. You're saying like, holy cow, dude, I'm, I'm a Hickory, North Carolina guy. Just, you know, I'm just this guy from the South. And I'm just thinking like, I'm about to be on the, at that time, the hottest show on TV.

• 19:50Guy Raz?

  I'm looking at a photo of you at the time. You were selected. I think people are gonna make that assumption now. And you became, you become Cyclone. That's your character.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  They called, they called me Cyclone. That's, they thought I was very, I was big and I was very fast. And that's just a name they came up with.

• 20:06Guy Raz?

  You were like 31.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  About 31, 32, yeah.

• 20:09Guy Raz?

  Giant. You were just a giant. Like, your, your bicep is like the size of an adult head.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  I had some big arms. I still have big arms, guy.

• 20:21Guy Raz?

  All right. So you get the job. You're on this massive show. And you've got a serious career ahead of you.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I thought. I was like, this is it. This is the pinnacle of my sports career. I didn't make it baseball, football, whatever. But this, this was my pro sports. Everything had led me to that moment. Right? I felt like if anyone had earned it, it was me.

• 20:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  And, but then God has a way of saying, let me, uh, let me deal you another blow.

• 20:49Guy Raz?

  What, what happened?

• 20:51Speaker 01

  On my, I did eight shows. And on the day that they called, they said, this is your coming out party Cyclone. They were gonna, they were gonna make me a known. I mean, I was gonna be a, I felt like I was gonna become a star. And so they said, you're in every event today. That means they're gonna, they're putting you out there. But the best event was Powerball. People love Powerball. So that's basically the guys, the contestants are sticking a ball into these little cylinders. And there's three of us trying to tackle two of them. And so I dive, there's two guys, they come together, I dive between them, I extend my arms, and I wrap them up. And at that, and my bicep popped. When I did that, yeah, and my bicep was just gone. It had rolled up in my arm. Complete, complete, yeah, complete detachment. Sorry to be gory, but it's what it's what happened.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  And I wanted to hide it from the, from the producers.

• 21:40Guy Raz?

  It was like hanging meat off your arm?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Well, it just, guy, what it does is it rolls up like a, like a shade. It just goes up into your, up into your body towards your, towards your shoulder.

• 21:49Guy Raz?

  Weird.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just complete, it attaches at your forearm.

• 21:52Guy Raz?

  And painful?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Up to that point, one of the, the most painful thing I'd ever gone through. I was, it was just like burned, like somebody's taking a match and they're, they're lighting your arm on fire for 24 hours a day. I could not stand it. But I would not, I would not stop. I kept, I kept taping it and trying to shut off the pain. I didn't take pain pills or anything, but I was doing it because I, you understand, this was my moment.

• 22:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  There's nothing that would ever kept me off, except a liability issue with the actual producers of the show. They said, you gotta go, you gotta go to the hospital.

• 22:23Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  And so they ended, that ended my career as a gladiator.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  So you were done. That was it.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I was, yeah, I was, I was done.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  Which must've been crushing because you had worked so hard to get that job.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. If there's every, if there's ever a time in my life being depressed, that was it.

• 22:41Guy Raz?

  So here you are, 31.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  You kind of taste this, this moment of like stardom, like just the beginning of it. And, and you know, you're probably thinking, okay, here we go. And then it's over.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:56Guy Raz?

  So what did you, I mean, obviously it had to rehabilitate your arm. That was priority.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  And when you say you were feeling like down, like what does that, what does that mean?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Feeling like a, feeling like a failure. I worked my, my whole life. I felt like from the time, you know, being a kid, being an athlete to pick up the weights, you know, going through, becoming a bouncer in nightclubs and wrestling, just everything. It was just like leading towards, there was something, there was a pinnacle somewhere. And American gladiators was my pinnacle. You could have cast me in a movie with Armored Warfare. I wouldn't have taken that over being an American Gladiator. And I, it just, yeah, depression is like, not even, it's funny I'm talking about, I've never really, I've never really shared this with anyone. But when you're a proud person from the South, you don't talk about your feelings, you just, you just swallow it and you go on with life and you pick yourself back up.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  But man, behind the scenes, I just, I didn't know what I was gonna do. I was like, how, how do I, how do I top that?

• 23:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  How, how, basically, how do I get that feeling of being, you know, being a success again?

• 24:00Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're, you're going through this and trying to figure out the next step, I guess.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:08Guy Raz?

  And Benny, he, he was on Knights and Warriors, that sort of low budget spinoff of American Gladiators, also had a, an injury, like something that kept him from, right?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he tore, he tore his shoulder, labrum or something. And you, you can't make this up. We're, we're sitting, we're literally two guys on these two opposite shows, we both get injuries. And it's just like, I'm like, are you serious? How does this happen?

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you guys are, you and Benny are not sitting around trying to brainstorm ideas of, hey, what should we do together? You're just, you're two jacked guys trying to recover, recover from your injuries and still eating probably insane amounts of protein and

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 24:51Guy Raz?

  right, egg whites and chicken and rice and whatever you can just stuff in your body.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 24:56Guy Raz?

  Um, and I guess one afternoon, you're just kind of eating all this food and to having a conversation.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, just having a conversation. We're at Coffee Roaster Cafe in Marina Del Rey. It's our favorite little spot. And eating chicken breasts and egg whites. And our thing was, we always liked to, like, before we'd work out, we'd always like, you'd have like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a cup of coffee, a muffin with a cup of coffee, something sweet with the coffee. Just, that was just our thing. So we had a muffin sitting on the table, and we were going to split that muffin and have a cup of coffee.

• 25:30Guy Raz?

  It's just a regular muffin?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Just, just a regular muffin. Yeah, just kind of, kind of a natural type muffin, nothing, nothing in it. And I'm eating chicken breast and egg whites. And I point to the chicken breast and egg whites. And I said, why can't we put that protein in that muffin? And I looked up and it's like Benny had saw a ghost. And he just goes, oh, my God. He goes, we're doing this. And I was like, you damn right, we are. And that's all we needed. That was it.

• 25:55Guy Raz?

  Okay. This is the light bulb moment. And, and you're like, why can't we put that into that? And now, this is 1993. There were some, I mean, protein powders existed. Whey powder existed at the time.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was, Metrix was big. Metrix was kind of doing their thing. But it's funny, though, there was protein powder and there was protein bars, but there was nothing else.

• 26:18Guy Raz?

  Metrix, Metrix is MetRx, right?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  MetRx, correct.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  Um, GNC existed.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  GNC existed. You get protein powders. Yep. But there was no one putting protein in anything other than a, other than a protein bar. You didn't have to. You just, if you wanted protein, you ate tuna. You ate chicken, you ate steak, you ate eggs.

• 26:37Guy Raz?

  Which is a pretty great way to get protein. Let's be honest.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  The best way to get protein.

• 26:41Guy Raz?

  It's just not convenient for everybody.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  You can't take a steak on the go with you. Just munch on it while you're driving. Like Fred Flintstone.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Hang on, I got a steak in my pocket. I need to eat it. Yeah, so.

• 26:55Guy Raz?

  But there, then and there.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:57Guy Raz?

  You guys are sitting there and both of you are like, this is it.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  And it's funny, you said light bulb moment. I always look back on it. I go, this was a giant halo. It was like, this is not your moment where you can maybe go make a little bit of money. This, I think, is something bigger than that. I literally, I thought that from that very day.

• 27:17Guy Raz?

  This is like a Renaissance painting. This is like Fra Angelico's ascension.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  It is.

• 27:21Guy Raz?

  The halo right there on the angel.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  That's it. It was, it was, it was our, it was our moment. Two podunk guys from the South gonna go change the world.

• 27:32Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Barry and Benny build a business, but not a brand. And Barry makes a deal that he regrets almost as soon as he signs it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 27:57Guy Raz?

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• 28:42Guy Raz?

  judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them,

• 29:27Guy Raz?

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• 30:09Guy Raz?

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• 30:54Guy Raz?

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• 31:33Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1993 and Barry and his friend Benny are sitting at a cafe in LA where they've just come up with the idea to start a business selling protein muffins.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  There was no turning back, Guy. It was just, we're gonna do this. We didn't know how we're gonna do this. No consumer product could experience. There's no marketing experience. There's no business experience. Nothing. And we just, we knew that day, that was it. And so we didn't leave that table until we drew out what we thought the logo was gonna look like. And we left there and went straight to a little natural food store, Rainbow Acres, and picked up some protein powder. We bought some muffin mix, went back to my kitchen and started baking these muffins within two hours. We opened up a bank account that day with $1,400. I don't know why it was 1,400, maybe that's all we had. And we did a DBA, doing business as.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  So this all happened the very first day.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  And the business was gonna be called what?

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Lenny and Larry's.

• 32:39Guy Raz?

  You decided it right then and there, you're gonna call it Lenny and Larry's?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right, right then.

• 32:44Guy Raz?

  Even though you were Benny and Berry?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yep. We always called each other something different. It was, again, something goofy. We just, our names would change every day. It was just something stupid we did. And so we wanted to create these characters. And we said Benny and Berry sound like real people, Lenny and Larry's sounds like two characters. And that was it. I think people overthink things, now that I look back on this. I think people overthink trying to get the perfect name, or the, you know, the perfect design, or whatever, rather than just doing it.

• 33:14Guy Raz?

  All right. So it's gonna be Lenny and Larry's.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  And what, when you guys were talking about this in that initial, did you say a snack food brand, or did you say, let's just make baked goods? Or what did, what do you remember?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were, we were thinking, we're gonna put protein in everything.

• 33:33Guy Raz?

  Just protein powder, like whey powder?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, whey powder's gonna go in, cookies, muffins, brownies. We started crazy ideas of popcorns and granolas. We're just, we're thinking of everything we can put this, put protein in.

• 33:47Guy Raz?

  What did you guys do? Just got like muffin mix and like from the grocery store?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  That's, that's all we did. Apple cinnamon muffin mix and some whey protein.

• 33:55Guy Raz?

  Seems like, seems simple enough?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Seems simple. You just, you take out some of the flour and you replace it with protein and it's gotta work, right?

• 34:03Guy Raz?

  Of course. And?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And it did not. They, the muffins actually baked, but they were hard as a rock. And we weren't discouraged. We go, we can find somebody that can do this. That's what we kept saying. We knew it wasn't out there, but we said, we can, we can do this.

• 34:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So we find a bakery in Santa Monica called Montana Bakery, small little bakery and said, hey, here's what we're going to do. Can you guys help us? We said, we just need help putting these recipes together.

• 34:31Guy Raz?

  Did you know the owners of the bakery?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  We didn't. We just, we met them and they were, it was just two brothers. So we just struck up a friendship and they, they started baking muffins for us.

• 34:41Guy Raz?

  So they agreed to help you figure this out. And what you said to them, look, we want, what did you say to them?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Well, we just said, we're trying to get a certain amount of protein in these muffins. We didn't want to really use refined sugars. We wanted to use something healthier. We're now we're already thinking about how healthy these things can be.

• 34:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So we're, we're thinking, we wanted to use like a fruit juice concentrate in place of sugar. So we're just, you know, we're thinking even further down the road than just making protein muffins.

• 35:09Guy Raz?

  And by the way, in those early days, what were you using for protein in the muffins?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  We started with whey and that was our, that was our protein source initially. And what happened, the muffins tasted great. They just wouldn't have a crazy good shelf life. And they started to bind up. They started to get a little harder over like just too soon. But we did, we did actually, we launched with whey protein muffins.

• 35:33Guy Raz?

  Okay. So this bakery did make, they came up with a formulation.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 35:37Guy Raz?

  And the plan was you guys bake these muffins for us and then we're going to take them off your hands and do what with them?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  We're going to go sell them. We had no idea who we were going to sell them to, but we, we knew, we, we knew we could sell these. And our first, it's funny, our first account was the coffee shop. We dreamed up the idea.

• 35:56Guy Raz?

  That coffee shop in Randall, right?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. She said, Joanie, and Joanie goes, yeah, I'll give you a shot. And I can remember a guy, our first invoice, we were selling these muffins for like a dollar and 20 cent a piece. And our first invoice for our business was $13.20. That was the first invoice we ever issued.

• 36:13Guy Raz?

  And so they would just sell them like in their display case?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. They put, or they put them right by the register. We were big. I don't know why. We were always big about, hey, if we'll, if you could put these by the register, that'd be great.

• 36:23Guy Raz?

  And how many, and then presumably also going to some other coffee places? Or did you try gyms?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  We did, we did Rainbow Acres Natural Food Store here locally, and we did Gold's Gym in Venice. And we did a local health food store called Mrs. Gooch's.

• 36:43Guy Raz?

  Oh, yeah, which was eventually bought by Whole Foods. And so how long was the shelf life for the muffins?

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Probably like four days or something like that.

• 36:52Guy Raz?

  And it wasn't sold, it wasn't packaged, was it packaged?

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we, it was packaged, we had them in like a plastic wrapper, then we had a sticker, we had a label, like a label sticker put on top of it.

• 37:00Guy Raz?

  So you would hand package them yourselves?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  We would hand package them ourselves, correct.

• 37:04Guy Raz?

  We had a muffins from the bakery.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Muffins from the bakery, we would sit there at night with our little crimping thing and we would crimp.

• 37:09Guy Raz?

  Basically put the, the package into the crimping machine, crimp it, it would seal it, and then you'd slap a sticker on it.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Slap a sticker on it, yep.

• 37:16Guy Raz?

  And how, and, and what was the flavor of the muffin?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  We did apple cinnamon, we did blueberry, and we did a lemon raspberry. Those were our three flavors.

• 37:25Guy Raz?

  And how much protein in each muffin?

• 37:27Speaker 01

  I think back then around 15 grams.

• 37:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:30Guy Raz?

  So this is early 90s, this is like really before the protein revolution, which is, we're gonna get to it, cause it's,

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:38Guy Raz?

  I would argue just starting now, and only now are you really seeing an explosion in protein, protein, protein everywhere. At the time, who did you think was gonna buy these? I'm assuming you thought it was gonna be like bodybuilder types?

• 37:52Speaker 01

  We did, but to be honest with you, we, we really were developing these, we said for the average consumer. We thought if we could make a, we coined a term later called better bad, but, but at that time, we thought if we could get them to stop eating, you know, Little Debbie's or Chips Ahoy, and come to this, because we, we thought bodybuilders would enjoy it as like a little cheat treat, but we were really targeting the average consumer.

• 38:18Guy Raz?

  So the idea that you were trying, you were thinking was, hey, maybe we could, we could, if we pitched this as a healthier for you muffin, because there's protein and, but there still was sugar in it, there was still carbs in it, but people didn't care about it that much at the same time. But you thought, okay, if we can get people to think, okay, protein, fiber, was fiber or something?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  It was, yeah, we started, we had, we had added fiber already to that product, yeah.

• 38:42Guy Raz?

  And they tasted as good as-

• 38:44Speaker 01

  They tasted fantastic. People talk about to this day, they go, that's still the best product you guys ever made was your, was your protein muffin.

• 38:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:52Guy Raz?

  All right. But now this is a, this is a small business. I mean, this is like a tiny business. You're going, I mean, you're selling that 15, 20, 30, $50 worth of muffins at this coffee shop and that coffee shop and trying to collect. I mean, that's a tough business.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  No, we were, listen, we weren't even small. We would, we'd have taken small. We were smaller than small. We, we just, it was just a crazy little idea that we were so determined to make it successful.

• 39:18Guy Raz?

  So tell me a little bit about what a typical day was like. Was the, okay, you were not baking the muffins. You had this bakery make baking the muffins initially.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yep. So I, I had to bring in some money. So I was doing some personal training at Gold's Gym in Venice. I had clients. My wife was a personal trainer. I met her at Gold's Gym in Venice.

• 39:38Guy Raz?

  Okay. You were married. This is your-

• 39:40Speaker 01

  This is my second wife, the one I've been with now for over 30 years, Cheryl Sandy. She was a personal trainer. I was a personal trainer and we had just had one son at a time. And we would just trade off. Like she'd go to the gym. I'd watch my son. She'd come home. We'd swap off. I'd run to the gym and then go to the bakery and, you know, package muffins or whatever had to be done.

• 40:01Guy Raz?

  And were you presumably driving the muffins to every little location that was selling them?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We delivered. We'd get up at three or four o'clock in the morning, go deliver them around town just so I could be back to the gym by seven, maybe to train a client. I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was just like, it was like, I don't know. I never, you're driving around a car at four o'clock in the morning in LA or even down, sometimes down to Anaheim, just to deliver a bunch of muffins.

• 40:25Guy Raz?

  And, and it was just you and Benny?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Just me and Benny.

• 40:28Guy Raz?

  So I would think in like that first year, maybe you do $10,000, $15,000.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 40:37Guy Raz?

  But it's exciting. It's, it's felt exciting.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yes. To know that where you're spending X amount of dollars, you're bringing in Y amount of dollars. At the end of the day, you're like, hey, we've got money left over every freaking week. This is incredible. We're making money.

• 40:52Guy Raz?

  Okay. But the formulation still is a challenge, right?

• 40:56Speaker 01

  It's still a challenge. Yeah.

• 40:57Guy Raz?

  Because you're, you're not getting a lot of shelf life. And I guess, I guess this starts to change when you meet a guy.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Who is a retired baker, a guy named Len Hoffman. Correct. Who's Len Hoffman? Len Hoffman was a retired baker from Entenmann's Bakery. And our business had started growing. We started, so we, we outgrew the little bakery in Montana and we ended up baking at a bakery in the valley, Green's Bakery. It was a little bit bigger and Green's- In the San Fernando Valley. Correct. But Len Hoffman was friends with the owner of that and we told Len what we were doing. And the first thing he said, he goes, "Stop calling these recipes." He goes, "These are formulas." And I was like, "Okay." He goes, "This is scientific now, boys." So we're like, "Okay." So we get Len to start helping us with these products that we're working on. And we're also starting to do some private label for a pretty large coffee chain here in Southern California.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Private label, meaning that- They were not Lennellarys. They were just selling it as their protein muffins. Yep. They, uh, it's called the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Sure. And how many Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs were there? At that time, there were over a hundred. Wow. And you were servicing all of them? All of them, through their, through their distribution center. So you got a contract with them? Correct. We were selling our products to some of their independent stores and they're like, "Well, hey, I wonder what else these guys do." So they asked us about doing some scones. And we told them we made the best scones in the city. Which was not a total lie. Which was not true. You did not even make scones. Guy, we didn't even know what the hell a scone was. Or a scone, if you're in certain parts of the world.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  So somebody said, "Hey, listen, for you two rednecks, that's a biscuit with fruit in it." And we said, "Okay, we can, we can make that." And so that was one of the first products that Len Hoffman actually helped us with. It was reduced fat. I don't know why at that time, they were doing these reduced fat scones, but that's what they wanted. Not protein scones? Not protein, just reduced fat. Reduced fat, okay. So we saw an opportunity and we made these amazing scones and it quickly became their number one selling product. Wow. And because they, the scones were such a success at Coffee Bean, they, what do you think they said? "What else do you guys do?" Yes. And you said? "What do you need?" Cause now we saw opportunity there. We're like, "Okay, we can, if we get this private label business going, we can use that money and help to grow our brand." So they wanted some new cheesecakes.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  So we started doing that for them. And then they they asked us about if we could do things like bund cakes. And we're and the answer was always, yes, we can do this. We can do

• 43:27Guy Raz?

  But again, not protein. These are not protein products.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  These aren't protein products for them. But then when we started like showing them protein products like high protein cinnamon rolls, they were like, Okay, this is interesting. So we started selling them some of our newest protein dimensions.

• 43:42Guy Raz?

  But this is not Lenny and Larry's. This is Coffee Bean Tea Leaf.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  This is their product. This was this was a chance to actually, we're actually making money now. And it got to the point where we ended up, we were delivering pallets of product to their distribution center. So much, the business was booming so much on the private label side, we had to go buy a big truck to deliver it seven days a week. We were dropping off product.

• 44:06Guy Raz?

  Wow. So this was, you guys are bringing in?

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Like 400, 500,000 a year. Now it's starting to make some good money.

• 44:13Guy Raz?

  But you're not building your brand.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Not building our brand. Still, still, still working it behind the scenes. And don't get me wrong, we did not give up on it. Our day was spent like, we just kept opening up more and more accounts locally. Started getting some independent 7-Elevens that could actually take product without the approval of the corporate office.

• 44:30Guy Raz?

  Just the muffins, though?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Just the, just the muffins. Yeah. Yeah. And then we started developing more products. We started, we came up with a brownie, high protein brownie at the time. We came up with a high protein cookie. And we still know we're on to something. Then things, things change one afternoon. So

• 44:49Guy Raz?

  Which was?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Which was Benny was delivering product to Coffee Bean. And I got a call that he got rushed to the hospital. He had a deviated septum. So he had a surgery done and they had lants in artery, didn't know it at the time. So he was bent over, was picking up something and blood just starts gushing.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  So he gets rushed to hospital, almost dies. He realizes he wants to leave California and go back to Georgia and be around his family. So we tried to manage this, we'll call it as an east coast, west coast business, but 99% of our business was on the west coast.

• 45:27Guy Raz?

  Let me just pause for a sec because I know, I know that, I guess this is around 2000 when he moves. But I think, you know, most of your business, probably 95% of your business was coffee bean and tea leaf, right?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:41Guy Raz?

  And Benny has this kind of life-changing experience. He decides he wants to go to Georgia and you're going to run the business bi-coastal. But that's hard, especially in the sort of the pre-internet, pre-Zoom era.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:56Guy Raz?

  And that meant that you were probably delivering all the product and dealing with all the, you know, the, you know, billing and collection and all that stuff. And he probably wasn't able to do that much at that point.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  No, at that time, we weren't, it wasn't big enough to do east coast, west coast. So basically doing 99% of the work for half the money.

• 46:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  And it does take anyone long to figure that out. That's not, that's not a good model. And so you want to change. So what do you do? You say either I buy you out or we sell the business. So we put the business up for sale.

• 46:34Guy Raz?

  In 2001?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  2001.

• 46:37Guy Raz?

  And who was the buyer?

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Don Crouch and Jim Felder. They were two friends. They were just two local guys, lived in the valley.

• 46:46Guy Raz?

  And they saw potential in this business as a white label.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  As a white label, yeah. Yeah, they liked, they liked the brand, but they really, they thought the white label business, they could turn it into something.

• 46:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And what roughly, what did, what did they pay for it in 2000?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  They paid $480,000.

• 47:05Guy Raz?

  So not, not ideal, but not bad.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Not, yeah, not, not bad. At least, at least we created, we made money along the way. We created something that had value. And it was kind of cool that you could sell a business for, you know, almost a half a million dollars that you created from just an idea.

• 47:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And they got those accounts, though. They were going to continue.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  They got everything. Yeah, they got everything.

• 47:27Guy Raz?

  How'd you feel about, about that? Was it, did it feel like a relief, you know, Benny's gone and?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  No, it's just a, again, regret that I should have just bought him out. And then Don and I were standing in the parking lot talking after we had done our deal and Don said, you and I should have just partnered on this. I said, I hundred percent agree. And so Don and I remained friends as he owned the business. They actually paid me to really kind of manage the Coffee Bean account because they knew how valuable it was and I had a great relationship with Coffee Bean.

• 48:00Guy Raz?

  Do you remember feeling similarly to how you felt when you were out of American Gladiator? When you injured yourself?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:09Guy Raz?

  It was like that?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, like something ended that you just didn't want it to end. I still had the passion for my brand and it was like, it was just kind of like giving it away and never watching it, never giving it a chance to grow up.

• 48:23Guy Raz?

  It was six and a half years.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Six and a half years, yeah. Somebody asked me one time, what did you, what did that six and a half years cost you? I said, it just cost me time because it came down to being very scattered and not having what I call a hero product. We had all these products that we could make, but none of them were the one where you just went to, yeah, this is our calling card. This is what we're going to be known for.

• 48:50Guy Raz?

  You never focused on like, this is the thing that only we make and only we can make it great.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we made too much stuff to really focus on one that could be a winner. Now, we still had our brand, but like I said, it was the majority of our business was Coffee Bean.

• 49:05Guy Raz?

  And nobody knew your...

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Nobody knew the brand, no. Locally you did. Like we would have, Magic Johnson was a big fan of our brand back in the day when he was still playing with the Lakers and he would see our product, you know, and he'd always buy it at Gold's Gym and somebody would say, hey, Magic, that's Lenny and Larry's. He'd always, he'd stop and say, oh man, I really love your product. So we had those types of things where we had, we had people that knew us in LA, but nowhere else.

• 49:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So when that ends, you're 40.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, 2001, yeah.

• 49:34Guy Raz?

  And one kid or two?

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, two from our previous marriage, two daughters and then my two sons. So I had four kids at that time.

• 49:41Guy Raz?

  Right. So there's a lot on your plate. I mean, that's no joke.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, true.

• 49:48Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you are out of Lenny and Larry's.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  And then I guess over the next few years, you do a bunch of different things. Like you go to real estate. I think you even made some money, right? You got out before the bust.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did well, actually. Yeah.

• 50:07Guy Raz?

  And then I read that you did some work, like you went to work for a software company for a while.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Well, that's an interesting story there. So one of my good friends, Michael Vinnie, he was working with these guys in the software business, and they wanted to meet me. I meet these guys, and they've got this little software company they're doing. And it's kind of computer monitoring software. And so they asked me one day if I would like to join them. And I was like, well, in what capacity? What do I know about software? Right? And they said, we don't know. We said, we just think that you could, maybe you'll run our company one day. And I was like, okay. So I hung out with these guys. I call it hanging out with them. They were paying me to hang out with them. And it's just, you know, I'm learning about the software business, but I'm also learning how to market online direct to consumer. And so after a year of being there, they said, we'd like to make you president of our company

• 50:58Speaker 01

  and let you run our company. And so I'm running this software company called Awareness Technologies. And we're selling computer monitoring software. Now, this is at the height of like the NBC show Catch a Predator. So we're working with law enforcement agencies, schools, parents, et cetera, because the software captured everything, every keystroke, every email, every website visited. And we were doing great. I mean, this thing was catching fire. But I was looking at this, I'm just like, well, if I could do this with software, imagine what I could do with, if I had my old company back.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I could sell direct to consumer snacks.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  And it was just, you know, kind of putting it out there in the universe. And that's when Don Crouch reached out to me and said, I need help. I'm about to shut this thing down.

• 51:47Guy Raz?

  He calls you, says, I'm going to shut this thing down that I bought from you.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  He had, because he said, I don't, I don't know what I can do with this. I don't, I don't know where I can go with this anymore.

• 51:57Guy Raz?

  Was he still supplying coffee beans?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Still supplying coffee bean and, and he had a little bit of other like private label stuff. He may have, he was doing locally and he said, I'm about to shut this thing down. Would you ever consider coming back? So we did some quick negotiations and I said, yeah, I'd just throw caution to the wind here. I'm, I'm in, but it's.

• 52:19Guy Raz?

  He said, well, you want to come back?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  You want to come back, be a 50 50 partner with me.

• 52:23Guy Raz?

  50 50 partner?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:25Guy Raz?

  And did you have to buy, buy some of it back?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was very, it was very cheap.

• 52:28Guy Raz?

  Low, it was a low, okay. So, so you were able to buy 50% of the company back? And basically be the partner again?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:37Guy Raz?

  What was, I mean, I'm just, it's going to sound like a sort of a dumb question, but teeing you up for, but I'm curious in your mind, what was exciting about that prospect? I mean, you would, he had left six years earlier. You had not been involved for six years.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:51Guy Raz?

  What was exciting about coming back to this thing?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Now I got to do what I wanted to do from the very beginning, which was build this brand. Money didn't excite me. Building my brand excited me. I wasn't scared at all. I, I got my baby back.

• 53:14Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Barry has the second worst day of his life. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 54:41Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2007 and Barry has bought back half of Lenny and Larry's from its current owner, Don Crouch.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  I wasn't scared at all. I love going back into the unknown, but I was so confident that I could turn this into what I originally thought Lenny and Larry's could be, which was a brand. And a funny story, I walked in the office, the first day, we had a small little office in Encino on Ventura Boulevard. And jokingly to Don, I just said, okay, I said, "Sit down, shut up, and watch what I'm about to do." And we had a big laugh about that, right? But coming from my experience working in the software company and working with these guys, who were very brilliant guys, by the way, in terms of marketing, I felt like I could launch the first direct-to-consumer

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Snack food company that was a, you know, kind of a protein fiber, all natural. I felt like that's what I was gonna do. And so the first product I wanted to launch was a high protein brownie because everyone was doing protein bars at the time and no one had done a brownie.

• 55:52Guy Raz?

  Let's talk about building the brand. First of all, you didn't have a, you needed a logo.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:57Guy Raz?

  You need packaging, you needed to just, you needed to get it into shops. I mean, you had the muffins in some, a few places. So let's talk about first, first of all, the logo.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:06Guy Raz?

  Cause I don't know if everybody knows what this looks like, but today it looks like two crazy dudes with like clown hair.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:15Guy Raz?

  On this, that's the logo.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the logo.

• 56:17Guy Raz?

  Lenny and Larry's.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and our original logo was mine and Benny's actual faces or hair. That was originally, it was like a real photo. But when I came back, the first thing I said I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a caricature. It can't, it can't be a photo anymore. So we, so, so we created a character of the logo.

• 56:34Guy Raz?

  It's basically a giant Afro with two heads.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  That's, that's what it became. Two heads and always say one head of hair.

• 56:41Guy Raz?

  And one head of hair.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:42Guy Raz?

  And you're gonna come out with your own product, Lenny and Larry's in shops and it's going to be a brownie.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  It's gonna be a brownie. And so we find, I find, wanted to manufacture the brownie. We designed the film, everything. We ordered 72,000 brownies, 36,000 of two flavors, had those shipped to a warehouse that we were, that we rented. And we're sitting, there were 72,000 brownies and said, now we have to go sell these.

• 57:13Guy Raz?

  You did not have any?

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Nope, not a single, not a single, nope, not a single commitment.

• 57:18Guy Raz?

  And how long would these brownies last?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Oh, they would last, yeah, 15 months easily.

• 57:22Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, these have a really, really good shelf life, yeah.

• 57:24Guy Raz?

  So how did you sell them?

• 57:26Speaker 01

  First thing, we walked into the Whole Foods office in Sherman Oaks.

• 57:31Guy Raz?

  Did you have a connection there?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  I, well, we did, I didn't know who was working there. We just showed up at the office one day and I see one of the, one of my former buyers. She walks in, she goes, I remember you. And I said, I remember you. And she said, what do you have? And I showed her, she goes, I love this, let's put it in.

• 57:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  That's it. That's it.

• 57:46Guy Raz?

  How mu- by the way, how much protein in each brownie?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Twenty, twenty grams.

• 57:49Guy Raz?

  Twenty grams. And to be clear, you did not, sugar was not an issue. You weren't worried about sugar and carbs, right?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Nope. I felt like, again, I'm still catering to the masses and not the bodybuilder fitness people.

• 58:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  I always said if I could be in two retailers at the time, it would be 7-Eleven and Walmart. That's the only groups I wanted to sell to.

• 58:11Guy Raz?

  And not to minimize what this product was and how innovative it was, but basically it was a sweet sugary brownie, but with a lot of protein.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Correct. It was basically a protein bar, but it tastes like a brownie in the shape of a, like a kind of a square. So it had to be different there, too.

• 58:26Guy Raz?

  All right. But 2008, I mean, this is super innovative. Nobody's making a protein brownie.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Nobody's making a protein brownie.

• 58:32Guy Raz?

  Ah, so you get into a few Whole Foods in the LA area?

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, yeah, the LA area. And then it just snowballed from there. GNC accepted it. Vitamin Shoppe accepted it. Then we said, okay, now we're onto something. And all the while, though, we had a little product. I don't want to jump ahead, but there was a little product. It was a cookie. It had a label on it and it had a little, like a sheet in the back that you could print our nutritionals on. And we sold that locally to 7-Elevens and a lot of office buildings, stuff like that.

• 59:01Guy Raz?

  This is a protein cookie?

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Correct. But it didn't have a great shelf life. And because it had a clear package, you could see the package and light oxygen can destroy it, but it had a couple weeks shelf life. And we remember a call we had with Vitamin Shoppe. And Vitamin Shoppe said, if you could get a shelf life on your cookie, we would take that also. And I went, okay.

• 59:23Guy Raz?

  Because how long did the cookie last?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Couple of weeks.

• 59:26Guy Raz?

  And that was because of the packaging?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because of the packaging. Yeah, because of the packaging. And so I had a lightbulb moment again. It's like, I gotta, I gotta design a film for that cookie. And we did. Then, I would say the rest is history, but the cookie just became, just became an absolute monster. I wanted, like, again, I was creating, I wasn't creating a low-sugar, you know, low-carb product. I was creating a freaking cookie.

• 59:55Guy Raz?

  It had flour, it had sugar, it had...

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Everything. Four hundred calories. It became popular with college kids, construction workers, teachers, people that could say, for a buck ninety-nine, I get this giant cookie. It's very filling. I can grab, I'll grab my Red Bull and I'll grab a Lenny Larry's cookie.

• 1:00:13Guy Raz?

  I mean, one cookie I'm looking at today, I think it's probably similar. 10 grams of fiber.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Guy Raz?

  16 grams of protein, but you know, 26 grams of sugar.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Guy Raz?

  But, but I guess you just were like, maybe people can choose this. It's marginally better than a, an Oreo or a Twinkie.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  That was, that was, that was it. That was, that was everything. I want to create a better bad. I want people to make a better choice. And nobody's going to go from eating a, you know, a little Debbie to eating some sort of protein bar. It just, there's, there's, there has to be something, has to be a stop in the middle.

• 1:00:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah. What are the cookie retail for?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Retail from anywhere from like a dollar 99 to 249, that range.

• 1:00:55Guy Raz?

  And how much did it cost to make?

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Less than 50 cents, around about 40 cents.

• 1:01:00Guy Raz?

  That's like a LVMH bag.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Guy Raz?

  It's like making a Gucci bag. It cost them like 160 bucks. They sell it for like 3,000.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we weren't, we weren't shy about making, uh, making a profit. What we liked about it is like we were, we never had, we never had to raise money. We never had investors, never had debt.

• 1:01:17Guy Raz?

  So, okay, so by 2014, are you still primarily in California only?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  No, we're, we're everywhere at that time. We're really, we're really starting to take off. 2014, we're about doing about 11 million in revenue.

• 1:01:30Guy Raz?

  So you hit 11 million dollars in sales by 2014.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Guy Raz?

  Purely or mainly on the strength of the cookies, not the muscle brownies?

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  No, the muscle brownie was still there, but the, uh, the cookie is the one that just, it just literally caught fire.

• 1:01:46Guy Raz?

  Why, why do you think that is? I mean, I, I, I think the answer is just because cookies are much bigger, more popular snack than brownies.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  That, well, that's it. And a brownie is considered a decadent treat. It's not something you would eat every day. You'd eat it, you'd eat a cookie every day.

• 1:02:02Guy Raz?

  Even though like nutritionally, they're pretty similar.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. But it's funny, guy, when we talk about like, we talk about sugar and carbs and, you know, all this nutrition and stuff. You and I are in, still in the minority of that world. Rest of the country is still trying to make a better choice, but they're not going to make an extreme choice. So people still want to have their, you know, cake and eat it too. They'll sacrifice something in order to eat a, something that's just a little bit less bad that has some nutritional benefits to them.

• 1:02:35Guy Raz?

  I completely agree with that. I think that's exactly right. I think that just as a tiny number of people care about sugar and carbs, I think most people, you're right. If they see protein, fiber, they're good. They're not worried about the carbs or the sugar. Okay, so you're just growing like hockey stick.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Hockey sticking.

• 1:02:53Guy Raz?

  So, all right. I guess around 2015, you are at a trade show.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:02Guy Raz?

  And you guys are a hot ticket there, right?

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Hot, yep. We just finished, I think it's 2014 at 11 million. And we're going to have, we're going to grow probably to, you know, 18 million or something the next year, whatever in 2015. But I got introduced to a gentleman named Nick Giannuzzi. And Nick is an incredible attorney. It represents pretty much every CPG brand that's been sold. He's always represented them. Nick pulled me aside and just said, I love your brand. He goes jokingly, he just said, stop effing around and start doubling your revenue and you're going to get noticed. And I was like, okay. It inspired me to want to really turbocharge my sales. So we went from 11 to 27 million in one year

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  by opening up accounts and actually managing servicing the accounts we already had.

• 1:03:56Guy Raz?

  How many employees did you have?

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  2014, 2015, we may have had seven.

• 1:04:01Guy Raz?

  God, with 27 million coming in?

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Guy Raz?

  That's an efficient business.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  And that's the only way we knew how to do it. I never believed in hiring when you have to hire. I believe in paying your people more money that are there.

• 1:04:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  And we had a great, we had a great, small little ragtag team. And from there, 27 million turned into 94 million in revenue the next year.

• 1:04:25Guy Raz?

  By 2016.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  By 2016.

• 1:04:27Guy Raz?

  And what percentage of that do you think was the cookies?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  Probably, probably 90%.

• 1:04:34Guy Raz?

  Were you worried at all that, you know, this was not going to last? That you would have competitors coming in? I mean, that, in other words, did you think like, we better really make a bunch of snacks? Because otherwise, we're just going to get General Mills or whoever Nabisco is going to come in and do this.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  I'll be 100% honest with you. I have never in my life worried about a competitor, a so-called competitor. And that's not, that's not being cocky. It's just like, if I'm worried about what someone else is doing, then I'm not worried about what I'm doing. So I didn't care what you were doing. I was building a brand. But I fought a bunch of other things along, along that journey that could have destroyed my business.

• 1:05:11Guy Raz?

  Like what?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Well, one was a, an issue with one of our manufacturers. Got a call from one of our retailers in Florida said, hey, we're starting to see these little, we'll call them little bugs. They're in a cookie, no kidding. Like, like, like a little, and they're, they're called meal moths. So they get in flour, like flour has been sitting for a long time.

• 1:05:31Guy Raz?

  Oh, yes, I've seen that. I've had that.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so, so had that happened with a, like a retailer? For, and now, now social media is out there. And the first thing people do is they want to start posting. You're just, oh, yeah, yeah. And I had to take that on myself. I literally post, I was doing our own social media at the time. And I actually posted my own phone number and just said, anyone gets, I said, I'll, trust me, I'll, I said, I'm going to handle this. I'm going to, you know, apologize to everyone or whatever. And it was real quick. We were able to isolate it real quick because it was one flavor and we knew the actual group that actually made it. So we were able to isolate and pull all that product. But anything to damage your reputation, it just makes you, you don't sleep at night.

• 1:06:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, but still, I mean, even with all of that, like, as you mentioned, I think by 2016, I mean, you guys are doing like almost a hundred million dollars in revenue.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:06:26Guy Raz?

  And then I think that same year, you decide you're gonna find, you're gonna sell it. You're gonna sell the brand again.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's only because people start, that's what people start coming for you. And you're just, you're fielding call after call after call. A lot of the general, not General Mills, but General Mills type companies, we'll say.

• 1:06:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah, big companies, yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Big companies are coming for you. They're asking about you. They're, they want to buy your company. And we had 28 interested parties right out of the gate. And then I'm like, shit, pardon my French, but the, we had just moved in this beautiful warehouse office. I was just, just, just starting to enjoy this. I didn't really want to sell. And then you're starting to field like some big offers for your business.

• 1:07:10Guy Raz?

  And you accept an offer from a group called Lion Capital.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:07:14Guy Raz?

  First of all, I'm curious, was there an option to go to get acquired by a big food brand?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  There were a couple at the table and had made offers. And I'm just being honest with you. If I was gonna sell it, I was gonna sell it for, to the highest bidders. Highest bidder, that was it.

• 1:07:30Guy Raz?

  All right. So they had, they were the highest bidder and they acquired you for, I think it was a mixture of cash and equity, right?

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, so they bought, ended up buying 75% of the business. And we, at the time, now you understand, this is seven years ago. So if you're equating it to the value of today, so at the time, we were valued at $250 million.

• 1:07:52Guy Raz?

  Not bad.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  And so we sold 75% of the business. And it was just because how, how our business was structured, we were an S corp, it had some, had some value to them. And so Nick Giannuzzi, who I mentioned earlier, as he represented us, he was our attorney. And he told us point blank, he said, don't expect to get the second bite of the apple.

• 1:08:10Guy Raz?

  You mean they were gonna just hold on to it forever?

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Exactly, and exactly what they've done.

• 1:08:15Guy Raz?

  All right, so this begins a period of which you're still in today. And they're not on this in this interview, so I want to be careful and mindful and respectful of them. So I'm going to play the part of defending them a little bit here.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:08:28Guy Raz?

  But you are still in a situation where you own still a chunk of the business.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:08:33Guy Raz?

  And technically, you're on the board, right?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  I'm on the board, yeah.

• 1:08:36Guy Raz?

  Okay, but when you left, or when they bought you out,

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:40Guy Raz?

  they replaced you with a new CEO, right?

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:08:43Guy Raz?

  You said that the first time you sold it, 2001, was the worst day of your life.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Terrible.

• 1:08:49Guy Raz?

  When you sold it for the second time, you say it was the second worst day of my life.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Yep, I still live by that. I miss my people more than anything. These are my team members. These are people that helped me grow this business. So, yeah, to this day, I wish I never would have sold my company.

• 1:09:07Guy Raz?

  Okay, so while the company, okay, they take it over, you're out as the CEO, but you're still an advisor ostensibly.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:09:16Guy Raz?

  But, and look, I see Lenny and Larry's everywhere. Every time I go to Whole Foods, I see it everywhere. It's a, that logo just pops. I see that Afro. So I'm under the impression that things are swimming, are great, going great. You have a different view here. You are not happy with how it shook out. You're not happy with the current owners of the brand.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Not at all. I have no problem saying that. We're not each other's cup of tea. And it's just bad decision after bad decision, bad hire after bad hire. They hired, this is no lie, within six months of selling the company to them, we went from 17 employees to 59 employees. The business didn't triple. They only grow the business about 6% to 8% a year, if that. They destroyed profitability. I felt like I handed them a Ferrari and they turned it into a Ford Taurus.

• 1:10:09Guy Raz?

  But what would the, I mean, listen, I'm looking at their portfolio. This is clearly a sophisticated group. I mean, they own kettle chips, that's just in food, but they own beverage and hospitality and jewelry and licensing, personal care. I mean, there clearly they've made a bunch of cash in different places. Like, there's no question in my mind.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  I think you're being nice by saying sophisticated.

• 1:10:30Guy Raz?

  Okay, all right.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  They would never have had me stayed in that chair because they used a term one time, it always rubbed me the wrong way. After they bought the company, they said, "We need to professionalize the management in this company." And that means we weren't professional enough in their eyes. Then you fast forward about, you know, four or five years later, they go, we gotta go back to being an entrepreneurial brand. Well, that's what we were. That's what we always were. It was an entrepreneurial brand. And they never really embraced it because they had to come in, they had to show, we know what we're doing. And they just don't.

• 1:11:00Guy Raz?

  Okay, here's the thing. Because again, you know, we don't do this, not documentary show. Yeah, I only have you on here. So I've got to be respectful of of line capital. And I there's, you know, this is emotional. It's like a house. It's like a business. It's like anything that somebody creates. We're I'm emotionally attached to how I built this.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Guy Raz?

  Right. The reality is that you can just let it go if you want to. And just say, you know what, I'm just gonna let it go. And I whatever. It is what it is.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I and I have. I don't. Okay, good. The fact we're talking about it is fine. Like I said, I don't.

• 1:11:38Guy Raz?

  That's healthy. That's healthy.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think about them. Ever. Do a board call even now and then whatever. But I don't I don't even I don't comment on the call. I go on the screen. I'm just on mute and I'm listening. But yeah, then there's always two sides to every story. And I 100% agree with that.

• 1:11:58Guy Raz?

  Here's the thing, right? And this is like a fear that I think a lot of people have. Okay. Especially as they get into their 50s, which is, you've had some success in your professional life, whether it's a business, or you're working for a company or whatever. And for a variety of reasons, that ends. And you can live for the rest of your life.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Guy Raz?

  Like, right? You can be, you can live off what you made and live a good life. But you lose that purpose, that sense of purpose, which is really scary.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  100% guy. That's it's so important. And no one, you're never going to understand it unless you've lived it.

• 1:12:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  But I did, I did care about my brand a lot.

• 1:12:43Guy Raz?

  When you look back on this whole journey and you think about where you got to, because you did really, did really well.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Guy Raz?

  You know?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Here I am.

• 1:12:49Guy Raz?

  How much of where you got to do you attribute to the work you put in the grind? And how much do you think has to do with getting lucky?

• 1:12:55Speaker 01

  I think 100% to the work and the grind. I don't, I know a lot of people out there have gotten lucky.

• 1:13:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  I don't use words like hope, luck, wish and try.

• 1:13:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  I just don't like the word luck. I, my, my thing was always said, luck wins you the lottery. I created my own lottery.

• 1:13:15Guy Raz?

  That's Barry Turner, co-founder of Lenny and Larry's. By the way, I think there's something you're not telling me that you, I think you're concealing from me here, which is I'm looking at the cast of that, of that movie you were in, Death Becomes Her. And Fabio was in that movie.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  You know what? You're, you are right.

• 1:13:34Guy Raz?

  You did not tell me that.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  I forgot about that.

• 1:13:36Guy Raz?

  Fabio was your co-star. Well, you weren't a star, but you guys. You and Fabio were in a movie together.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's Fabio.

• 1:13:44Guy Raz?

  I wonder what he's doing these days? He seems like a nice guy. I think he's done some like self-parody stuff.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my, that's my buddy.

• 1:13:54Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rum T Nara Bluey. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Cypher. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and James Keely. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Kerry Thompson, John Isabella and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.