Billionaire Lawyer spills his $250M side hustles (pick one)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I don't hunt deer, I hunt money.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
You own one of the biggest, if not the biggest, law firm in the country. We've seen your face on the billboards from Morgan to Morgan. And if you just want to say Morgan, that'd be great too.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:11)
My big vision was this. What if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
You just became a lawyer to fund your harny ambitions. Yeah, and that's pretty badass.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:23)
I built an attraction called Alcatraz East, and it just prints money. I've got apartment complexes, I've got shopping centers. That prints money too.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:37)
He's basically like half Walt Disney, half shark.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:40)
Where my competition gets beat by me is 95% of them are shit. I'm not hunting cockroaches, I'm hunting big game.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:49)
I got goosebumps, John. I love that answer. That was incredible.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:59)
So, first of all, welcome to the pod, we're on. And I'm from the south, from Missouri and Tennessee. I live in Tennessee for a while. And I've been trying to convey to Shaan this idea that I call capital men. And I was like, Shaan, I don't know how to explain it, but they just kind of follow the process, and they just do thing to thing to thing, and they don't overthink stuff, and they're just ballers. And you are a good example of that. I'm hearing how you talk, and I'm like, you are exactly what I'm talking about, these capital men, these guys who just get into stuff, and it's like an onion. They just have layers of stuff that you don't even know about. And so for this podcast, maybe we can ask you about the, I think you have like 10 or something different businesses. We can ask you about each one, because everyone knows you as the law firm guy, but that might not be the most interesting thing about you.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:47)
Well, believe it or not, I've tell this to my wife all the time, the thing that I'm most proud of in all my businesses has been WonderWorks, the upside-down house. Back in the 90s, my kids were little. We'd go to the Science Center, and it was just, they were shit. They were terrible. And the kids were wanting to leave before they got there. And I had a business where I put on fairs around America, and one of our vendors had this huge tent, and everything in it was interactive, interactive, touching, feeling. Before, before interactivity was a thing. And I said, you know, if we built a Science Center that was interactive, that's what a Science Center should be, where you're touching, feeling, doing, and that parents would enjoy as much as kids. So I went out around America. As a matter of fact, I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and I found like four things in the Exploratorium. I found in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, I found a bubble room where you make these bubbles, and I'm like, okay, that's something. I found another thing called recollections. And so I went around the country looking for interactive things from Science Centers. But I felt like the building had to be great. And this guy comes up to me who had been with Ripley's, and he had a rendering of a building turned upside down. He goes, this is what you should do. You should turn it upside down. I'm like, well, how do you do that? And he starts to tell me. I go, well, hell, if I could do that, I would do that. And so I built the first one in Orlando. It's called WonderWorks. If you Google WonderWorks.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:35)
It's this right here.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:36)
There it is. And this is amazing.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:39)
I've never seen this. Is this near Disney World?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:43)
One of mine is. The one in Orlando is very close to Disney World and very close to Universal.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:50)
Is the inside of the building upside down?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:53)
Well, you go in and you walk in, you walk in and you're standing on the ceiling. Yeah. So you walk through the trusses and now you're standing on the ceiling. And the storyline is that once upon a time in the Bermuda Triangle, the greatest scientists in the world were working on the greatest experiments in the world to better mankind. They were trying to build their own hurricane. It got out of control.
The place was located in Bermuda Triangle. Lifts it out of the air, spins it, and it crashes down in Orlando, Pigeon Forge, Branson, Missouri. And so then you go in and now you're on, so you look up and, you know, there's the stairs and now you got to know how you're going to visit it. So you go through an inversion tunnel where we turn you upside down so that when you exit the inversion tunnel, you will be defying gravity and walking upside down. And then you go from gallery to gallery to gallery to gallery. And that prints money too. That goes saying I have zero debt and I'll be like 33 million in EBITDA this year.