Bob Parsons: An American Original
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Speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan and additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Well, that's a problem. Here's my thing. I only get up early if I'm getting paid. Well, I don't know you that well. All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally It's Me. Rob Lowe. We have an American original here. His name is Bob Parsons.

Um, you would know him from being the founder of GoDaddy. You would know him from being the founder of PXG, the most amazing golf clubs and kind of revolutionary when they came out. People were like, how can a golf club cost that much? Cause they're great. Um, you would know him, uh, from some of his other business accomplishments, but he's also written an amazing new book called Fire in the Hole, the untold story of my traumatic life and explosive success. Um,

He's just one of these people that is the American dream come true. And I love giving them the spotlight because there are so many times in this man's journey where he could have given up, where he was not the one in the room you would pick to end up where he is worth billions of dollars.

And I think it's good for everybody out there to know anything is possible. And this guy is a perfect example of that. Let's get to it. Rob, welcome to the podcast, man. Pleasure to be here, Rob. Where am I finding you? Are you in Arizona? I am in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the basement. You are never in the basement. Well, I am this time.

Now, are you wearing, oh yeah, you got your PXG black shirt. Here's my first, I'm going to get my request out of the way first. I need a couple more lighter colors in the PXG quiver because I bake in the black. I'm putting that out there into the universe for you. Okay. Rob needs a couple light colored shirts because he's baking in black. The black I cook. And a lot of guys are able to get out on the golf course

in black and they don't wilt. I wilt. I'm a pansy. I wilt in the heat. Well, the trip rob is to come out at 6 a.m. Well, that's a problem. Here's my thing. I only get up early if I'm getting paid. Well, I don't know you that well. So...

It's so hard. You know, in my line of work, we're up at like 445 and five. And so you just get, you just realize like, oh my God, when I, when I, when I have, when I'm on my own time, I like a little bit of extra sleep. But how much golf are you playing these days? You know, I typically play maybe once or twice a week. And lately it's, you know, I sleep in. So I get up at six, I'm out at 630.

And that is just beautiful. Best time of day. No, it is. It is. Whenever I do it, I feel good about it. Okay, let me ask you this. You know, you and I know each other. I know your story great. I'm sure a lot of people listening are going to be learning so much about you in our talk. But I want to talk about the first time I became aware of you for sure was the GoDaddy commercials, for sure. And I think that's probably true now.

for a lot of people. Those commercials were so ahead of their time, so revolutionary. So it's, and you can correct me, but here's my view of it as an audience member. I love sports.

I'm watching, I want to say the Super Bowl. You know, everybody's spending millions and millions and millions on these high-produced, glossy, celebrity-driven, very Madison Avenue, corporate, safe commercials. Although they're trying to be funny, but they're not really. And here comes GoDaddy. Nobody knows who. Go who? Go what? Who are it? Everybody knows how expensive these commercials are.

And here comes this upstart company, GoDaddy, with this provocative, in-your-face, almost, it felt like to me, guerrilla filmmaking, like we're here. What was that like for you, and how did that come about? Well, you know, it was, first of all, it was a blast, an absolute blast. But it started with in, I think it was 2008.

where we had a war chest of $10 million at the company. And we decided, you know, no matter what we did, our market share wouldn't move up or down. And so it was at, I think it was like 16%.

And so, you know, what I did is I hired a market research firm to tell me something that, you know, I should have seen at a moment. And what they said is the reason your market share is not going up is because you're not advertising where –

Your customers are. Your customers will be watching standard TV ads, right? You're advertising like you're just on the Internet. Your customers aren't on the Internet. Right.

And in fairness, this is in 2000, right? Yeah. The Internet is not where it is today. Exactly. So they recommended that we use some traditional media. And so I decide, okay, well, that's the case. You know, the best thing I know to do would be a Super Bowl ad.

And, of course, you know, back then, you know, I was right after the dot-com bust, you know. Dot-coms had a, you know, weren't exactly what everybody was looking for to invest in and on and on and on. So, we go ahead and I watch this, you know, I keep thinking, how in the hell am I going to get people to watch my podcast?

commercial if, you know, I just had no idea how I would, because they're going to be at a Super Bowl party. They'll be drinking booze. They'll be, you know, teasing around and talking and so forth. You know, how am I going to do it? And then,

I was watching TV one night with my then wife, and I see this deal by Mike's Hard Limeade, where there's this...

three women at the end of a bar and they're all pretty good looking women. And there's a guy catty corner from them and he's just like a klutzy dude and so he's got this thing of Mike's hard limeade and he's got just a very little bit left in the bottle. So instead of lifting it straight up and letting it pour into his throat, he sticks about a nine inch tongue straight down into the bottle and

And start slurping it around. And so the bartender goes, ladies, what can I get you? And they pointed to this kid and they go, we want one of those. Unbelievable. And I said, that's it. That's it. So I go ahead and contact the firm that made that ad.

You know, with the tongue ad. And it's called the Ad Store. They were out of New York. And we go ahead. And this was the year right after Timberlake and Janet Jackson had the wardrobe malfunction. Yep. And so we decide to spoof it.

in some way. So that's what we did. And what happened was, in our ad, you got this girl who was the GoDaddy girl, Kansas Michelle. She wasn't a GoDaddy girl then because we didn't even know there was a GoDaddy girl. The media named her the GoDaddy girl. It looks like a court scene, but instead of all judges, they're censors.

So they go, okay, ma'am, what do you plan on doing? So she gets up and starts doing a twirl dance. She goes, I could do something like this. And her tank top strap snaps open.

And she catches it. I mean, you see absolutely nothing. But it looks like you could have. Right. And so anyhow, you know, one of the women censors, you know, she says something. And I put the language in there is that those are not real.

That immediately was rejected. Rejected. Can't say that. So we replaced it with, may I suggest a turtleneck? Right. And then one of the other sensors, his name is Booth Coleman, you know, he sees it and he's taking oxygen.

So, anyhow, you know, the guy says to her, you know, can't you see you're upsetting the committee? And she goes, oh, I didn't mean to upset the committee. And that's the last line. So, I can't get it approved. I can't get it approved. I can't get it approved. I get it approved a week before the Super Bowl.

You know, we shoot it from behind. We shoot it from the front. We shoot it way, you know, from, you know, at a distance. We blur her cleavage. I mean, you see nothing. So we go ahead and do that. It gets improved.

And as soon as it gets approved, Fox was, you know, filming the Super Bowl then. So, you know, Fox takes and right after he tells me it's approved, he goes, you want to buy another spot? Wow. And I said, another spot? I said, I don't have time to, you know, do another commercial. He goes, why don't you just run the same one twice?

And he says, and I've got a really good, you know, location for the ad, right? It was right at the two-minute warning. Yep. And he said, and plus they cut the price, you know, somewhat.

So I said, you know what? Why not? Let's do it. And so we go ahead and we got two ads running, one in the first quarter and one at the two-minute warning. And so... How much money...

You're a young – you had $10 million. I mean, that's a huge swing. Isn't there a world where you just sort of – you buy a little bit on this show and a little bit on that show and a little bit on that show, but you – from my sense of it, that is a ginormous swing. Am I wrong? Well, yeah. It's a stack of cash. But, you know, we –

No balls, no blue chips, Rob. I love it. Yeah. So we go ahead and, you know, we'll spend a whole $10 million, but I think we spent like about $8 million.

So we had a couple, a couple, a couple little bit left. And, you know, cases bombed. But anyhow, when the first one ran, I mean, it was nobody knew what to do. So, I mean, we got so much Internet traffic, our building shook. Right. But it but it didn't cave in. And then I thought.

Okay, well, we still got the two-minute warning coming up. And when the two-minute warning gets there, it is—I'm trying to think who was playing. It was Philly and it was the Patriots. All right? Got it. And Philly's going to go in and take the lead. And boom, they break for a commercial to it. How can we be this lucky? And then all of a sudden, right? Yeah.

Instead of our ad showing, and this is absolutely true what I'm going to tell you. Instead of showing our ad with the tank top strap snapping, right? They show a Fox Network ad for the Simpsons showing Homer Simpson stabbing a baby.

Okay. Much more acceptable, right? Yes, yes. So anyhow, so we're saying, okay, make this the next ad. Now, so our ad never shows. So I get in touch with the Fox executive in charge of the NFL stuff. And the guy says, well, your ad was out of tenor with the rest of the ads. So we had to pull it. And he said, call me tomorrow and tell me what you want.

I said, well, that's music to my ears. So, you know, my people are a little upset and so forth. And I turn to my right-hand guy and I say, man, can we be this lucky? So I write a blog article about what happened, you know, how the first ad ran and the second one was pulled. Never happened before in the history of television. So I put the blog up. It gets picked up all over the world.

I mean, I'm doing commercials from early, you know, crack of dawn to dusk. And that went on that way for a week. The Go Daddy Girl, she had a name now, Go Daddy Girl, Candace Michelle, she went on the Today Show, the Tonight Show, the Tomorrow Show. She went on Howard Stern. And I told her, I said, Candace?

Don't you dare get in that spanker or that super soaker. And she goes, I won't, Bob. And she was true to her word. And so anyhow...

From that commercial, our market share went from 16% to 25% overnight, and it held. Overnight. Overnight, yeah. And obviously, what goes without saying is at no point in the commercial do you really say what GoDaddy is selling, really. It's all about getting your attention and wondering what GoDaddy even is. Well, yeah, yeah.

I think we might have mentioned domain names somewhere in there, but it was quickly in passing. I mean, we never went out of the way. But what happened, the beauty of all that was, okay, you know, when the ad was rejected that second time and it was picked up all over the world, it was on every radio show. It was on every TV show. It was in every newspaper and most magazines.

They all said exactly what we did. It's unbelievable. I mean, it's one of the most amazing Super Bowl, you know, success stories. It was a love story. And so, you know, it's just one of those things where, you know, once in a lifetime something like that happens. With us, it was the 2000 Super Bowl. Where else can you go surfing and skiing alone?

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Well, you have a career of making things happen, and that's the first time, the first six. And you ended up selling GoDaddy for a fortune, and it goes on to this day. You've moved on to so many other things. I'm going to get to your book because I've read it, and I'm super, super interested in talking to you a lot about it. But, you know, personally, I'm obsessed with PXG, as you know. And here's what I've heard, and you've got to tell me if it's true.

So for those of you who don't know, PXG is Bob's company. They make the best golf clubs in the world.

extremely high end in that it's the, it's the finest technology. Here's what I heard. I heard you went to whoever, like the, the, the, the best technology guys at say ping and tailor made or whatever. And we're like, I want you to come for me and I want you to make your dream club. I don't care about the cost. Don't worry about the market. Just give me the, your dream club that you've ever wanted to do. And they did. Is that,

Is that a true story? Is that an apocryphal story? Well, I don't know what apocryphal means, but, you know, it's not a true story. Not exactly. It's not! Oh, I love it, though, but I love it. You might have to steal it. I got to tell you what happened, though. Yeah, please. What happened was,

I bought Scottsdale National. What became Scottsdale National? Oh, that's a whole other story I want to ask you about. Oh, yeah. Okay. Because I've heard that story, too. There's a lot to tell there. Okay. Well, okay. You mentioned Scottsdale. Let's put PXG on a table for a minute.

So what I heard, so that golf course is notoriously beautiful. It's a top tier golf course, but as you know, and I love golf, I'm obsessed with golf. And look, I love when I get to go to the most beautiful places in the world that are very, but there's a, it's very structured. It's, it's very, it can be very uptight. I heard when you were a member, you did not particularly like golf.

some of the oversight and structure. And so you said, I'm just buying this place and making it my own. Not true. You know, no stories are true. I mean, every story about me is a fable. Yeah, no, but it is. You definitely occupy that space. But what happened was, is, you know, when I sold GoDaddy, you know, I had a couple billion dollars in folding money.

And so I decided, you know, I would, you know, if an offer presented itself, I'd buy a, and this is back then when you could do this, you know, I'd buy either an NFL franchise. You know, a guy asked me once, he says, you ever considered buying a franchise? And I said, I have no interest in owning a McDonald's.

But anyhow, okay, so I decided to buy the golf course. I paid $100,000 for it. Excuse me? Yeah, 100 grand. How? I don't understand. How? With a check. $100,000 for a golf course? Yeah, uh-huh. But there was some sleight of hand involved.

Okay.

but anybody could play it really. You know, you could have a concierge at a hotel get you on the course. I know those types. You know, they have reciprocal agreements everywhere, you know, and that sort of thing. So you could be a member and never get to play the place. All right? So what I did was I found out that they were going to put the club up for sale in the fall.

And so I went and tried to buy it from them. I said, you know, I'll buy it. You know, I'd have given them a million bucks or a couple million bucks for it. And they said, no, we can't do that because, you know, we got to give the membership a deal.

So they go ahead and make this deal for the membership, and the deal is a terrible deal. It is just absolutely terrible. So they wind up coming back with a better deal, and the better deal is we'll sell it to the membership for $100,000.

If you can give us, post a letter of credit for $5 million and you can do this and do that and do this. The membership would have never been able to do it. And they told me that. They said the membership will never be able to do the terms. So when we get ready to put it up for auction, they will have already had their chance. And we'll probably have seven different parties that'll do that.

So what I did was I went down and they said, whatever you do, don't join the club. So I talked to Steve Cabay, who's my right-hand guy. I said to him, we got to join the club tomorrow. And he goes, well, yeah, but they said you don't want to. I said, well, there's a reason they don't want us to. So we go down and we talked to the membership director. And, you know, they were selling the members' tickets.

for like $25,000 and it was a non-equity thing and so forth. Well, they had another one for like $75,000 or so and they hadn't sold one in five years. So we each bought two of the $75,000, each bought one of the $75,000 memberships. And I did that because we'd get all the documents, we would have access to everything.

So anyhow, I do that. The membership gets together, forms this membership committee who's going to come up with a deal to buy the club. And they had like about five guys on it, which were exactly the five guys that should never be on it. All right.

They take and put together a deal, and the deal is terrible. It is absolutely terrible. First of all, if the place was crowded before, in order to get money for whatever they needed to raise, they had that many more people playing it. I mean, you didn't...

Even the outside people wouldn't have got to play it. And then they said there'd be, you'd lose half your equity or you'd lose all your equity. You would this, that, and the other thing. So I go ahead, since I have everybody's address and so forth, I send everybody a letter and said, hi, my name is Bob Parsons. I just recently joined the club. I've seen the membership committee thing. I don't like it. I have a better idea.

So I go ahead and in it I say, look,

if I buy the club, all right, dues will only increase a little bit, and all outside play, I will replace all your equipment. The equipment they were using was bought during the Civil War, I think. And then, you know, and on and on and on and on. And I said, and if you take my deal, I will post a $5 million letter of credit. I'll do that, and I'll loan you the money to buy the club with.

And they goes, that's fine. I said, the only catch is right after you acquire it, you have to convey it to me for the same terms. Right. So you got it for $100,000. All right. And that's how I got it for $100,000. Okay. I knew that there was a great story there. And that is actually an even better story. Tell me about...

how you came to want to design a golf club line, of all things. I mean, obviously, because you're a golfer and you love golf. I get that. But I feel like that's a hard business to crack. Oh, it is. It is. It is probably the toughest business I've ever been in. And I've been in some tough business. I know. I've heard you say that before. Why is that? You've been in so many businesses. Why is that so hard? Well, first of all, you have to design...

some excellent golf clubs, which I have no trouble doing. And we have some great designers and so forth. But the other thing is, you know, you got to have your clubs manufactured properly.

And then you've got to maintain this inventory and all the things that you didn't have to do with GoDaddy that you had to do with the golf company. And then the industry was shrinking. Yeah. And, yeah, it goes through that. And, you know, and it just was –

It was very tough because it was a small market. The companies that are in it were traditionally in it, like TaylorMade and Callaway and Ping and Titleist. I mean, been in it forever. They're legendary, legendary. Right, exactly, exactly. So anyhow, so we go ahead and –

I talked to a friend of mine who was a designer at Ping. And I asked him, I said, Mike,

how come your clubs don't get much better year after year? And he goes, well, he goes, the problem is that they don't get much better because we have to hit price points and we got to hit time frames that we got to get due to stuff right and on and on.

So, wait, do they – so you're saying they had – so they have technology to do it, but because of whatever reason, price points, corporate stuff, whatever, they're unable to actually – No, no, no. They don't have the technology to do it. They didn't bother with it. You know, they just did the technology enough to get them, you know, the clubs that they're going to do. So, I said to him, Mike, let me ask you this here. Suppose you didn't have to – you didn't have all those constraints, right?

You know, suppose, you know, instead of all those constraints, you know, you can, you have all the money you need and, you know, and it doesn't matter how much you spend. All right. And you don't have any time constraints. I said, you think you can make significantly better golf clubs? And he says, man, I'd sure as hell like to try.

And then that was the genesis. So, you know, I said, well, you know what? Let's give it a go, brother. And I said to my right-hand guy, Stevie, I said, God help us, sir.

You know, we're in the golf club business. Well, they've changed my—but they really are revolutionarily different. They are. And from the minute they showed up, they were. It took a while for the Woods to catch up to the Irons, but you have now, big time. And every—I mean, you always had the Sugar Daddy. The Wedges were always super sick. Those were always my favorite clubs, but—

I can't tell you, it's so fun to go out in the world with them and people are like, oh, wow, hey, those are PXGs?

Let me have a look at those. It's kind of like driving a vintage car or a current really cool car down the street, and everybody wants to look at it. Everybody wants to, you know what I mean? It's really cool. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what it is. And so, you know, and they're sexy as can be. You look great. It's like having a blonde in a bikini standing up in the backseat. You know, everybody's looking at the car. Yeah.

It's good stuff. No, they wouldn't be looking at the car, would they? No. No, they wouldn't.

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Okay, let's talk about the book. I didn't know your story. Thank you for your service in Vietnam. It's always great to be able to celebrate guys like you because you weren't celebrated in the time when you returned. So I can't even imagine what that was like. The story that you tell in your book, and by the way, the book is called Fire in the Hole.

The Untold Story of My Traumatic Life and Explosive Success. That's the title. The story that you enlisted with three dudes, and you're the only one who came back whole. Yeah. By whole, and I wouldn't even say whole when you had in the PTSD. One didn't even make it to enlist, and the other had catastrophic physical injuries. It's unbelievable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other did.

Yeah, the one poor guy, you know, he made it through boot camp. Guy's name is Aggie, just the best dude in the world. And, you know, his mother owns a bar. He's got some guy after, doesn't want to leave because, you know, he just wants to sit there and drink. So he gets in an argument with Aggie's mother, and Aggie jumps in between him, and this dude plants a big knife right in his chest.

Goodbye, Aggie. Yeah. Heartbreaker. You have more stories. That's why you wrote the book. But you have, I mean, you're like a jukebox with records in it. That yours are stories. Yeah. There you go. And then so it was me and my buddy Mike.

And we took and we went to, you know, we went to Vietnam together. I went to 26 Marines, which were operating off of Hill 190. He went to 1st Marines. I have no idea where they were.

But he had a deal where a hand grenade landed at his feet. He went, reached down to throw it, pick it up. But just as he was touching it, the thing exploded, took both his legs off and his right arm off. And that's what happened to him. Now, if you talk to Mike today, he's the happiest guy you've ever want to meet.

And I asked him, I said, Mike, how can you be so happy, brother? He said, Bobby, I wasn't going to let a triple amputation fuck up my life. Wow. I said, man, you are the man. No kidding. Yeah. When you came back, you talk a lot in your book about PTSD and PTSD.

That is a thing that wasn't even in the vernacular. I mean, I guess in the old days they had shell shock, right? They talk about guys coming back from World War I with what they called shell shock, which was obviously PTSD. And then you never heard about shell shock weirdly in World War II, I don't think. Like that was not really a thing. Obviously, trauma is trauma is trauma and war as it is in any life. What was your journey learning about it, getting it diagnosed? Yeah.

Like, when did you notice something that you had been changed? What was that like for you? Well, you know, the first time I had an inkling of what was happening is, you know, when I went over to Vietnam,

I had just turned 18, just turned 18. I made the cut. And because I joined the Marine Corps during the height of the Vietnam War and showed my—I was getting ready to fail—

And my senior year, and I wasn't going to graduate. So I joined the Marine Corps with my buddies, and I showed the teachers my orders, right, to go to Parris Island. And they knew where I was going to go after that. Well, you know, one or two of them cried. They all passed me. So I owe the Marine Corps my, you know, my high school diploma. And that's kind of, you know, how that went.

And, you know, when I went over there, I was a pretty happy-go-lucky guy. You know, I probably had some PTSD from how I grew up. You know, it didn't have a – like a –

I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I was born with a dirty plastic one. And so, you know, that's just kind of how that went. When I went over there, though, I was still in pretty good mood and, you know, good spirits, that sort of thing. But when I came home, instead of being that happy-go-lucky guy, I was different, man. I had a hair...

I didn't like being around people much. It was just completely different. And it was PTSD. And I didn't know what it was. I just knew I was different.

But you knew you were different. You knew enough to know you were different. Oh, 100%. 100%. And then, you know, as the years kind of clicked by, first of all, you know, I was a terrible student when I was in school. Terrible. I failed the fifth grade.

Nobody can ever take that away from me, Rob. And nobody will try. There you go. So failed that, failed the fifth grade, was going to, you know, the rest of the years, I wish, you know, they were going to be better. Every year for me was a photo finish, you know, to see whether I passed or not. And so that's just, it just was the way it was.

So when I came home and eventually, you know, at first I worked at a steel mill for about a year or two at Bethlehem Steel. I was one of those guys that would get underneath these big lathes and shovel out the chips, you know. I'll tell you what, I was in great shape, man. I was like a bull, you know, working with that. And so then I'd take in the...

Man, I just was in this boss shape. So then I see this ad where it says at the University of Baltimore that, you know, if you go there and you're a veteran, you don't have to take entrance exams. Your grades don't matter. On and on, you just need a check.

and to be eligible for the GI Bill. So I go there and apply to go to college. And they asked me, they say, well, you know, what are you going to major in? I didn't even know you needed a major and nobody in my family ever went to college.

So they tell me to go see this counselor. Well, I go see this counselor, and they got a line, I mean, a long line to see him. If I got that line, I'd be just getting to see him now. So...

You know, I don't do that. So I go back and I say to them, can I pick my own major? And they said, sure, just sign a waiver. So they give me this book of majors. I open it up. The first major in the book, baby, is accounting.

And I said, what's that? And they said, well, you good in math? I said, yeah, yeah, I am. And they said, are you good with, are you interested in business? I said, sure. They said, you probably should take accounting. So that's how I got to study accounting. And so I did. And it was a fortuitous choice to

Because, you know, I just clicked with it. I graduated magna cum laude. What? Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait. How does a guy who at one point in his life isn't going to graduate the fifth grade end up magna cum laude? What happened? The Marine Corps.

The Marine Corps changed me in every way. I was a different guy. You know, they taught me responsibility, that responsibility's sacred. They taught me the importance of discipline. You know, when you have something to do, you don't have to like doing it. You don't have to want to do it, but you got to do it. They taught me that I could accomplish more than I ever dreamed possible. And they taught me that I had a right to be proud.

And all those things together with some, you know, much other stuff. Man, I was a different man. And so I owe them totally 100% credit for that. Matter of fact, Rob, I owe them credit for everything I've ever accomplished.

Amazing. Because, man, I was just a knucklehead when I went in. When I come out, man, I was a warrior. I mean, isn't it interesting that the duality of it where you, and I can hear it and see it and I get it, you owe your life to it. And yet the experience leaves you

permanently with PTSD, would you consider it a wash? No, no. No, it doesn't sound like it. I wouldn't. You know, as a matter of fact, the PTSD...

Um, you know, when I had it, you know, that might've been part of the reason why I was so successful because I always, I always would buckle down and just focus on whatever I had to do and do it. And the reason I did that is because I, you know, I, I just didn't, I didn't want to socialize. I didn't want to do a bunch of other stuff. So man, I was a worker bee, you know, when I started my first business parses technology,

The way I got to do that is I was working as an accountant, and I was working for commercial credit. And they would send me around for these companies they wanted to buy, and I would go ahead and schedule their assets. And then I'd go back and send it to them, and then they'd give me the next one to do. Well, they sent me out to Redwood City, California.

And I did that for the business they sent me to. And when I was finished, I had 12 hours to kill between then and the time I had my flight back to Baltimore. So I wound up on the Stanford campus at the bookstore. And I bought a book on how to program in the basic computer language. And on this 12-hour layover,

I read a lot of the book, enough to get to salient points. And I wrote my first computer program.

And when I got back to Baltimore, I was just lucky enough that in my office, I had one of those dumb terminals back then. It looked like a teletype machine, but it ran the basic computer language. And so I started writing code that would do different jobs than I needed to get done so I could do my job better.

And so and then when one of the Apple II came out, I bought one of the Apple IIs and then started writing writing code and that. And when I wanted my computer to do something, I wrote the code.

So, you know, I never bought software. And then when the IBM came out, I bought that, sold the Apple, and wrote a computer program that would do home money management I called Money Counts. And it took me a couple years to learn how to sell it. But when I did...

Start to make your money, brother. You never took a coding class? No. You just did it from a book that you got at a—I've been to that Stanford bookstore many times. Just in the bookstore and then sitting on a plane, you learned how to code. Yeah. There you go. Uh-huh. I'm thinking your fifth—I'm thinking your fifth-grade teacher needs to get fired. No, no. That's what I'm thinking. She was pretty mean. She was a nun, boy. Woo. Sister Brenda. Yeah.

You never forget people who were mean to you on the way up. They all were. I got to tell you, my hat is off to you on so many different categories. But, dude, coding is – I think you have to have the math side of your brain. I really do. I think it's – my son took coding at Stanford, and I would –

It's that famous class that everybody starts with and everybody who's ever been anybody has gone through it, except you who learned it on a plane. Well, you know, when people ask me where I learned how to code, I always tell them Stanford. You just leave out the bookstore part. That's amazing. It's true, though.

It's where it all stems from. But it's unbelievable if you've ever, I mean, my son, who's really, really smart, John Owen, you had to write a computer code for your final grade. I think what he managed to do, and he's gotten A's in everything he's ever did, was a stick figure that walked. His roommate created an exact replica of the entirety of Facebook. Wow. He got taken immediately out of the class for $400,000 a year.

as a freshman or whatever it was. So,

It's not easy, but some people have a facility. You clearly did. Yeah, well, you know, when I was asked if I was good with math, you know, when I was a little kid, I went to first a public school, public school 83. And man, I loved that. I loved that place. It was just so much fun. And then when I was going into the third grade, my father, for reasons he's never told that, he never did tell anybody,

You know, he became Catholic, and man didn't have a religious bone in his body. But the victim of that was the two victims, me and my little brother, where, you know, we had to go to this Catholic school, St. Elizabeth's of Hungary, you know, where the nuns dress like penguins, and it is like a prisoner of war camp.

Uh, Gloria, it is, uh, it is something. So I remember when, when I went into school that first day, I walked, walked in the front entrance and they had this big wall and they had this effigy of Jesus on a cross. And, um,

You know, when I looked at that, you know, everybody had been telling me, they said, you know, when you go there, there's none, you're not going to put up with any nonsense. They will beat your ass raw. Well, I looked up and I see Jesus on a cross. What I seen, because there was no religion in my house then, or ever really, I seen a guy nailed to a plus sign. I thought, well, shit, I'm not going to be that guy.

So, I thought these people are very serious about math. So, I focused on math. Talk about it's all about how you see the world. That's a great version of you look up, you see a guy on a plus sign and get serious.

Um, the book is fire in the hole, untold story of my traumatic life and explosive success out now. Um, I, I was, you asked me to write a forward to the book and I was happy to do it. And what I said in it was you are one of the great American success stories, characters. And by the way, to have both their success stories and their characters when they come together, that's my favorite in the world.

unique, interesting, iconoclastic, controversial, funny doers, achievers. You run the class, Mr. Parsons. I'm a huge fan and it's been great having you on the show for sure. I hope you had a good time. Well, I'll tell you what, I sure appreciate it, brother. What a guy, huh? I mean, come on. It's the best. What an unbelievable journey.

You can't make it up. You can't make it up. I love being able to put the showcase on people like that. Don't forget, Bob's book, Fire in the Hole. It's out now. Thank you all for listening. There's so much more to come next time right here on Literally.

You've been listening to Literally with Rob Lowe, produced by me, Sean Doherty, with help from associate producer Sarah Begar and research by Alyssa Grau. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel. Our executive producers are Rob Lowe for Low Profile, Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross for Team Coco, and Colin Anderson for Stitcher. Booking by Deirdre Dodd. Music by Devin Bryant.

Special thanks to Hidden City Studios. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Literally.

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