Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster

When I was in 3rd grade, or about 10 years old, my parents were divorced. The divorce between my parents was not a good one and I was the oldest the 3 siblings (all boys) and I probably took it the worst out of the three of us. At this point in my life I started to develop some sort of concept where I tried act as a fatherly figure to my younger brothers and always wanted to please them. This same complex, if you want to call it that, (I am actually happy to have this trait) has carried on to this day and has been the root of all my success as well the root of my failures. During this period of time in the 1990s, when my parents just had divorced, we were back and forth In between my mother and fathers house. My father was a drinker (I inherited that gene) and also very much so a womanizer (luckily that is not something that I participate in and I’ll get to why a bit later). So, we spent the majority of our time when we were younger with our mother as my father (love him to death) was dealing with some issues of his own at the time. My mother, is someone who I don’t only look up to but who I strive to be more like as I get older with life. When the divorce happened, she had 3 kids, ages: 4,7, and 10. She hadn’t worked in years --- and don’t tell any of her employers but she never finished her 4 year degree in college as she stopped school early to take care of a little accident that her and my father had: yours truly. So back in 1995, my mother is 36, with 3 children, has not worked in years, and is newly divorced and has 3 hungry trouble making shit head kids. She started her first job as a cell phone (I think they may have been car phones back then) sales woman and then moved on to a tech recruiting job. At the Tech recruiting job she started to make a decent amount of money but still nothing enough to support 3 kids, herself, and a mortgage. I remember during this time we would go to McDonalds every Wednesday night and they had Bingo and you would win free food and that was how we ate on Wednesday nights --- but we were little kids and we didn’t look at it like being poor we looked at it like a fun time together at Micky D’s! As the time moved on, my mother rapidly changed jobs and reached the high ranks at many different software companies. While she was a tech recruiter she saw a job posting for IBM (as I mentioned earlier she brought home a PC which changed my life) and she decided to apply for the job herself. After that she ended up getting a job at Oracle and worked her way up the ranks winning many awards and working under the infamous Larry Ellison! Along with this great performance in her job came a pay raise, this occurred when I was about 15 or 16. My mother was afraid of me getting involved with drugs at the local public school and sent me to a Private All Boy Catholic high school ---- and boy she was wrong on the drug front. As George Jung once stated, I entered jail with a minor in Pot and left with a master in Cocaine --- similar to my private school experience. However, not to get off the tangent on drugs (which I often do) but I was at this all boy, RICHY-RICH high school, and I had grown up in the lower class. It was really an eye opener seeing how much money all my new friends had and how much more spoiled they were then I was growing up. Before I even entered the private school I had already determined that I was never going to let myself be “POOR”. And since I was about 12 years old I had been running companies and little schemes so that I always had nice stacks of money. I remember at one point when I left that ancient first computer of mine on and forgot to close my windows, my mother found my paypal account open and it had over $12,000 in it --- from little internet schemes I was running (I will elaborate on this particular one here for my share a story/experience at the end of my post). Even besides the internet money that I thought was so cool as I felt like I was creating it out of thin air, I also always had a job even since I was 14 and could get my workers permit. Here is my list of jobs in order that I have had: Had a Lawn Cutting Business in my neighborhood, Worked at a nursery loading peoples cars with flowers/bushes/mulch etc, worked a Christmas tree lot, worked at a carwash cleaning cars, became the Saleman at the carwash working on commission (and competing with guys who were in there 40s and 50s because the job paid well but took a good salesman), worked as a construction worker one summer while in college (all we did was smoke pot and had no supervision and made a lot of money --- was a pretty rad job), worked as a medical debt collector (worst job I’ve ever had), had a car detailing company one summer in college, delivered sandwiches and pizzas, secretary for a guys financial advising company working in his basement with his dog named peaches (very similar to buffalo bill and precious), worked as an assistant to a financial advisor who got arrested for selling illegal securities and then he tried to sue me for calling on his old clients after I left his firm, worked as a broker / trader at a major bank which I recently left. So as you can see I have worked A TON of different jobs and although some of them were horrible – I look back at each one and can see how it changed my character and work ethic and how even when a job truly sucked you always learn something positive out of it even if it is: I never want to have anything to do with this company/industry again.

So I write this post as I sit in my $3,500 business class seat on the way to Singapore for my first stop in Asia. This is the first time I have ever left North America, so I have a plethora of emotions right now. Business class on Singapore Airlines is one of the coolest setups I have ever been on as far as traveling goes, I feel like a King. The kicker is, this flight is a 17.5 hour flight, and is one of the longest flights that there is! I drank 2 glasses of champagne and took a dose of Xanax when I got on the plane and I woke up 6 hours into the flight go see that we only had about 12 hours remaining until we get there. Boy have times changed for me, I went from having to win Bingo to get a cheeseburger at McDonalds to eating an all American Breakfast with a glass of champagne on an airplane seat that turns into a a bed and has its own personal TV. The only thing that this flight doesn’t have is WIFI, which is shitty considering the price --- but I guess we are currently traveling over the Emperor Trough, somewhere in between Alaska and Russia? The flight attendants on this plane are all dressed like little geishas and they remind me of the Episode from the office where Micheal Scott forgets what girl is his and has to mark her with permanent marker . So I guess as I start to put all my thoughts into words the biggest emotion that I am feeling right now is gratitude. I am a LUCKY guy for a handful of reasons:

My mother put my brothers and I first and made sure that always got everything that she could afford to make sure that we were raised properly and were able to get a good education --- she paid for my entire college! Not many other people have that opportunity.
I’m on a flight that cost as much as a full semester at my private high school
I have a girlfriend who is way out of my league
I have a family who all loves each other --- even with the broken family we are still very close and are completely open with each other about everything (they will be reading this blog and I'm assuming im going to continue to incriminate myself with sketchy things I’ve done in life)
Some of the biggest problems I have in a day are an overcooked steak, my laptop running out of power, or my flight to Singapore not having WIFI
So beyond the jobs listed above I have also started about 15-25 different internet companies/ marketing schemes (for lack of better word) which was the main supplement of my income for the majority of my life. I am a very trusting and giving people and I give anyone a shot ---- this has been one of my biggest downfalls that I am trying to work on want to be a priority when I come home from this trip. However, I also look at the giving and being kind as a Karma thing – I am an extremely lucky guy and have been presented a lot of great opportunities in my life I don’t think that its coincident that I listen to everyone’s point of view and try not to judge a book by its cover as everyone has a story that you probably don’t know and they make decisions based on past experience that you might not have any clue about. So I try to give everyone an open ear and chance to prove me wrong that they are a good person. Most of the time they do prove me wrong and for that reason I would say I have about $500,000 that is owed to me from failed business partners, bad loans, people ripping me off etc… I don’t plan on ever seeing that money but I try to look at it as I am $500,000 more educated now that most of you idiots (this is me going into defense mode because I know that I am wrong).
So I apologize for there not being too much meat to this post as there hasn’t really been anything encountered on this trip since yesterday other than the awesome bed/chair, the pretty Geishas, and the champagne and Xanax. So I will go ahead and give you guys the story on how I acquired that $12,000 in my paypal when I was 12 or 13 years old.
I believe the year was 1998 and I was about a year into learning computer systems and doing some self-taught programming. The self-taught programming was more so just downloading folders and folders of other peoples programming projects and then trying to piece together different code via copy paste and buying a few books to help me write some of my own functions. This was a period in time when Porn was not free like it is now. For you younger people can you imagine that? Having to go out and pay to see some boobs on the internet…. What a scam!!! Well luckily scam is my middle name. I met a guy in a chat room (this sounds like the beginning to a Chris Hansen investigative report) and he had a business in porn dialers. So, what this was, was a program that you downloaded and you would click connect, from there your computer would disconnect from the internet and it would dial up to a 1-900 number and the user (I referred to them as creeps) would have access to pictures of naked women/men whatever they were into and they were charged by the minute. I think it charged them something like $20 a minute and I was paid $7 a minute. So I constructed a program that would go through the AOL chat directory and go into each chat room, it would scrape (extract) all of the usernames of everyone in the chat , and add them to a list. From there I used a AOL SMTP Email Spammer to send them all a message. I was 13 years old at the time so I can’t even imagine what my creative looked like but if I had to guess it was something like this, “Want to see some awesome boobs? Click here for access to unlimited boobs”. Anyways after a few months of this I had acquired enough creeps who spent enough time “viewing the boobs” to be paid somewhere in the vincinity of $12k. That was a lot of money to me back then and still is a lot of money to me right now --- and I couldn’t even tell you what I spent it on. I know that I bought a $1000 set of golf clubs, a $800 desktop computer, and a portable DVD player right when those came out.

I started a book on this flight, which is probably the first book that I have read in years, but I am making that a resolution to read more! The book is “Growth Hacker Marketing” by Ryan Holiday, it is pretty good. I wish that all of my clients or people who asked me what I do for a living would read that book because then they would very quickly understand! But I am only 2 chapters in and the first chapter talks about how “growth hackers” as opposed to your old school Don Draper type marketer are able to test and see when a product is a good product or a piece of shit real quick. They show AirBNB as an example, originally it was named AirBeadAndBreakfast.com and it was a company where you could sleep on an air mattress in someone’s living room and they would feed you breakfast the next day and it was like a networking type deal. The owners went back to the drawing board and looked at how they could make the company better and they have the AirBNB that is today valued at a billion dollars. I am going to try to go back to the drawing board during this trip regarding some of my old companies and see if there is a way to I can spin one to go from Porn Dialer Programs to AIRBNB.

That is all I have for now, in 10 more hours I’ll be on the runway in Singapore (and hopefully not in the bottom of the Baltic sea) with more pics video footage and hopefully some interesting stories.
Thanks for reading,
BROJo

P.S. Last night was somewhat crazy --- will have pics and video to follow up with. Singapore is a very strange town but very cool. Need to edit the videos and I'll have another post tonight hopefully. Thanks for tagging along!