Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I don't hunt deer, I hunt money. You own one of the biggest, if not the biggest, law firm in the country.
Chapter 2: What is WonderWorks and how did it start?
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. My big vision was this. What if Google was a law firm? What would it look like?
Chapter 3: How does Alcatraz East generate $5M per year?
You just became a lawyer to fund your Harney ambitions. And that's pretty badass. I built an attraction called Alcatraz East. And it just prints money. I've got apartment complexes. I've got shopping centers.
Chapter 4: What were John's earliest side hustles?
That prints money too. He's basically like half Walt Disney, half shark. Where my competition gets beat by me is 95% of them are shit. I'm not hunting cockroaches.
Chapter 5: How did Morgan & Morgan become a major law firm?
I'm hunting big game. I got goosebumps, John. I love that answer. That was incredible. So, first of all, welcome to the pod. You know, 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 Sean this idea that I call capital men. And I was like, Sean, 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.
Chapter 6: What is the John Morgan School of Branding?
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 like the... I think you have like...
Chapter 7: What is Downtown Flavortown and how does it work?
10 or something different businesses. We can like 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. Well, believe it or not, I've told 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.
Chapter 8: What does 'fish first, fish fast' mean in business?
Back in the 90s, my kids were little. We'd go to the science center and it was just, you know, they were shipped. 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 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'd 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. And 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 Wonder Works. If you Google Wonder Works. It's this right here. There it is. This is amazing. I've never seen this.
Is this near Disney World? One of mine is, the one in Orlando is very close to Disney World and very close to Universal. Is the inside of the building upside down? When 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 are you 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, uh,
that prints money too that that those things i have zero debt and i'll do like 33 million in ebitda this year wow that's amazing you dropped into kind of a bit of gold that you just kind of stepped over which was before that you had a a national fair well we put on fairs around america we we weren't we didn't own the rise we were the operator in other words uh brevard county fair
Pennsylvania State Fair, Long Island Fair, Nassau County Fair, where we just set it up, we'd promote it, and then the ride people would come in and we were just, it didn't make a lot of money. But back in those days, listen, I remember the first time me and a guy, took a piece of land and flipped it and made 60 grand. We split 60 grand.
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