Grubstakers - Episode 75: Sara Blakely (Spanx)

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

On this episode we dive into the billionaire making the world thinner by reinventing the corset Sara Blakely. Listen up as we let you in on how hounding the executives at Nieman Marcus, for over a week, and sending a basket of her goods to Oprah helped create a woman who eventually named her son Lazer. That’s right Lazer, and if you are looking for Sean’s ASMR goodness we are severely lacking this episode due to his absence. Tune in and tune out you got Grubstakers on the dial.

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin a start in the dynasty. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people. I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. But anyway. In five, four, three, two. Welcome to Grubstakers. I'm Andy Palmer. And with me as most of the time are my friends...

Yogi Poywall. Steve Jeffries. And Sean McCarthy isn't here right now because he is currently in Brazil volunteering with the Bolsonaro Youth. Oh. Yeah, yeah. What's he doing with them? I think he's helping out with some kind of camp. Oh.

Yeah. You know what? He told me he's helping them create their own podcast down there he's lead podcast tech down there and he's really doing a good job teaching them how podcasts work teaching them the ins and outs and the outs and ins you know i saw like some like um i don't know some anarchist community uh posting recently i think it's somewhere in italy or something but the header they had were people in like full uh like bandanas on their face and their head and you know what they were doing they were having mics in their hand and podcasting quibble yes even an advertisement for like even an article on anarchist communities is a is a podcast haven that's a that's a waste and like either don't do a video component of your podcast or uh don't do don't put on the bandanas yeah i mean i guess that's true

uh but alas today we're talking about sar Blakely, the CEO of Spanx. S-P-A-N-X. Sexy. She is a billionaire. She has about a billion dollars, I believe, a little over one. So buckle in, because you're going to have three guys talking about women's clothing for an hour. Hey, listen, as an overweight man, I feel like I should be able to say the most on this show. They have male Spanx now. Well, I'd

never wear them because I'm not. I'm wearing them right now. Oh, really? I wear Under Armour, the original man Spanx, ladies and gentlemen. Spanx for men that you can work out in Under Armour. I wear Over Armour so that my enemies know that they can't defeat me.

But get right into it. Spanx, as you may or may not know, is a garment sold in high-end retailers that slims down the appearance. They have branched out since their original inception idea, which was launched in 98. Now they currently make bras and underwears and leggings among many other products that are probably the same as the competitors, but they got the Spanx name on them now. So basically saying, oh, remember

the corset? Let's do that again. Was about a $3 billion idea. Or $1 billion idea. Not even $3, just $1 billion. Sarah Blakely, before she became who she is in her childhood, when she was growing up, her dad would ask her and her brother every day at the dinner table, hey, how did you fail today? And if they couldn't come up with an answer, their dad would be disappointed,

which is kind of cruel and harsh. Well, at least he's not mad. Well, all parents aren't mad andy they're just disappointed you know that's the key we're recording on father's day i forgot to do my shorts i forgot to take out the trash sure yeah what i like great high five go do it what i find interesting is that they couldn't just say when he said how'd you fail? Like, they could say, I don't know, coming up with an answer to this question. But that one's only going to keep the belt away for like, you know, three, maybe four goes.

Did you guys ever deal with the belt? Did you guys ever deal with parental abuse in that way? No, I just got stories of the generation before me. That must have been nice. I got slapped a whole bunch. I got the occasional swat. I feel like immigrant kids in this country are often, they have to deal with this like, I got slapped a whole bunch. My mom threw spoons at me. A whole bunch of A lot of threats of violence is wrapped into parenting. Spoons? Yeah, spoons. A lot of threats of violence is wrapped into parenting.

Spoons. Yeah, spoons. Metal spoons. I guess that's like the getting hit with a bag of oranges type thing, where it's not going to injure you like a fork or a knife, but it sends the message. Yeah, and someone threatening, an adult threatening to throw a spoon at you, regardless of your age, is terrifying. Yeah, certainly. Because in my case, my mom's in the kitchen working on stuff and she sees me doing something i here's the thing it's not i will say it's not terrifying regardless of age because check this out i'm gonna throw a spoon at you i'd be terrified but that's ptsd did she ever throw a spoon in and missed you and it hit something

valuable uh maybe actually what that does seem like a possibility i think once you threw it and they hit like the glass on our uh the the uh fucking the fireplace like we had a gas fireplace i think i hit that once it made like a huge call it was very funny but incidentally though whatever she was throwing a spoon at me for i have no idea what i was doing then because it immediately became the moment my mom's throwing cutlery at my face. I'm moving. Keep at it, young yogi.

I'm moving to knives. It's less cutlery and more of like scoop-lery. I was also worried about like if she'd been cooking with said spoon and she'd been like mixing spices or had been in some boiling hot, you know, somber or something. And then she throws at me, I'm dealing with spoon,

but it also burns. So it was a multi-pronged weapon. Oh shit. Yeah. So it was a, it was a thermal projectile. Oh yeah. At sometimes.

Yeah. Well, if it, if it landed on me, you gotta, you gotta get good at dodging spoons in the Pollywall household. So the Spanx lady, if it landed on me. You gotta get good at dodging spoons in the Pollywall household. So, the Spanx lady.

How'd she start out? She's got a dad who wants to find out how she failed. So, you know, nothing psychologically weird going on there. Right, of course.

Where'd she grow up? What'd she do? What's her deal? She grew up in Clearwater, Florida. There's not that much about her upbringing, really. It's pretty basic. She went to Clearwater High School.

She graduated from Florida State University. She was a member of the Delta, Delta, Delta sorority, Tri-Delts. Where was it? Florida State University? Yeah. And when she graduated her undergrad, she was going to try and be a lawyer. That was the first dream. But then she failed her LSAT, and her dad was proud, but she was mortified. But because she failed her LSAT, she decided to just get a kind of middle-of-the-road job

selling fax machines for a company. What was the name of the company? Donka? Donka, yeah. How do you fail an LSAT though? I mean that's like failing the SATs. Well she just got low score. Really? You think it's just a low score situation like she wasn't I don't think you can fail it

so much as just you get a low score. Yeah I guess that makes sense. Well she didn't get the score she wants. I guess you know I've never considered that Stephen. I've never thought that you can't fail those tests. I just realized this. I don't know why that's eye-opening information for me but i've never realized that you could you can't fail those tests i don't know she she got too low of a score to get into her safety school that baffles me because those tests can't be that hard can they like

you have to have dicked off through college to fail an lsat Yeah. I mean, you know what? My sister, I mean, I'm sorry, my fiance, her sister took the LSAT on a whim and did great on it. Like, literally, she was like, ah, my friends are doing it. I might as well try it. And then, like, did amazing on the test. Everyone's doing the LSAT, so I thought I'd try it. I assume that, like, the grades are based on the fact that like probably a good third

of the people taking it are actively drunk yeah oh yeah oh definitely drunk and also i mean listen the whole fucking case recently with the usc kids getting their parents to pay for money yeah yeah i mean you tell me law school kids ain't got fucking money back in their butts oh yeah like i'm not saying there's been manipulated lsat tests but i'm saying that if it's a if it's not a pass fail system and it's just a high low scores type of thing i'm sure you know and i realized the education system was fucked up when i was placed in a class called ar which was called academic resources essentially you just get more time for tests and stuff and i remember one of the seniors

was taking a test and in it the test question was something about like if the tax rate is this and you make that much how much money do you have left over for blank or whatever and the lady literally went i don't know this shit i just use turbo tax and she was winning the argument though the teacher was like i mean that's a fair point you if you don't know how to do the tax, you know, like, and I was just like, oh, this country is fucked. Like, I am not ready for the world if this is what we're letting pass. Okay, here's an LSAC question. If Jason places higher in running than in biking and places higher in biking than in ice skating and swimming, which one of the following allows all six of his race rankings to be determined?

What? That's something where you just need to write it down on a piece of paper. Like, that's a middle school level question. She got bad grades on that. So, because she got bad grades on the LSAT, she instead took a job at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. And she worked there for three months, and then apparently during this period, she occasionally

worked as a stand-up comedian. She claims that it lasted two years, but from this, it looks like she just did a couple of mics. I don't know. What was she doing at Disneyland World? I'm not sure. I think that it was just, they don't, nothing that I could find could really say what she did there.

But the thing is, is that she could have been anything from, you know, the real life Disney princess to somebody working in back to even someone in like their accounting offices running numbers. She just said she wanted to be goofy. But she wasn't tall enough to be goofy. Right, right, right. She would euthanize the mascots when they get rabies. Oh, my God. So then after her job at Disney, she started working that job at Donka. Sorry, the Donka stuff happened after the Disney job.

Bitter. So that job was selling fax machines door-to-door. And apparently she was good enough that she got promoted to a national sales trainer at the age of 25. Now, here's the thing. I don't know if you guys ever bought anything door-to-door, but it's really do you want the product or not? Because I remember my family had a door-to-door salesman once, and they sold us a Kirby vacuum. I don't know if you guys know about this.

That vacuum was pretty good. It's a heavy piece of shit, but it works very well. And with fax machines in this era and in Florida, how hard is it to sell a fax machine to old fucks in Florida? I mean, really. You just got to convince them it's the technology of the future, and that it costs X amount of money. It's not hurting their bank account to sell a fax machine.

So all I'm trying to get at is that a lot of the people have been like, oh, she's such a great salesperson. She got promoted to national sales trainer at 25. That's not fucking hard. I don't think that that's really that big of a deal. I mean, it could have been a sell me this pin wolf of wall street thing where she goes like door to door and she's like

hey good news you just won this contest you just have to send this form across the country in one hour and they'd be like that's impossible I couldn't do that and she's like it is possible if you had a fax machine get in on possible if you had a fax machine.

Get in on the ground floor of the fax machine revolution of the late 90s. She's working this demanding job in the hot Floridian weather. And so she needs to have an undergarment that doesn't suck. And hosiery typically was thicker and wouldn't cover all of your lines underneath. And so one night she took a pair of hosiery and then cut off the feet parts and just wore that underneath like a white pair of pants but the problem was it was rolling up and down because of the material that that shit's usually made out of but she from that moment oh this is what i should probably fucking do so then she moved from florida to atlanta now wait so it was moving up and down what do you mean by move it was moving up and down

well like so hosiery traditionally is a very stretchy material. And so if you were to cut it off the foot, it would, like, roll up or roll down. Yeah, because the entire tension of it is from the fact that it covers your entire leg. Your feet. Oh, so she had to figure out you said that she, like, went to a party

and was really popular with her, like, footless leggings. No, no, no, not that at all. She went to a party like footless leggings no no no not that at all she went to a party wearing footless leggings underneath her pants and so she realized like oh this is this is fucking pretty great i would say the fact that this shit's rolling up on my foot and rolling down from my hips and stuff like somebody should probably make this this device right right and so then after that she moved to atlanta georgia with company, Donka, and then started developing the concept for what would become the Spanx Corporation. She looked up where a lot of hosiery was made in, and apparently there's a whole bunch of manufacturers in North Carolina.

So she hit up a whole bunch of... just like sitting you know at a desk with a piece of graph paper uh and then just writing in like big capital letters like desperate immigrants plus sewing machine and then drawing a big circle around it not not writing north carolina and then an arrow sign with dollars on it so you know she hits a whole bunch of companies in north carolina that make hosiery most of them turn them turn her down she probably just doesn't reach the right people so on and so forth but then one person in uh ashboro north carolina uh called blakely and said that he he got encouragement from his three daughters and so he decided to take a chance on her and And that is when they started developing the product.

And so this is around 1998. And then so she went to a patent attorney to finalize her patents for like the Spanx and the fucking name Spanx and shit. So the idea was just, was this, was the corset thing in play at this point? Well, so that is what this is, essentially. Oh. So instead of hosiery that ends at your hips, it goes all the way up past your bra or past your, you know, chest area. So it slims down the entire body. Oh. Yeah.

Oh. Yeah, dog. I mean, like, you know, it's just hosiery of the 21st century. Right. It's really just, you know, and the entire, like, leggings hosiery of the 21st century. Right. It's really just... And the entire leggings, yoga pants type of movement, it comes from this shit as well because it's all slimming and fucking... It's a foundation garment.

Yes, precisely. Precisely. But not just a foundation garment, though. It is a overpriced foundation garment. The Spanx retail for like a hundred and thirty dollars hundred twenty dollars some of the newer ones and so like it you know listen far be for me to judge what makes a person look good or feel good in clothing but fucking you tell me you buy an $130 underwear I I'd look at

that like maybe maybe you should be I have spent a hundred dollars underwear once but it was because I went on a tour. I was going through Portland to San Francisco to a couple other cities, and I didn't pack any underwear because I got way too fucked up the night before. So in Portland, I had to buy a whole bunch of underwear. And there's one place that was called Underwear for Men. And I'm like, sure, this place only sells underwear. And I went there, and I had to take the train an hour later. So I was fucked on time.

So I bought six pairs of fancy underwear. And to be fair, I bought some very nice underwear. But it did end up costing me about $80. It was the worst decision I made in my life. And let's see. We're about 15 minutes in. So I'm just going to say, you know what? You wouldn't have had that problem if you signed up with Mack Weldon dot com. They have odor neutralizing beads that fix your dick to not smell like dick.

Originally for 120, like you originally said, I think it's like this better be some like Mormon shit. Let me ask you this, Yogi. Could you try it on and send it back if it didn't make your dick not smell so bad? I'm pretty sure I could. Oh, well, you can also do that at MackWeldon.com underwear. MackWeldon. MackWeldon underwear. MackWeldon.com. They're not paying us yet.

Free advertising. So when she was in her 20s, called neiman marcus executive multiple times per day for about a week and a half she says that she knew from selling fax machines that you don't leave like a message and then eventually an executive answered the phone and she said like hey i'm sarah blakely i made a product that's going to change the way your customers wear clothes and it's going to make a real difference for them can i have 10 minutes of your time and i'll fly to dallas so she's got the capital to fly to dallas whenever she fucking needs to and the time to call this fucking random idiot every day for a week and a half right and

then she went into this pitch and then five minutes and she was like oh this this fucking is not working so then she went to the bathroom and then put it back put on the spanks and then came back in the meeting and went this is back put on the spanx and then came back in the meeting and went this is what the fuck i'm doing and the executive was like okay i guess that makes sense we'll put it in even marcus um oh so basically her pitch was like i give you more of a boner now yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what in five minutes and she was like their dicks aren't hard in here let me go put on my spanx i feel like though that was probably like a planned out stunt sure but maybe that's a fair point you know it's it's it's similar to the like i read about

politics for a living but i don't really want to do my comedy about that because it's a lot it's a lot it was it's very similar uh to the nanotainer nanotainer the story of elizabeth holmes where it's like all right i just got to impress these old dudes with money yeah and i'll get this off the ground and at one point she's like went to neiman marcus and didn't like how they were displaying the spanx so she like literally bought or she brought in her own pair and her own like model mannequin and set it up near the cashier and in the quote she literally says when you're confident nobody questions what you're doing so you know she bullies her way into a meeting with the executive sells the product to them by making them horny and then even in the store didn't like how they were presenting it

and took an extra mile to to get it to the right point. I mean, you know, there's a whole bunch of luck involving her success, but it really boils down to how can I bother the right people to advertise what I want to be advertising? And she did tap into the people that controlled the market she was trying to advertise to. I'd like to speak to your manager. Yeah, exactly. Oprah, Kardashians, they all have vast networks of people that are you know flaming that are

mad that their latte wasn't made correctly yes precisely um i was gonna say flaming the fire and that's very hard to say when you can't remember which words go where stoking the flame yeah yeah yeah well i mean and fire is a relatively new concept so i can see why it would be hard to find the words prometheus um um it's crazy how fast it goes from just like you know her sewing things and snipping them around in her uh apartment to it's on sax fifth avenue right right well i mean you the thing is, is that it's a luxury undergarment. So the market for them is high end retailers. And so it's not that Neiman Marcus, I mean, it's not that it's such a great product that Neiman Marcus needed to buy. It was just the only one at the time that was doing what it was doing.

You see, it was different because one thing that we learned from Sarah Blakely's husband in the future is how you got to be different to really pursue a good career. More on that in a moment. He's very inspirational. He's so inspirational. I mean, his music, his speeches. I mean, this episode is about Sarah Blakely, but at the end of the day, we're going to talk about her fuckboy husband. Alright, so then in 2000, Oprah Winfrey gets a basket of fucking Spanx with a

letter made from Sarah Blakely. And guess what? Oprah puts it on her favorite things. And after that, it's all fucking money, baby. That was that year in 2000? Oh, sorry. Yes, it was in the year 2000.

So only two years after they basically got started? Just about, yeah. There was like a year of pre-production where she was prototyping in 97, but it took about two years for it to get off the ground. But I think that... Should we send grub stakers to Oprah? I think she'd send it back with fucking Stedman's jizz.

Can Stedman still jizz? No. It's all frozen. She's just got like a dedicated Stedman jizz emporium on her property. So then once Oprah took it on, she fucking started selling on QVC. She started selling it with other stores and then apparently

in 2013 they were like, we're going to make a comfortable high heel and then that never happened. This is the year. This is not the year. It's like a fun idea to say and pretend you have but then to never execute yeah that's a real elon musk move yeah oh yeah it's like people thought it couldn't be done

the comfortable high heel but we're gonna do it and then like a year later they're like there's no such thing as a comfortable high right this is way too hard um so in all this machigana sarah blakely ends up marrying a very beautiful man jesse itzler and now this gentleman he is anywhere i go a fly girl will please me east to west college girls are easy that is the jesse itzler that we're referring to he was a rapper james in the 90s that's right uh that was his rap name uh he created such great hits as uh uh college girls are easy and also a great song called shake it like a white girl and it's it's kind of interesting how they met originally because um they were both at a party and then as i uh surmised jesse uh looked around and then shouted out where the white women at that drop is from the beginning of his shake it like a white girl music video

their story is like they met at like a sort of like poker like a gambling type thing oh really uh and they bonded over and neither of them knew how to play poker oh yes the the the ever-loving beauty story we're both idiots why don't we start checking up um she's like that song spoke to me i was so easy in college how easy my lsat score suffered yeah like just looking at these it's like you just have to be not actively stoned to be able to follow the reasoning of these questions yeah like the recent proliferation of newspaper articles and major publications that have been exposed as fabrication serves to bolster the contention that publishers are more interested in selling copy than printing the truth.

Even minor publications have staff to check such obvious fraud. The above argument assumes that a newspaper stories of dubious authenticity or new phenomenon. You know, it's, but it's like this, that's not a tough question. You don't need to know quantum physics to be able to like work this out.

It's just basic reasoning you won't let this go will you anywhere i go a fly girl will please me east to west college girls are easy so the way jesse etzler made a good chunk of his money was from his rap career but then he also wrote the great NBA, the Emmy Award winning NBA commercial song, I Love This Game, as well as a whole bunch of theme songs for various teams. The New York Knicks song, Go New York Go. You know that great song?

Go New York Go. That's literally the chorus of the song, ladies and gentlemen. I can't add too much more that's not it that's like a commercial series called i love this game and it's got a whole bunch of music but look up go new york go by the knicks because that actually we should play for the for the listeners because it's a white rapper singing and with black athletes lip-syncing the lyrics and so it's a great mindfuck of former Knicks going, why wasn't this written by Jay-Z?

We are the New York Knicks. We are the New York Knicks. We are the New York Knicks. And if you want to hear a much less popular song about the New York Knicks, subscribe to our Patreon for the James Dolan episode this week. He also wrote a song for the New York Knicks that was nowhere near as well received. Oh, really?

Yeah. So Jesse Isler, Jesse James wrote these songs and made a pretty good cash pile from it. But then he eventually, with a friend, made NetJets, which was a company... NetJets. With that, yeah, NetJets, that essentially would allow you to buy into a private plane collective.

Like a private plane townshare, almost. Yeah. You can buy shares or just part ownership. Shares of a jet? Where can you buy them? Where can you buy these jet shares? NetJet. From NetJets. From the net.

Jet. So you can get the jet from the net? The NetJets. The NetJet? Well, it was later bought by Marquise Jets, which was owned by Berkshire Hathaway. So we got some Buffett money rolling in as well. Yeah, he just wants to own every airplane company. Yeah, I think so.

He wants to own the sky. That was what I took from our episode about him. It's just he owns all of airlines. Yeah yeah and that's why he wants this guy ted turner wants all of montana i mean it's it's ownership of areas but it really wants the air i think he just wants a monopoly on airplanes so that like he'll fly private and then he'll make flying miserable for the rest of us hey he already is he already is um but like he partners with a guy that starts zico water and then they get by bought by coca-cola i mean essentially he's in the right place at the right time when it comes to opportunities when it comes to making some

money on the side of his illustrious fuckboy career as sarah blakeley's husband yeah he decides to eventually kind of transition to uh it was from what I could tell he becomes inspirational speaker Kevin Federline yes precisely that's true yeah um he's written three books if you've if you've seen a guy that does like bullshit motivation speaking talking about living with a marine for 30 days that's jesse that's this guy as well yeah he's like the king of that kind of bullshit like he's on joe rogan and he's like yeah so i like i moved in with the monks and like they had me they have you with sleep it's called a cell it's like the size of this this table here and you sleep on the cell but like you're able to really get in touch with yourself and it's like everything he does it's like how i learned

from this very tough experience how to be tougher and none of and the one like tough experience that he never has in either his personal study or in his own life is just having a regular nine to five job right he's like it's never like what i learned from working 40 hours a week for minimum wage well he and also his future wife uh have this thing of like overcoming you know a larger narrative of like overcoming adversity is like the wellspring of personal growth yeah failing on the way to success yeah so like and even you know um sarah's father asking like how did you fail today right all of that well like they've they've had the luxury of being able to fail many times but still ultimately being fine yeah whereas the average working person doesn't have that many opportunities to fail and

you basically have to make it work and also the average working person doesn't obsess over their failures when they do well they don they don't have the time to. Yeah. I mean, I threw a line with all the billionaires. You might not want to anyway. Yeah, but I threw a line with all these billionaires, like Stephen is saying, is that, you know, the opportunity to fail is the only thing that separates them from the regular working class.

Because, you know, any one of these major failures, I mean, I've never wanted to be an attorney in my life. But if I failed the LSATs, it wouldn't derail my entire life. But it kind of would. I mean, it would make me completely question everything I could do with my life. And, you know, I do think that principle in trying to improve yourself is rooted in a bit of failure. But this whole fucking what did you fail in today nonsense it's like oh it's fucking gross it's also like you know they're she's never gonna have an answer to a question of like how did you fail today where it's like well you know i'm black

and i reached for my phone in front of a cop like yeah and like she has uh four kids as well and in one article i was reading uh one of her sons is seven years old And she's asking the seven year old What did you fail in today And mind you the seven year old The name of this beautiful child Let me just look it up so I can pronounce it correctly Because I don't want to pull a Sean here

The name of the child is Laser Blakely Itzler You know that great name for children Laser What's her other child's name Light emitting diode Laser Blakely Itzler. You know, that great name for children, Laser. What's her other child's name? Light-emitting diode? Yeah, I got my son Laser. Got my other son Strobe.

Got my daughter, Reagan. Got my stepdaughter, Phaser. Disco ball. No, she literally named her son Laser, L-A-Z-E-R. The person that wrote Where the White Women At and the great hit College Girls Are Easy. Where the white women at? Anywhere I go, I'm fine. The person that helped create a child named Laser, ladies and gentlemen.

I just hope that Laser has a family of like I hope Laser names his kids Beatles and Pink Floyd. Such a dynamic pairing Sarah and this guy. And Queen. So you know we've talked about Sarah Blakely and her husband and her beautiful son Laser but one person that I think should be mentioned when it comes to the success of the Spanx brand

is Lori Ann Goldman. She is an investor and a business person that I think should be mentioned when it comes to the success of the Spanx brand is Laurie Ann Goldman. She is an investor and a business person that came from R.H. Macy's is where she started her career doing their advertising and launching new brands. And then after that, she worked for Coca-Cola for 10 years during the period where they did three different Olympics campaigns as well as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And then after that, she came to Spanx in 2002 and helped Sarah Blakely get a manufacturer, among other things. So Spanx started out without a manufacturer. Spanx literally, when Oprah's people were like, hey, we want to see your headquarters and your staff,

she used literally her apartment and no one else. So she was sewing them herself well so no she had a manufacturer in north carolina that took a chance on her and that dude was on the hook for making the actual products themselves and then her office was just her apartment yes the office was apartment the staff was nobody and in one of the interview one of the uh speeches she gives she talks about so she was just in her apartment like every now and then she'd pick up her phone and be like make him spankier yeah she was real howard husing the whole process peeing in bottles and shit she tried to surround herself with mormons but like she kind of fucked up the formula and got...

This is magic underwear. Yeah. She fucked up the formula and got Jesse Itzler instead. I think the difference between the magic underwear and Spanx is that the Spanx stuff actually has holes to pee out of and poop out of and stuff. Actually, I don't think you can poop out of it. Itzler isn't Jewish, but he looks Mormon.

You're telling me the great guy that created rap songs for the 90s looks Mormon, but he's Jewish? I don't know. He's blonde and has these little 90s nerd glasses. But really, this lady, Laurie Ann Goldman, is the brains to how Spanx becomes what it is today. Because after Oprah picks it up and stuff, there's a good chance they could fall apart Laurie Ann Goldman I think believe I believe she helps the manufacturing go from North Carolina to overseas is that right Steven or am I speaking out of turn now

in like the first seven or so years almost all in North Carolina and eventually they outsourced to elsewhere this movie wasn't Laurie Ann Goldman maybe I am a fucking idiot um no no you you're right because she served as ceo from 2002 until what 2013 yeah she served as ceo for spanks

until 2014 yeah okay 2002 to 2014 yes yeah so she yeah yeah yeah thank you yes you good so was lorian goldman basically like you know what's the problem with manufacturing in north carolina is that uh your workers aren't actively starving and that's just that's too much overhead if you say go to a country uh where they die quickly but they're also easily replaceable because there's no other source of revenue you can make a lot of these for a lot cheaper and increase you know now now my husband was concerned are there any college girls in these areas because i need this to be easy steven you're telling me that her dad is a lawyer as well? Yeah, well, so he was a trial lawyer.

Yeah, I mean, she probably had a somewhat upper middle class upbringing. Yeah, I think that, you know, when we look at Sarah Blakely and the billionaire that she is, I think it's pretty easy to be like, well, I mean, she's just making fancy underwear. Like, what's the problem with that? But I think one thing that's unrecognized is the fact that sure she's making underwear that's what she's making money from but the way she's profiting from making underwear is feeding into this instagram social media fucking if you're not thin you're a piece of shit mindset that capitalism seems to breed so wholeheartedly and it's just the product itself

is so um genderized right exactly based on looking a certain way you know also at the same time like american the american obesity epidemic is largely due to just the inherent deregulation of like american food production and how unhealthy american food is. Right. Uh, that, and it's, you know, people, people are from no fault of their own. They're just, you know, they can't afford healthy food. Um, you know, they're becoming obese. It's usually like people at the lower income level who are becoming obese and it's it's sort of like if you had like in a um in a city in the middle of it there was like a chemical plant that was spraying toxic chemicals and then someone came up with a billion dollar idea to manufacture chemical burn cover-up. Yeah, I mean, that is precisely what she's doing.

I mean, not to also, you know, to also include the fact that, like, you know, we throw away more food in this country than we fucking consume. So you want to talk about how fucking the deregulation of all this shit has ruined our country and our nutritional values and our food.

You know, a product like Spanx, the reason celebrities are endorsing it so much is because it's such a great solution that usually would have taken a fucking computer programmer 30 extra minutes after after the fucking shoot was done and i mean you know i i'm conflicted because i i think that a product that helps people feel better in their own skin is good but the need for us to have that is fucking ridiculous and the fact that she's charging an arm and a leg for these fucking products

is bullshit it's okay to critique basically like a new wave of corseting for like the specific genderized violence surrounding it exactly like i mean like the corsets from the 18th and 19th century ended up like fucking with people's spines yeah in and uh rib cages all right when i went to the philadelphia museum of like medical

arteries mutter museum you can see somewhere is that in german yeah that's how it's it's that's how it's spelled oh i didn't know that yeah um if you go there there's a skeleton of a person or a woman who wore a corset and the rib cage is literally like crushed into itself and it's like literally a circle it's disgusting and this fucking body dysmorphia day and age we live in where if you're not fucking a hundred percent attractive looking at all times, you're worthless is so goddamn horrible. Here's the thing is I also went to the Moodle Museum, but I didn't notice that because it's also full of jars of deformed fetuses and formaldehyde. I remember this. There was like this little kid and his mother in the museum this is just a complete tangent

and the kids saying very reasonably like I don't want to look at this it's scary and the kids mother goes no it's not scary it's interesting and it's like no he's right this is fucked up like you shouldn't make

your child look at dead babies for an afternoon right you're supposed you need to experience the horrors of this history yeah it makes you more well-rounded or something yeah it's like look at the deformed babies so you can be a doctor like this kid's like seven and his mom's like making him look at babies born without brains so they have like flat heads and like just their tongue sticking out and their eyes are glazed because they're dead in a jar well the good news is anyways is when they went home that night the mom went well son how did you fail today and the kid went i don't know i didn't look at the fucking fetuses that were in front of

my face all day today when you go when they went to the museum and the kid looked, I don't know. I didn't look at the fucking fetuses that were in front of my face all day today. When they went to the museum and the kid looked away, one of the older children was like, don't look away. Mother will see you. I guess you could say that Spanx don't go that far, but it's still this, so it's like the more humane corset, but still the same basic idea. I mean, they do. We don't know what this shit does, but man, listen, in the day and age where everyone

knows everything's fake when it comes to how we look appearance wise and how we present ourselves, to add another layer of Spanx is fucking idiotic. Listen, I'm not saying that scrolling through articles and videos on Sarah Blakely, there weren't hundreds of comments of dudes being like, Queen Fraud right there, making it so us dudes have to work a little harder to figure out what chicks are hot and what chicks are not. Fucking this lady right there, all she did was make it so us dudes have to work a little harder to figure out who what chicks are hot what chicks are not fucking this this lady right there all she did was make it so that when i'm at the club and i see a girl dancing i gotta see the jiggle a little extra hard because it could be spanks underneath there you don't know well you don't know spanks hole in your life like there's

so many comments of guys saying those things and i mean as as terrible as all of that is, I do understand. It's just like two terrible sides of society. Right, right, right. There's like a, you know, TMZ bombards Sarah Blakely at the airports from time to time. And one of them was like, hey, so do you feel like you owe the card? Wait, wait. They catch her at the airport? Yeah.

Her husband started a private jet rental. Oh, I know, Andy. Still got to go through security. Still got to go through baggage claim and stuff, too. Really? Because I thought rich people have their own special airports. They might have used to, but the 9-11 fucking regulated all that shit, I'm pretty sure. Well, they have their own airports, but they also, I mean, mean you know they still oh he's hanging out at the private airports that and you know you might still want to fly into

lax or something yeah uh yeah and the team's the reporter's like hey so like how much like essentially teams your word is saying how much money have you made since the kardashians have started talking about your products and the look on her face is like, I mean, a lot of celebrities are saying what we're doing is great. And the last question the TMZ report asks is like, Hey, is it, is it rude to ask a woman if she's wearing Spanx? And Sarah Blakey goes,

no, no. Why would that be rude? Um, one thing I want to mention is that there's a new campaign that Spanx is putting out. It's like a mom, like a proud of your bump campaign

essentially i don't know any of the fucking names for this shit but basically oh that's that's that's always the great like marketing thing right but basically in this one she did like some sort of fucking flip book or a calendar and she had women with their baby bumps paint funny faces and funny items on said bump and like take photos of it right this woman that's made a billion dollars from from making people think they're thinner than they actually are is now displaying women's baby bumps and painting photos on them and now here's the kicker that's literally a bit from futurama in futurama they have a museum where modern art is painted on fat dude's stomachs. When she turns around and plays the body positivity card,

which they have been since 2016 or so, there's a backlash. They got to roll with the new thick craze. Also, if you wear Spanx and the pregnancy is pretty far along, does that mean the fetus is getting crammed in there Possibly yeah It means you get a thinner fetus And that's all we want in this country Because it's constricting the nutrient It's constricting the umbilical cord

But they come out thinner The baby is just Just fucking squished down Now that it's not cool to smoke anymore You gotta find a new way to get thin babies. Andy was worried we'd make too many sexist jokes on this episode. It's not sexist. I want babies of all genders or non-genders to be thin.

I'm insinuating that's worse. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the moment I found out that Sarah Blakely's son is named Laser, I went, what is this lady up to? What is she really doing with her life? Because my name is Yogesh Paliwal. When it comes to having an odd sounding name, I've been through the gambit. But Laser? Laser with a Z? I mean, I do feel bad for her in that she became a billionaire.

And her dumbass husband is way more interesting in that he's a public dumbass. And he just has this dumb guy vibe to him that's like... He's on Joe Rogan talking about meeting with with monks harebrained schemes yeah yeah he's like yeah he's this guy who fell ass backwards into all this like fame who started out with this shit anywhere i go a fly girl will please me east to west college girls are easy. And now he's on, like, the official dumb guy podcast experience talking about training for mindfulness with monks. Right. Like, that's, it's just such fucking basic Instagram bullshit where it's you know selfies with coffee and like littered with aphorisms of like if you want to be great all you have to do

is try every morning you know just shit like that and it's like you know what like the thing I hate about it is that there are legitimate aspects of feminism that I truly have hold to my my core like Peggy Seeger I was going to be an engineer and when that this new age type of like anyone can do what they want if they're pretty type of rhetoric is so fucking frustrating it's just it's just fucking bastardizing an entire movement that's based on intelligence to to make it be about being pretty it's also like they take the fact that um you know for a lot of society women were denied power you know as a guy i think i'm an authority on feminism yeah of course i think so they take like you know how for

centuries women were denied power and then what they change it to is that like being ruthless and powerful must be a feminist quality and not that the problem was people abusing power right of course yeah it's the uh power has never been the problem it's been the problem was people abusing power. Right, of course. Yeah, power has never been the problem. It's been the problem that people haven't used the power correctly. It's like, no, power crops all. It's pretty straightforward. Yeah, yeah. Jeffries, you got something?

I just think this is so related to corsets specifically that I think the standard feminist take on spanks has basically just been it's like it's it's a continuation of course it's right and it's okay to critique like that sort of genderized violence around this particular type of garment and the fact that you know people feel kind of forced, in a sense, to wear it. Definitely. Just as a part of maintaining your career, basically. At the very least, it's an added cost of just existing,

trying to have a professional career as a woman. Sarah Blakely says that women often flash their Spanx at her. So there's a pride that I'm wearing this as well. But the pride comes from I'm a working woman. I am in a professional environment, and I need to appear my best. And to do that, I am using your product, and I'm proud of it as well. There is an odd sense of entitlement with the Spanx community that I'm, I think it's so funny. Because it's like, I spent over $100 to look slightly thinner with every outfit I've ever worn.

To compress my body. Yes. To contort it. Right. Into something it's not. Right. Just to, you know. It's also this idea that it's like, oh yeah, you know, I'm making it in business because these allow me to get more power by making my male boss hornier.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's not like instead of like maybe we should just have a place where we should work on a place where you don't have to rely on the male boss being all horned up. Yeah. As a place of work. Why did you get quiet there at the end, Ailey? Because I'm thoughtful. Oh.

No, but that's exactly right. And I think that, you know, with the conceit of the show, are billionaires useful? In this case, it's like you're just making the entire spectrum of body image worse by creating this type of shit. And listen, I understand that, I understand that as a guy saying this who personally is morbidly obese, but not necessarily in the spectrum of most ridicule

when it comes to body standards, that it might seem hypocritical for me to say that to be that outlandish about criticizing Sarah Blakely. But you know what? I'm not convinced that a good-looking white lady that wears thin underwear to make herself look even better isn't selling her image as part of the fucking reason why you should

be buying her shit if sarah blakely was an overweight indian lady i don't think this shit gets off the ground and i understand that might be uh anti-white feminist of me but i don't give a fuck listen no yeah be anti-white feminist because me, but I don't give a fuck. No, yeah, be anti-white feminist. Because it's fucking, listen, the lady named her son Laser. Are you not listening to me? This person is inept in a lot of ways

and we've given her a billion dollars off the insecurities of women all around the world. But think about it, though. She got her start selling fax machines. i'm pretty sure there are lasers in those that's true like maybe she's just getting in touch with you know what she marries jesse itzler you know this is not they get married because they both don't know how to play poker that's like if me and my lady are driving somewhere and we get a flat tire and

neither of us know how to do it and be like, well, you know what? That's why we're perfect for each other. It's also. Collectively dumb. They also had one big thing in common, which is they made a lot of their money by asking the question. Where are the white women at? Yeah. It's does like it's also her rise kind of does highlight like the randomness of billionaires

well like there's it's just it's just a product an emergent property of our system that some people attain that wealth more or less yeah to a degree it was like there's just like this like highly genderized uh system exploitation women's garments right Right. I mean, I guess that's not really random, but somebody is going to take advantage of this to the point that they attain ludicrous wealth. That much is true about the fashion industry. Yeah, it was like she was able to say, okay, well, what if we take all this progress

since the Victorian age and throw it away? Right, right, right. And pretend it's more progress. Yeah, so I don't know, Yogi, if you came across this New York Times article. It was titled, Spanx Tries to Loosen Up Its Image. Oh, no, no, it's gone. Okay, well, I don't know.

I'd just like to close out some of the... By loosen up, on one hand, it sounds like they're trying to say like oh we're not going to be um the skinny heteronormative idea but it also sounds like they're trying to make their image more along the lines of anywhere i go a fly girl will please me east to west college girls are easy spanks they're for loose women. Real quick, Stephen. You know, there was another company made by one of the women from The Real Housewives called Yummy Tummy Pants, and Spanx sued them in 2017. So Spanx is not only the monopoly leader on Spanx,

but also if you want to come with Yummy Tummy, they'll cut you the fuck down. Well, actually, like, okay, these days they have some competition from like the Yoga Pants Industrial Complex. The YPI. Yeah. Like Lululemon. Right. You know, all those groups are kind of edging up against them.

Oh, I've been edging to Lululemon for a long time. I own that stock in the game. In the stock market game. Yeah, right, right, right. You make some great games in the Best Brokers app, yeah. I'm still waiting for the year of the tank. Yeah, right.

Shout out to Best Brokers app. If you wanted to compete with us in stocks, please download the Best Brokers app and add us on there. Well, anyway, this New York Times article is kind of saying my age i just said i'm 12 or younger because they want to tailor sorry go ahead uh they said quote compression is just so 15 years ago said jackie stafford a fashion editor and celebrity stylist in new york

women today just don't want to be squeezed into something uncomfortable. They're much more comfortable in their real bodies. And then it goes on to, actually, it quotes Sarah. We're going to do something revolutionary. We're going to turn our clothes back into all the other clothes. Right, right, right. We've noticed that squeezing the shit out of our clientele isn't as comfortable as we thought it was going to be. What we're going to start doing is making clothes that fit.

Yeah. Yeah. And it goes, just to like kind of close this out a little bit on my end at least. This article, I thought this was funny. It says, shapewear is just outdated. It's just not cut for modern clothing. There's virtually no innovation that's gone into these products except for something that's restrictive that's literally holding women back wait was this an announcement from the spanks company no this is like a fashion critic oh that's fucking gold oh and also at some point i just wanted to add that

um in an interview um that sir blakely did with some fashion magazine. She said something to the effect of, don't let your insecurities or something hold you back in pursuit of your career. Trust your gut. Her entire product is based around not trusting your gut and being really insecure about it. Right, right. Trust your gut that being really insecure about it. Right, right.

Trust your gut that has been so compressed that your intestines have started eating themselves in order to... Trust your gut, the device that literally removes your kidneys without you trying. That's great. That's all I got. Well, I think it's time we saddle up this rodeo i do want to say

that the uh votes are in from people ranking us five stars on itunes and i want to thank everyone who did also uh keep doing that uh the votes have been almost unanimously more drops. That's just not true. I love having the support of real billionaires. Where are the white women at? I love having the support of real billionaires. I left the drop keyboard within reach of Yogi. And as much as he complains about having to edit out the drops, once he can get his hands on it. That's fucking stupid.

That's not my wife. Bob Dole. I love having the support of real billionaires. I'm a socialist. I'm so sorry. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. My name is Yogi Pollywall. Steve Jeffers.

I'm Andy Palmer. Come over to us for the Patreon. We're doing James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden and Rocker. Sean McCarthy will join us next week, and maybe so will you. The story's kind of funny It's one about the honeys And Debbie was a girl who used to do it like a bunny And how about Mocha? Her hips was like a mocha I heard she liked to do it in the back of a sling

And it was Amy, I'm happy to blame me She wanted to see me I'm happy to pay me And V. I know some of the lyrics. I do love the low rider in the background. Yeah, that's like the real selling point of this song is a better song. Yeah, a better song is in the background. That's my favorite lyric, is counting.

Thank you Kardashians for promoting Spanx. See, they've probably put millions in your pocket, you know? They probably, you think? Have you been planted by the Kardashians here to try to get commission? I'm just trying to get a cool scoop, a cool headline. No, listen, all these women that talk about Spanx, it's awesome. Does it also help when, say, you know how they say, this celebrity caught out in Spanx, as almost like a negative thing,

not that I see it that way. Does that help as well? Like every time those stories come out, it must help market and push the brand. Yeah, absolutely. Spanx is a word of mouth brand. I mean, for 16 years we didn't advertise at all and it was all word of mouth. So it was women loving the product that much

that they talked about it in public. Totally. And flash, a lot of people flash their Spanx. I know, I know. Last question, I promise. I get flashed everywhere I go. Oh, you do? I do.

Oh, that's hilarious. Am I allowed to ask a girl if she's wearing Spanx or is that rude? Oh, absolutely. You are? Yeah. Okay, great. Go for it.

Hey, thank you so much, Sarah. Great to meet you. Nowadays, people aren't interested in art that's not tattooed on fat guys. I'm on loan from the Louvre. She's queen of the frauds. Because chicks put on these Spanx, and then when they take them off, it's a totally different experience. Another weapon in the chick fraud arsenal.

Deception. Decepticons. Yes, the Transformers are awesome, but right now we're discussing fraud, which is also running rampant in the animal kingdom. These guys in Argentina are giving steroids to ferrets and selling them as toy poodles for $150. I had something else I wanted to get to. I forgot. Yeah, yeah. Go on to it.

It'll come to me. You know, Hitchcock, when the writers would get stuck in a moment he would tell like a long boring story and one writer at first was like mad that he would do that and then like every time he'd finish after like 20 or 30 minutes like the stories would be crazy they'd be like oh you know what i remember back in the day was that me johann, Mr. Chalmers, Bidsby number one, Bidsby number two. We all went to the store. These are all names of actors in The Birds. They're specifically the birds that they cast in The Birds.

Most of his stories are about hanging out with birds from The Birds. All I know is Bidsby 1 was more confusing than Bidsby 2, but I looked at Bidsby 2 sometimes and thought it was Bidsby 1. Were the writers like, oh wait, this is Orson Welles I'm talking to. Hitchcock's down the hall.

Okay.