168: This Homeless Drug Addict Became an 8-Figure Entrepreneur with Khalil Rafati – 8FE

In 2003, Khalil Rafati was living on the streets of Skid Row, battling cocaine and heroin addictions. Consumed by darkness and self-doubt, his only goal in life was to become famous and die.

Today, he’s the owner of SunLife Organics, a multiple 8-figure wellness empire with locations across the country. He’s an acclaimed author and a highly sought-after speaker. But how did he turn his life around so drastically? And what does it take to rebuild a life from the ground up? In this episode, Khalil shares the powerful lessons he’s learned from overcoming addiction and building a business rooted in purpose and service.

Tune in!

Inspiring Quotes

• “Addiction gave me the one thing that I so fucking desperately needed, which was humility.  humility.  I had no humility. I was a victim, everything was everybody else’s fault.” – Khalil Rafati
• “The world doesn’t exist on this little parasitic device I’m holding. The world exists out there.” – Khalil Rafati
• “When you go from living under a bridge to having a couple million bucks and your shit’s paid for, that’s life. I’ve woken up.” – Khalil Rafati 
• “When people ask, ‘If money didn’t exist, what would you do?’ This is what I would do.” – Khalil Rafati 
• “I don’t think I would be where I am today without addiction.” – Khalil Rafati

• 00:00:00 Intro 
• 00:01:35 The Billion-Dollar Smoothie
• 00:03:44 Best investment Khalil made in himself 
• 00:06:24 The core tenets of a healthy diet  
• 00:08:54 From addict to 8-figure entrepreneur 
• 00:19:52 How do you define a drug? 
• 00:25:47 Khalil’s forming years 
• 00:36:49 Khalil’s awakening and business growth
• 00:51:39 Business and purpose 
• 01:02:22 Outro

Khalil Rafati 0:00
Company wide, we operated an 8% margin, which is terrible for most people. They’re like, You should be at minimum 20% and I’m like, I don’t care. My house is paid for. I don’t have a mortgage. My car is paid for. I was a victim. Everything was everybody else’s fault. If you go from living under a bridge to having a couple million bucks and your shits paid for, that’s life.

Brad Weimert 0:24
Do you think addiction served you?

Khalil Rafati 0:27
It gave me the one thing that I so fcking desperately needed, which was

Brad Weimert 0:35
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Khalil rafati, yes, sir. 2003 your homeless living literally on skid row in LA battling cocaine and heroin addictions today. Sun Life. Organics is a multi eight figure wellness empire with multiple locations, and you also have a yoga center and some other things going on. There’s a very significant through line with your whole ecosystem, which I love, which we’ll talk about before we dive into the history of a couple quick questions. And the first is, at Sun Life, organics, you have a billion dollar smoothie, yes, which you so graciously. Brought one for me. Thank you. Will it increase the size of my manhood?

Khalil Rafati 1:54
I mean, that’s the hope, that’s the I keep praying. It still hasn’t grown, but I have faith, I’m gonna keep trying. What

Brad Weimert 2:02
is special about the billion dollar smoothie?

Khalil Rafati 2:05
It’s just everything in the kitchen sink in there, it’s got everything that you would need to turn you into a super human version of yourself, like the highest version of yourself. So that was created, as I told you, when I brought it in for when the awards week back in LA or, well, I was in Malibu, that’s where I founded the company. But like when, when the award shows were coming, everybody needs to get skinny and healthy and glowy really fast. And so they were asking me all these fucking questions, what do I do? And, oh, there’s to katrinas and vitamin E. And then why you need the collagen, but you really need to get your protein and the three live. I’m like, You know what? Fuck it. I’m just gonna make something that has everything in it. I don’t think it tastes great. I think it tastes good. I don’t think it tastes great. And you brought me the goat. The goat tastes great, yes, yeah, the goat tastes fucking great. But the billion dollar smoothie. It’s, I mean, it’s a meal and a cup you would have to go to, I don’t know, multiple restaurants to get the same amount of nutrition that you’re getting in that that’s literally has colostrum in it, and collagen and protein and just all kinds of amazing things that are going to

Brad Weimert 3:20
make you feel awesome. Also amazing marketing hook. How much press do you get just from having something called a billion dollar smoothie? The Billion Dollar smoothie in the

Khalil Rafati 3:28
billion dollar bowl gets us a lot of press because, like, when the NFL guys come in, or, like the, you know, they just have to buy it. They have to, yeah, and they get a trap. They take a picture of it, they post about it. Yeah, that. I wish I was that smart. It wasn’t intentional, but we’ve gotten a ton of press.

Brad Weimert 3:44
That’s amazing, and I don’t believe that. But what is the best investment that you’ve ever made in yourself

Khalil Rafati 3:51
was just letting go of the Battle of wondering if there was a God, and just accepting that there is a God, that there is a Creator, that something created this certainly not what I learned in Toledo, Ohio and St Patrick’s of Heather downs, which they kicked me out, or St John’s, which they kicked me out, I got kicked out of every fucking school back there. But whatever created all of this, just conceding, just going, okay, something created it. It wasn’t me, and based on that, I need to develop an attitude of gratitude, and I need to stop being a fucking victim, and I need to stop blaming my parents and blaming Toledo and blaming my teachers and blaming everybody and and learn to take responsibility for myself. That was the that was the best investment I ever made, was was just turning my life over to God. And I’m not, I hope to. I am not a fucking spiritual person. I’m not a religious person. I don’t I’m not trying to fall. See, represent myself. I am not but I have a relationship with God, and I work on that relationship every day. Nothing has given me more power, more success, or open more doors or healed me more than that. How

Brad Weimert 5:14
do you view the difference between a relationship with God and being spiritual?

Khalil Rafati 5:18
Listen, if, if I die at some point, and I’m wrong. Who fucking cares? I got to ride that wave of optimism and hope and got away from my existentialism, and, you know that stupid shit when I was a kid, and that whole fucking New Order, Joy Division death called upside down smiley face, like, you know, God is dead, Nietzsche, I was a miserable fucking person, miserable. A spiritual person. I think, I think a spiritual person is somebody who really, truly serves others, and that’s their sole objective. Like I serve others like I definitely am of service. I’m providing a great service for people, and I get compensated handsomely for it, but there’s a lot of monks out there. There’s a lot of nuns out there. There’s a lot of people out there. I’m not talking about like the fancy preachers that fly around on private jets, but like, there’s a lot of people who are really, really into their religion that just do it because they they love God and they want to serve humanity. Those are spiritual people. I’m not one of them. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 6:24
I like that distinction. What are the core tenants of a healthy diet? Because it seems like your service comes into play with a healthy diet. I had

Khalil Rafati 6:33
a huge shift maybe 13 years ago, when I stopped eating wheat products and eliminated processed sugar from my diet. This is right at the advent of Sunlife organics. When it started, I didn’t do this because I decided I was going to be a good person and be super fit and healthy, much in the same way I didn’t get sober 21 years ago, or I didn’t become free from active addiction 21 years ago. That’s a better way to frame it, because I was a good person. I did a necessity. I literally couldn’t go on any further in the same way. At 41 years old, I had a I, you know, you’re from Michigan, I’m from Ohio. I looked like our brethren back there. I had a fat, round face. Even though I wasn’t fat, I had a fat, round, puffy face. Shout out to Ohio. Shout out to Ohio at a giant fucking lady pillow with no dream of ever seeing an abdominal muscle. I could bench a little and curl a little, but I mean, I just I wasn’t healthy. And I eliminated the wheat products. I eliminated processed sugar, I started putting super healthy stuff into my body, and I stayed away from processed foods to the best of my ability, that I think is a healthy diet. I’m a meat eater again, Ohio, I love meat. I stopped with the Carl’s Jr version of meat and started going to the regenerative farms and ordering directly from the farms and getting grass fed, grass finished meat and elk and bison and all that stuff. Love bison. I can eat bison every day.

Brad Weimert 8:15
I don’t even know that. I’m sure I’ve had bison, but it’s certainly not often. I love my stock it. Do you keep it in your

Khalil Rafati 8:22
fridge? Yeah, I have a whole separate freezer. I have a whole, like, giant Sub Zero freezer that is just full of fucking bison and elk,

Brad Weimert 8:31
and what’s the thawing process for that you thought? And then, like, for a day, and then took it, throw it

Khalil Rafati 8:35
on the counter, throw it in the fridge. Okay? And my girlfriend’s great about that. She can’t cook to save her life, but she’s great about thawing stuff.

Brad Weimert 8:42
So that’s actually the barrier for me eating that stuff is like, I don’t have the patience, like I’m ready to cook it. I’m gonna cook it. Yeah, yeah. If it’s not in the fridge and ready to be cooked, it’s

Khalil Rafati 8:50
not gonna get she’s really good about forward thinking. I’m not that good about it. I’m

Brad Weimert 8:54
not gonna premeditate my meals that way often. Okay, so I want to talk about kind of I want to talk about a bunch of things. Some of it is it’s all business focused in some capacity. Because your business is your life in a lot of ways, it seems. And I want to talk about that. But the beginning for me is, and we just spent, I don’t know how long talking about the actual beginning in Ohio, because you were so close to where I grew up, also 31 miles. But it’s amazing that, you know the exact also, yeah,

Khalil Rafati 9:23
well, I drove it. I mean, I escaped, yeah, I love that. Through that

Brad Weimert 9:27
journey, the journey for me started in researching you at 27 and actually it was a post that you made, which was at 27 it showed a picture of you at 125 pounds, having ketamine and cocaine for breakfast. And today you’ve got some life organics as a drug addict. What aspirations did you have? And how did that change to today? I left

Khalil Rafati 9:50
Ohio, like most idiots, to go seek fortune and fame in LA. I mean, there’s just, there’s a lot of that. There people. Because they believe that fortune and fame is going to cure them, it’s going to fix them. And I wholeheartedly believe that. I wholeheartedly believe that if I can become rich and famous, or when I become rich and famous, delusional thought process. Or actually, I don’t know if it was delusional. I either I had my sag card within six months.

Brad Weimert 10:20
I was delusional, until you make it happen. Yeah,

Khalil Rafati 10:23
I was in a rock and roll band with some I was playing music with Mark Ford from the black crows and screen Dwayne Betts and Barry Oakley Jr. I mean, there I was working with some real musicians. I was cast in a couple of commercials. Got my sad card, but I really felt like that fame was the ultimate goal, and that was going to be the panacea that was going to cure everything. And then life happened, and then I went through what I went through, and

Brad Weimert 10:59
was fame a contributing factor to addiction. I mean, hanging out

Khalil Rafati 11:03
with those guys that were kind of living off of second generation fame gave me access to things that I normally wouldn’t have had access to, the heavier drugs, the parties on the beach, the houses, the parties that went on forever, the drugs that seemed to be for free. I mean, everybody was rich, nobody had a fucking job in Malibu in the mid 90s, late 90s, everything was acceptable. I mean, nobody had a moral compass. It was it was pretty it was pretty intense. It was pretty intense. So the fame definitely contributed to it. But I just wanted to make some music and die. And I thought that that was really glamorous. I was, you know, huge fan of Sid Vicious Ian Curtis from Joy Division. I had a fascination with like Jim Jones and Charles Manson. I really was like in a darkness that I was fascinated with, and, God, it’s so sad when I think about that now, because life is so fucking beautiful and I’m so happy and I get to be a part of society now, but at that point, I just wanted to, yeah, become famous and die. I thought that was a great, great goal.

Brad Weimert 12:20
How do you think addiction served you, if at all,

Khalil Rafati 12:27
it gave me the one thing that I so fucking desperately needed, which was humility. I had no humility. I was a victim. Everything was everybody else’s fault, and in the process of engaging in addiction, eventually winding up on the streets, eventually selling my brought my body for drugs, eventually becoming filthy, eventually flatlining, you know, overdosing, in and out of county jail, all of that stuff. It just beat the fucking shit out of me so much that when I finally bottomed out, kept digging, bottomed out, kept digging, bottomed out, got a pickaxe and a shovel, started digging more. When I finally, finally, finally, finally stopped, there was no more fight in me. There was nothing I could do other than look in the mirror and go, You know what? You are living and behaving like a real fucking piece of shit, and it is all you. It has nothing to do that. Oh, I was molested, and my teachers were mean to me, and I had learning disabilities, and my parents were immigrants, and I was called racist. I had every fucking excuse in the book, but addiction beat that out of me. Addiction beat that out of me. It gave me clarity.

Brad Weimert 13:50
Do you think that you could be where you are today had you not had addiction? No

Khalil Rafati 13:56
way, no way. I’d be some fat, bald restaurant manager somewhere, I would, I just, I would go to what I know, because it’s, it’s it’s easy. I wouldn’t have the balls to dream again. You know I was, I was working menial jobs in my mid 30s, couple years of abstinence, and through a set of very strange circumstances, I kind of was going on a spiritual path, you know, seeking God, like a drowning man sees as a life preserver. And then also, kind of, like on a financial path, because I’m like, man, if I’m really going to do this, like, I want to be rich, like, I want to have a good life, I want to be able to be able to have a house someday. I want to be able to have, like, a wife and, you know, maybe some kids and all that stuff. And because I wasted three and a half decades already, I really need to fucking get shit going and in in that clarity. With a tiny little bit of humility, I became teachable again. It’s really hard to be fucking teachable in your mid 30s, really hard. But I became teachable again. I realized I was just a fucking idiot. I knew nothing. So I started. I started, you know, watched the secret, and then read autobiography, Yogi, and then read, Think and Grow Rich and Psycho Cybernetics and how to win friends and influence people, and the Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D wattles, and as a man thinketh, and like, I just fucking, and at the same time was doing yoga and chanting and going to the Self Realization fellowship. And I, like, went all in just, yeah, I just became a seeker, and I developed this voracious appetite that could have never taken place, had I not somehow had that spark, that little spark that turned into the forest fire, the beautiful, glorious forest fire of my life.

Brad Weimert 15:58
I I know quite as few people that are endurance athletes, like intense, you know, fucking ridiculous ultra marathon people, it is very common for them to have intense addiction as well. It seems like you needed to hit that bottom or sub floor. Yeah, yeah, based on to the subfloor, yes, yes. But do you think that there? Do you think that that’s also just the personality type you have, where the addiction and the drive that you had with the addiction of I’m just going to do more and more and more and more is parallel to I’m going to do it the best I can now? Or do you think you would have lived in a life of mediocrity, because it seems like, if you have the personality type of I’m going to drive no matter what, or did it take the bottom to find that?

Khalil Rafati 16:47
I think it’s like, I don’t know. There was this guy named Rafi who was, like, a, what the fuck did he do Tai Chi? Yeah, I

Brad Weimert 16:55
never understood Tai Chi in me. Neither. I was real fucking weird, really weird shit in the park, and he was

Khalil Rafati 17:00
Israeli, and he had that weird, like, list that Israelis have, and he was telling me, like, you know, you go you go to the darkness. You You fell down. You go down so far into the darkness. But now you understand that for how far down you’ve gone is how far you can now go to the light, and you’re going to be massively successful. And it it intrigued me. So I like that. He told me that I was going to become massively successful someday, but I’m thinking to myself, What the fuck is this guy talking about? You know, like I’m a fucking loser, I’m a heroin addict, I’m fucking I’m on welfare, like I’m fucked. But something about what he was saying that was like, if you go down that far and you are in that much pain, you open your vessel up so much that, yeah, I think you become a larger, larger than life individual that that is not going to be happy with a nine to five job, with A, you know, a dog and a cat and dinner at six and a couple of beers. And you, you watch the game, and you pick your favorite team, and, you know, you maybe you go to church or temple on the weekend, or maybe just on the High Holidays or the the appropriate holidays. You go to midnight mass. If you’re a Catholic. That was never going to be me, the everything, like the circuit board got fucking scrambled, and the pain and the shame was so intense, the anxiety attacks, the fucking anxiety attacks that I had when I was a kid, starting at 12, were crippling. Definitely suffer from mental illness. I hate to like label myself, but like, definitely got diagnosed and prescribed all kinds of fucking medication. I’m not on any medication unless I’m doing it myself, like I will micro dose, or I will do a journey every now and then, which has nothing to do with my freedom from active addiction. That’s a whole that’s a hot topic. I’m sure I could get canceled for saying that, but at 17 years of abstinence, when I had eliminated any debt, was living with the girl of my dreams had a thriving business, and my life really had become a fantasy. My like my wildest fucking dreams came from flying around the world, like, everything’s amazing, and a little bit of, like, low level anxiety that was just something that was in there. I made a conscious decision to do a plant medicine ceremony with no guilt and no regret, and by the way, it fundamentally changed me forever, and and I loved it. And I’ve done four, I think in the last five years I will, I will certainly do another one. But had I done that shit when I was a couple years off the junk, would

Brad Weimert 19:52
have pulled you back in? I think so, yeah, yeah. I think that’s a really tough heroin, sugar, caffeine, yeah. Cocaine, Adderall, marijuana, mushrooms, what is a drug? These

Khalil Rafati 20:05
are all fit pornography as a child, shoplifting, chronic, chronically, masturbating five times a day, seven times a day. It didn’t matter. It was anything to try and not feel like me, those are all things we use to avoid feeling ourselves. So

Brad Weimert 20:26
I agree. And the reason that I threw in, you know, caffeine and sugar, etc, yeah, because of all the things that we do to change our state that we rationalize, those are the most commonly accepted and you’ve built a brand around things that fuel your body and nurture your body, but they do not omit caffeine, for example. So where’s the line there?

Khalil Rafati 20:52
I mean, there’s a little bit of caffeine in the goat. I know I can feel it. Yeah, I like it. There’s a little bit of there’s a little bit of caffeine in the goat. There’s a little bit of caffeine in this room. Shake. I want that there for people that are of extremes. I mean, a Ben Greenfield is going to be able to, you know, drink two of those at 7pm and then somehow be able to go to bed at 10pm if I drank one of those after 1pm my sleep would be fucked. Yeah. So we do have some caffeine. There’s caffeine in the in the matcha, but there’s also theanine, so it kind of balances it out. I mean, caffeine can be one of those self destructive things that we use to get away from ourself. There are people that abuse the shit out of caffeine. There are people that die. There’s there’s children that die from drinking fucking monster energy drinks every year. I mean, it is definitely a drug. But, you know, I wake up in the morning, I use a little bit of caffeine after hydrating. I use a little bit of caffeine to kind of clear up my brain and get motivated and start on my little morning routine. I’m not I’m not too down on it. I talked with Andrew a lot about caffeine, and he’s pretty pro Calvin. Yeah, he’s pretty pro caffeine. We, he and I drink a lot of Latinos. It’s a yerba mate. It’s a different type of high, you know, it’s, it’s a bit more cerebral. He, he created with this company, Matina, a sugar free version, and then he just ships me cases to my house, and I geek out on it. And sometimes rarely, but sometimes, like, if I don’t have to go somewhere, and it’s like 10am and I’ve already done all my shit, I’ll just crack open, drink like half a Matina and literally take a fucking leaf blower and go through my inside my house and blow out under the sofa, behind the washer and dryer, under the stove, like everywhere in the in the pedestals, in the in the bathrooms, underneath the sinks, the shit that comes out, the dust bunnies. And I open up all the windows. I burn some sage, I get the fucking Dyson out, I clean it all out, and it every time, not kind of, sort of every time when my girlfriend makes it home, you know, nine hours later after work, whatever, she walks in, and she’s just like, What did you do? What do you mean? She’s like, she doesn’t notice my fucking haircuts, which I get every 10 days, but if I do that, she notices that. And so, yeah, I think caffeine is definitely a drug, but it could also be a great tool. I think

Brad Weimert 23:29
that that’s an interesting sentence, and I think that lots of things fit into that category, yes, yeah, for sure. And so that’s, I like, the question of, how do you define a drug? Because we don’t seem to have a clear definition of it. And then there’s the question of, what’s an acceptable drug, right?

Khalil Rafati 23:46
Depends on the situation. I mean, the ketamine as a club drug is highly addictive, and if you continue doing it, will take you to hell. But ketamine in in therapeutic settings is fucking transcendent. Some of the experiences I’ve had in ketamine assisted therapy, dude, it would have probably taken decades to peel back that many layers of the onion, the trauma that I had locked inside of me that I didn’t know was there. I had no fucking idea when that was released. It reminded me of reading all those fucking Indian books about all the sages and the saints and the, you know, the Paramahansa, Yogananda and Krishnamurti and all, you know, all those cats. It reminded when they would say they would go into like a state of, I’m going to mispronounce it, but samandi, I think, is kind of how they say it. And I’ve had in a ketamine assisted therapy session after the release of this trauma. I’m thinking of one session in particular where I. She took me back to my childhood when I had spinal meningitis and I was in Toledo hospital and I was dying. Now I knew I kind of remembered, and I remember my mom talking about it a couple of times, and I remember people’s reaction like, oh, whoa. You had spinal meningitis from your kid. Like, oh yeah, I was, yeah. I was fucking terrible. In fact, it was, like, around Christmas time, it was really bad, or whatever. I didn’t know the trauma that was locked inside of me that I was walking around with on a daily basis. And when she finally got me to go there under the influence of ketamine, which is a dissociative shuts down the noise and allows you to explore your ouchies.

Brad Weimert 25:47
Did you say your ouchies? Yeah, yeah,

Khalil Rafati 25:50
very Toledo term. Not sure if that migrated up to Ann Arbor, but when, when she took me there, clairvoyant Lee took me there. I was in that hospital room. It was, it was, I was there again, and I remember they did a spinal tap on me. They kept shoving a fucking thermometer up my ass. The food was terrible. And listen, I don’t want to beat up with my parents. Their dads, they’re not going to hear this anyway, or maybe they will. But like my parents, like, left me at the hospital. You know, today your your kids sick, like you’re fucking sleeping in a thing next to them, or your wife sick, or whatever. Like, my parents are immigrants. Maybe they didn’t know any better, yeah, but like, My parents left me at the hospital, yeah, and I’m I’m alone, and I’m fucking dying. Spinal meningitis will kill you. My temperature was 106 my mom would tell me, as she was explaining the story to her friends later, the ear aches and the and the fever and the spinal tap and the fucking thermometers up my ass and making me take the liquids and the IVs and all that stuff, I assumed that that was just like what happened and whatever it was all in there. It was all in there. And I was walking around with that. I was hanging on to that, that fear, that thing where, like, I remember being a young man, and I remember really young, you know, like, 1819, 2020, whatever. I hope you don’t remember this experience. But, like, a guy would just like, look at me, and I would be like, well, you know what the fuck man, you know the fuck you looking at like, that stuff comes from that stuff. The issues are in the tissues, and most people, my parents, included, for sure, my dad, who was a rage, a Holic, most people spend their entire fucking lives with that stuff trapped inside of them. So as bad as ketamine is, as addictive as ketamine is, as much of a club drug, and it is same thing with MDMA. One of my first MDMA experiences fundamentally changed me forever. And I think that they can be incredible tools in unlocking our true potential, and they can also become things that rob us of our soul without our consent.

Brad Weimert 28:25
Strong language, I lived it. Yeah, I lived it. That’s great. So normally I interrupt the show to promote EPD to tell you about credit card processing. But today I’m going to tell you about our partner program. If you know other business owners that accept credit cards and you refer them to easy pay direct, you will get paid a percentage of what we make for the life of the account, as long as they’re processing. You can build a residual for doing nothing, just the introduction. You can do that by going to epd.com forward slash bam, partners, that’s epd.com, forward, slash, B, A, M, partners, you, when you came in, you told me that the matcha you spent, you had your own whole journey of selecting this matcha from Japan, which I think is a good thing to know, because there are, I think sometimes when you’re trying to market something, it’s hard to convey the language, or like it’s hard to convey the story behind you know, one of 40 products on your wall, yeah, and the match is the matcha, but it’s great to hear sort of the narrative behind it in the sentiment, because that makes a difference well. And sometimes you don’t have to convey the story for it to come across in the brand, either. And so I think the brand might wrap all those stories in, in and of itself, because, like you said, I can’t remember if we were recording or not, but we were talking about Zingerman’s, yeah, and Zingerman’s the Deli in Ann Arbor that I worked at, and you were talking about the feeling that you got going into zingerman Yeah. And that was sort of the the point of origin of how you craft. Did the culture

Khalil Rafati 30:01
organics 100% Yeah, there there weren’t a zinger ones. There definitely wouldn’t be a Sunlife organics. Sunlife organics is a conglomeration of the snack bar at Laura Hills women Tennis Club, which was the country club behind my house. That what, you know my dad, thank God he left. But my dad left when I was seven. My mother worked nights, and, you know, took sleeping pills during the day, so I had no parents whatsoever. But there was a country club, and there was a snack bar at the country club. And as a child, my mom would leave money on the table, you know, a couple bucks, and I would go there get my corn dog or my french fries or my whatever. Really good for the development of a child’s brain, for sure, but, um, but the people working there was typically their first job. It was their summer job. It was, you know, it was a bunch of beautiful gals and guys, and I was this little boy that wasn’t loved by his parents, not intentionally, but I just wasn’t loved. I was just like an afterthought. My mother was suffering from fucking Stockholm Syndrome. My father beat her into submission, and she worked as a slave, and then he left, and then she went and worked at Toledo hospital like a fucking slave, wiping people’s asses as they laid there dying. My mother just was a saint. In that regard, terrible parent, but a saint, a giving woman that wanted to care for others, just didn’t know how to care for her own child, because when she was a child, she was abandoned on a doorstep during World War Two by her parents or her parents by her mother. She never met her father. So, you know, this is generational shit. Yeah, I didn’t have any love, and I would go to that snack bar. And these kids, as young as they were, they kind of intuitively saw this stray dog of sorts, and they felt bad. And, you know, lot of times they would give me stuff for free, or they would give me extra stuff, or they would get me a Slurpee or whatever. And I just, I stood there at that snack bar all day, every day, I just stood there. I would get in trouble, like the woman that ran it, this woman, Winona, would get upset because I was always there, and she would tell me to, like, go sit down. And, you know, customers have to order or whatever. And I always asked her if I could work there, because I wanted to be behind the environment, fucking six year old kid can’t work in a snack bar. So the answer was no, but I just wanted to be in that place where the spiritual act of nourishing, giving all of that stuff was taking place. Yeah, so it sounds like you have some connection to them too, right? They did providing just communication that you weren’t getting. Yes. And I mean, I mean, if you really want to get hot girls there, yeah, and if you really want to get weird, and I’m hoping that some of your audience members are older, and they get some of these references. But like, I remember one of the girls, I told her that I loved Ozzy Osbourne. I was 11, and she she was like 15, and she took me to the Ozzy Osbourne concert at the Toledo sports arena. Wild. I got smoke a joint with her and her friends. She gave me my first kiss, not like make out kiss, but she kissed me on the I mean, there was something about that lighthouse in the storm for me, that that was my solace, that that that was everything to me, that was my church, my temple, my mosque, and then when I eventually learned about Ann Arbor and I escaped through the doors of Narnia into Ann Arbor and Detroit and Bloomfield Hills and all that stuff going to Zingerman’s. It was on a bigger level. Now, all of a sudden, it was a fucking Reuben with a cell Ray soda, that green cell Ray soda and and those chips and the fucking Reuben, and then you dip it into the 1000 Island dressing, and you drink that cell race soda, and like all the cool people were there, and remember, I’m, I’m like a juvenile delinquent kid looking at all the hot college girls. And it’s, it’s my church, it’s my mosque, it’s my temple. So that never left me, and even though I grew up in the restaurant business, because my dad owned a restaurant, and then my stepdad, that took me in when I was 12, he owned a bunch of restaurants, I swore off the restaurant business in my early 20s, when I moved to California, my last job in a restaurant was in Beverly Hills at an Italian restaurant named tralusa, and the waiters were so mean to me, and the customers were mean. And I was like, fuck this. I’m never working in a fucking restaurant again. I fucking hate the restaurant industry. And that was it. I walked away. But they say that you always return to the religion of your youth, and at 41 years old, you. Uh, unknowingly, it didn’t I didn’t know any of this shit until I did a plant medicine ceremony. Unknowingly, I recreated the snack bar and Zingerman’s together. I created Sun Life, organics, and I made it for me. But what I didn’t realize is that we all need that we all have ouchies. We all want attention. We all want someone to smile at us and acknowledge us. The kids started writing cute messages on the cups a few years ago, and have a great day. And one day, I was giving a talk to the employees. There’s gotta be 400 employees now, but I said, Man, if someone’s having a bad day, like, if you see someone hurting, I want you to, I want you to comp their their their smoothie. Like, buy them their smoothie. Was the original thought, just buy it yourself and I’ll reimburse you. Contact me and I’ll reimburse you eventually. What we developed, because accounting was a fucking nightmare, yeah, you don’t say, but what my CFO developed was something called a love comp. So now every kid has the authority. Some of them are 16 years old. When you see somebody come in and they’re under duress, you see somebody come in, and it happens more often than you would think, yeah, people’s fucking dog dies, cat dies, husband dies, whatever they come in, you can see it on their face, like, how are you today? Yeah, and they have the ability to comp their order. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve gotten very long emails from strangers that are like, You have no idea how special that moment was. I had just lost my husband, I had just lost my son. I just, you know, yeah, so

Brad Weimert 36:49
can you tell me how many dollars you’ve comped in the last month or year? I don’t know. I don’t care. I believe that too. I really, I don’t feel curious. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t.

Khalil Rafati 37:00
That’s a great question. No one’s ever asked me that. I don’t mean it. Like, I’m not trying to be cool, like, I don’t care. Like, it doesn’t matter. Yeah, whatever it is, it’s worth it. It’s worth

Brad Weimert 37:11
it. Yeah, I totally get that. I also, as a pragmatist and somebody that wants the world to be black and white, despite the fact that I’m acutely aware that it’s not, yeah, I always want the system and structure, and I want to know, like, I want to do the math somehow, yeah, and, and I agree with you, yeah, I think it doesn’t matter. And I’ve had, I’m very much of the same belief that, and I also don’t think that it’s altruistic. I think it is part of a smart business model. Yeah, right. I think it builds the right culture and ecosystem, and ultimately, it is the way to get the best ROI, yeah, is to do things like that.

Khalil Rafati 37:44
Well, ultimately, I just want to be fucking happy. And like, you know, we operate it like a company wide. We operate at an 8% margin, which is, you know, fucking terrible for for most people. They’re like, you know, you should be at, you know, minimum 20% and I’m like, Yeah, again, not, not. I don’t care. Like, look at how cool I am. I don’t care. But literally, I don’t care. Like, my house is paid for. Yep, I don’t have a mortgage. My car is paid for. If you go from living under a fucking bridge to having a couple million bucks and your shits paid for, and you’re no longer suffering under the weight of Maslow’s hierarchy, and if you’ve done a halfway decent job of escaping from fucking Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and you kind of see that like, oh, wait, the world doesn’t exist on this little parasitic device I’m holding. The world exists out there. The world exists when I dive into that ocean, dive into that river, dive into that stream, climb that mountain, fucking hike, that hike, make love, pet that dog. Smile at somebody that’s life. The shadows that they’re casting on the on the wall, that ain’t life. I’ve I’ve woken up.

Brad Weimert 38:58
How has the journey of building Sun Life contributed to that awakening. You opened the first Sun Life in Malibu in 2011 that’s a long time ago. Man, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s so it’s March of 25 right now. Yeah. And, and you also went through COVID, yeah. And, like, I feel so grateful to have been in, first of all, a business that doesn’t have fucking expiring goods. Yeah, yeah. I mean, restaurants are sort of like, the ego in me wants to be a part of a restaurant, because you feel cool when you own the restaurant, yeah? So I have some investments in restaurants, yeah, so I can feel cool. Yeah, it’s theater. It’s fun. Yeah, totally. And I’m very much a an environment person, yeah, and an experienced person. So one of the things I love about the service industry is you get to design both, right? You get to design this phenomenal experience, to bring other people through, to build relationships with them. And I think that that’s beautiful. Yeah? Also fucking nightmare. So I feel so grateful to be in a, you know, in a digital business that happened to thrive during COVID. So COVID happened in the the weight that so many people felt during COVID. I didn’t have it all, yeah, in fact, I had this sense of lightness and freeness because things accelerated, and I got less communication and less interaction and less stress, everything, just sort of aside from, like, you know, the initial looming fear of death, yeah, which went away very quickly in Texas, and with a little logic, yeah, I’m gonna get hit for that one. But yeah. But anyway, you mean the flu. Yes. I digress. I digress. So you started in 2011 and I know you had another struggle during COVID, because you have physical locations, yeah, and you were not allowed to keep many of them open, yeah, we had to shut down

Khalil Rafati 40:50
all of them, actually, except, except Texas, right? No. Texas was closed down. Texas was closed down as well. I mean, nobody, nobody was coming in. I mean, we had to close. We went from doing $50,000 a day company wide to doing $5,000 a day company wide. And my CFO called me up and said, we owe American Express $740,000 and we don’t have any money in the bank, and payroll is next week. What do you want to do? And I’m like standing on my balcony watching people going into pavilions and buying all this toilet paper, just like hoarding toilet paper. And I’m going, What a weird time this is. I said to her, rich people are buying stocks. Poor people are buying toilet paper because the market had just crashed because one of those fucking billionaire idiots went on there and was crying that he thought his father was gonna die and he couldn’t go visit him or whatever, and the stock market just crashed. And she’s like, What do you want to do? What do you mean? And she goes, we don’t have any money in the accounts to pay American Express. And I’m like, Oh, my God, I don’t know, do a loan with American

Brad Weimert 42:03
Express. Was that the deal? No, oh, these are cards.

Khalil Rafati 42:06
We we paid our bill. We don’t use terms or whatever. We just pay our bills as they come. Yeah. And we were doing $50,000 a day in business, and that had nothing to do with our debt. We had massive debt, millions of dollars in debt. Yeah, operating. This is Bill cash flow. And then she said, we don’t have money to make payroll next week. And so I call my business partner. He’s great, he but, and he was always pretty helpful. Like, there was a couple times we were short on cash, and like, hey, need a couple 100,000 like, hey, you know, Can you loan the company? Like, 400,000 whatever. And I called him up, and he goes, bro, the fucking world’s economy is about to collapse. He’s like, I’m not giving you shit. And I’m like, Rick, we’re not going to have a business if you don’t give me the money to make the payroll, because we’re eventually going to have to, you know, we’re going to close out all the stores. I called the guys from Takaya Organica, and they were like, close every store right now, it’s how your landlord you’re not paying rent. So those guys gave me great advice, and then I said, Rick, we’re not going to have and he’s like, I don’t fucking care. Sell your sell your fucking stocks. You got a 401, K, which I did. I’m like, Whoa. Okay, so I sold half of my retirement account, and I paid the employees, because when we reopened, which I assumed we would at some point, if I didn’t have employees, I don’t have a business, right? So I had to make the payroll, plus they work, they deserve to get paid, right? Again, it’s not like I’m not a good guy. Because I sold my stocks to pay payroll. I sold my stocks to pay payroll, because I had people working for me that was they were promised a fucking check after two weeks. So I did it, and it was a nightmare and and it was scary, but I don’t know I had faith. You know, I leaned back into that like, God, please help me. My prayers are just fucking God, please help me. God, can you please help me? God, can you please hold my hand? God, will you please hold my hand? Right now, I’m scared. Those are my prayers. I don’t have any fancy prayers. And, you know, Yahweh, this and beads, and you know, Krishna and God, can you please help me? There’s one fucking god I would imagine, and God created everything. And so I subscribe to that. And again, if I die someday and I’m wrong, who fucking cares? It makes me feel good to believe that there is this benevolent, loving, living, nurturing thing that I can reach out to that will never fail me. That’s been my experience. I have empirical evidence of that. So I leaned into the God thing, and yeah, man, we made it out. We shut down a bunch of stores, we broke some leases, we went through some lawsuits, but all through the journey, because my objective really is to. To fucking feed people and make people like, when you sent me a text, like, can I get like, I fucking whipped around. I was so excited. I’m like, Oh my God, He wants one of my smoothies. I fucking whipped around. And I had just made this dramatic exit because I was being interviewed by that kid. You know, the kid on Instagram that walks up to people. He’s like, Excuse me, sir, is this your car? I just had gotten interviewed by him

Brad Weimert 45:25
at the school of hard knocks, yes, yeah. So I was just sitting here with Abel James talking, okay, and we just recorded and he No, Sean told me, okay, that kid, yeah, I’ve definitely seen the clips. So

Khalil Rafati 45:39
I just got interviewed by him. That’s why I’m wearing the same outfit as yesterday, because he insisted that he want because he saw my car. He’s like, he believe your outfit matches your car. That would be a great Instagram clip. I’m like, all right. He’s like, Can I interview you tomorrow? I’m like, Sure. So I had just, I had just finished that interview with him, which was so fun, that was so fun, that kid is so sweet, and I’m all fucking hopped up, and I leave them, I shake their hands. I tell them to, you know, put your faith in God. Stop fucking pounding your carrot and throwing your life force down the drain or into a tissue or into a sock like retain that fucking life force, put your faith in God, keep that spark alive, and just keep going. And I’m running down the stairs, and there’s like five of the most insanely hot 20 something year olds doing Instagram pics on the stairs going down towards the Magdalena hotel, and they’re looking at me. I’m looking I gotta stop, right? I’m like, girls, do you like me to take the picture for you? And they’re like, that would be so great. And I’m thinking, like, yes, just anything that’s gonna get me 30 seconds more of me being able to stare at you and objectify you in a tasteful way without being a creep. And they’re loving the fucking Celine track outfit. And so I’m taking the picture and I and I’m now, like, feeling like a rock star, and I’m fucking sweating because it’s 80 degrees outside, and I get in my car and I’m just getting down to Riverside, and your text came through, you know, would love to try the billion dollar smoothie? And I’m like, Yes, and I fucking literally illegal. You turn right in front of a state trooper. Flew back. They wouldn’t answer the phone, so I had to go park in the red zone. Race upstairs. I get up there, South by Southwest. Oh, my God, it is a wall of people, and I’m like, I go running in and I’m about to there’s a family that’s about to step up to the counter, and I’m about to just fucking, you know, I own this place, yeah? And I walk up and I stop, and I check myself, like, Relax, dude. You make smoothies. Not that fucking important. And I looked at the woman, and I said, please go right ahead. And the look on her face, the gratitude on her face, she was black, very black. She was with her very black husband, with their very black children, and she just looked at me and she goes, thank you. And I said, You’re welcome. Thank God there’s still a little bit of that Midwestern goodness in me. Thank God there’s, you know, enough of humanity in me, because I do struggle with humility. But, yeah, I had them make all the stuff, and ended up, you know, here, 15 minutes late and and so happy to be here.

Brad Weimert 48:37
Well, so, so a couple things about that. The reason that I was I was searching for the moment with the school of hard knocks guy, and I was thinking of who I was talking to is because I was sitting with Abel James. When I pulled my phone out, stopped the podcast, to pull my phone out and text you because I knew you were coming. I was like, I really want a smoothie. And as soon as I did it, I was like, that was kind of a dick move to ask him to bring me the smoothie. And it occurred to me too that we were getting close to recording time, and that maybe you were already on your way, and I was in the middle of a podcast, and I never stopped in the middle of shooting right to do anything right, and I just stopped. And I like, I deliberately stopped. I got up and I shot you a text. And the reason that I felt comfortable doing that was because you had in multiple text threads extended this invite. Yes, hell yes, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t really extending the invite. It was a I want to provide, I want to share what I’ve got. Yeah, yeah. And you could, I could feel that through the conversation. Yeah, it

Khalil Rafati 49:33
made my day. I treat people all the time, and some people have such difficulty accepting but they don’t understand. It’s just what I want to do. I’ll never forget. I mean, we’re going back 12 years Cindy Crawford standing in line. You know, I’m doing everything I can to not shit my pants like when those people come in. It’s a really, really great idea to just not. React, because they’re not looking for you to react. What they’re looking for is to feel normal. So in in the Zimmer Zingerman’s vein, like when Anthony keys walks in, or Cindy Crawford walks when the rock stars and the movie stars walk in, treat them like they are plumbers. And when the plumbers and the day laborers walk in, treat them like they are rock stars and they’re famous musicians that that’s been since day one, that’s in all of our training manuals. And I’ll never forget her saying, I’m like, oh, here, you know, I want to treat you. And her going, oh my god, that’s so sweet. Thank you so much. And literally, out of my mouth because I have no filter. I’m like, No, that’s not sweet at all. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world. I’m not digging ditches for people in Africa to get clean water. And she starts laughing. We ended up becoming friends. She’s a dear, a dear friend of mine today, but like, the Ohio and me, oh yeah, wanted to scream, yeah. Like, it’s the fucking girl from the George Michael video, the girl from the Pepsi commercial. It’s Cindy fucking Crawford. Like, what I get to do is so amazing, but the intention behind it is not to treat the supermodel, although that’s fucking awesome, and I’ve treated, you know, some really fancy people, but the intention behind it is, like, I make this stuff. Can I show it to you? Can I share it with you? Do you like it? That makes me feel good? Yeah.

Brad Weimert 51:39
Well, I think these are so these are beautiful life lessons, but they’re beautiful business lessons too. The question that I have at this point, and I want to know from the beginning to now, you seem to have everything working together in your business pursuits and some passion, right? You are in a very small group of people that run businesses that are completely aligned with what people feel like is their purpose. Very few people that I know are in businesses where they feel like the purpose is pulling them through it. Wow. Most people, I think, try to fit a purpose into the thing they’re doing, or find the purpose, but go through most of their life without great purpose, and maybe they find something, but they don’t feel pulled. Wow. How do you feel about people operating businesses in pursuit of it, versus not starting a business until you know what your purpose is. Oh,

Khalil Rafati 52:45
man, that hurts my heart to think about that. I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t. I remember the first time I got invited. I go every year. Now, I’m gonna do a little humble bragging, but I go every year now to the south of France and the fucking the yachts and the hotel do COVID Rock. I get invited. I’m not paying for this shit. I get invited. Love it, but I remember the first year that I got invited, and this is going back probably eight years, like can, yeah. So we start at can, and then we, you know, go, go down to cap, and then we go up to Monaco, to the f1 and then it’s right. So they, they go, they go for the film festival. I arrive the week after, and then, and then it begins the Amalfi Coast and the helicopter to fucking San Tropez and all that. And I’m just an invited guest, but like the I’ll never forget the first trip we went on, and we were on this, I don’t know, some of the royal families, whatever, 300 foot yacht, and there’s all these, like famous people and rich people, and you know, they’re all doing what famous people and rich people do. And I had brought matcha with me, and I was like, Do you Do you guys have honey? And they’re like, Yeah. And I’m like, do you guys have coconut cream? And they’re like, no, but we can send a, I don’t know if it’s called a Tinder or a tender, but they send the small boat to the shore. They’re like, we can get some. I’m like, Are you serious? And they’re like, yeah. I’m like, and you have ice? And they’re like, Yeah, of course. We have ice. The 300 foot yacht, yeah, I just started making iced matcha lattes for anyone and everyone, and it felt so fucking good. So like when people ask you that question, if money didn’t exist, what would you do? Yeah, this is, this is what I would do. I mean, I’d probably also sing. I’d probably also sing. I really love to sing. I’m halfway decent at it. I would like if you played guitar, I would like to sing you a song. Wrong. That would make my heart glow, but I want to feed you. I want to make you something and feed you. It’s that that’s always been in me. I’ve got some Jew blood in me. My mom was, like, born a Jew, but I’m not Jewish. My mom was born Jewish, but raised Catholic. Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. My dad is a Muslim. I know they’re all, like, really into, like, their food and sitting on the floor and, like, eating with their hands. And, like, maybe it’s a Muslim thing. I have no fucking idea where it came from. But like, I think all of us deep down inside, we just want to share. We want to share whatever gift we have with the world. And it feels good to share. And the fact that I get to do it, I feel like Kelly, my friend, Kelly’s a surfer. He that’s who I made the goat for. Oh, nice, yeah. And he invited me to the sphere. Well, he texted me, and he said, Dana invited us to come to the UFC fight at the sphere. Amazing. And I texted him back, I love you, yes, Dana invited you to come see the fight at the sphere, and I appreciate you going out of your way to make me feel equal. He’s like, No man, you know Kelly. It’s Kelly. He’s like, you know he knows you. He does know me, but he wasn’t inviting me. He doesn’t need Khalil rafati at the fucking sphere. And I’ll tell you how I know that definitively when we got there. Bob Iger, Dana White, Jeff Bezos, some very famous football player who I didn’t know who it was, because I’m not a sports person, and then a bunch of other people, sort of of that ilk, of that caliber. I wouldn’t trade places with any of them. I could feel their energy. I could feel their vibes. And I’m they’re not. They weren’t bad. They were cool. But some of them had a heaviness to them. There was a heaviness there, um, I know a lot of billionaires. And just, you know, because I feed people in places like Malibu, right? And, you know, whatever, Austin, Miami, Chicago, I know a lot of billionaires, and I wouldn’t trade places with them, because at a certain point the money kind of, like, becomes the objective, and it becomes the thing, yeah, and then that just becomes, like the drive. And I’m not, I’m not mad at money. Money is an incredible tool, and I’m gonna make a fucking shitload of it, but I’m gonna do really cool stuff with it, in the form of sharing, like, when I fantasize about having a bunch of money, I don’t want to bang Eastern European model slash hooker slash Instagram girls. I want to buy my buddy from Ohio who still drives a Volkswagen bus and teaches yoga who’s broke. I want to buy him a fucking house in Costa Rica. Like, that’s my fantasy. I want to share in that way I’m gonna make, I’m going to make a bunch of money, and I’m gonna do a bunch of really cool shit with it, and and I think that that makes me much richer than many of the people that I’ve been around. I’ve also been around some billionaires that are insanely fucking happy. Sergey Brin is always fucking happy. I don’t know why he’s always happy, but that motherfucker is always happy every time he comes into the store. No one knows who he is, by the way, and he doesn’t know how to apply sunscreen like it’s fucking embarrassing how awful his sunscreen is not rubbed in. No one knows it’s him, and he will literally go behind the counter and start teaching the kids how to juggle with oranges. He’s always happy. So there are, there are people with a lot of money that are super fucking happy, but I know a lot of miserable, really, really wealthy, miserable fucking human beings.

Brad Weimert 58:57
Yeah, it is not the thing that makes you happy. I love all that, man. I really want to hearing your narration of stories and your colorful language. I really want to, like, write a children’s book that is inappropriate and just have you read it on camera.

Khalil Rafati 59:14
I would do it. I’d be happy to do it. Hold you to it. Yeah, I want to do whatever I can to help these guys to change the world. I think these Sean Kelly’s and the kid that just interviewed me, and these young guys that are that are challenging mainstream media and challenging the woke ideology and identity politics, I want them to do what they are very capable of doing, and that is to change the world. They should change the world. They have every fucking ability to change the world. The rich people and the famous people need to get together with the politicians, and they need to form a coalition, and they need to stop war forever. There should never into. 25 the fact that there are wars going on right now is fucking embarrassing. It’s embarrassing. It shouldn’t be happening. The fact that there are homeless people in the streets, it’s fucking embarrassing. There is more than enough for everybody. No one should go to bed hungry tonight, like I understand we got to control the population. It’s getting out of control. I don’t think unleashing a virus or a vaccine on people is the Necessarily, the best tactic, but handing out contra contraception is, you know, might, might be, you know, getting people’s tubes tied or what. You know, there’s a lot of different ways that we can educating people on, like, Hey, don’t fucking have eight kids if you can’t feed them, and then watch them starve death in front of you, like, I know the population is a thing, but this world should be living in absolute harmony. And if Dennis Rodman could help mitigate the challenge that Barack Obama saw as the greatest threat to America, which was North Korea at the time, if Dennis Rodman could mitigate that, give me a fucking break. Then get get Leo and Cindy Crawford and Sergey and Elon and all these people on both sides of the political spectrum come together and fucking change the world. And these young kids, they can do it. They can do it with our help. So I’m happy to do anything that’s going to help this next generation coming up to change this world and put an end to this fucking stupidity. Stupid,

Brad Weimert 1:01:27
that’s awesome. Well, I know we’re coming up on time, and we keep going forever, but I just blew off three calls to keep talking to you. So thank you Absolutely, man. First of all, again, not for you. It’s just totally self serving. I’m enjoying myself. Well, I mean, we grew up 31 miles apart from which is wild,

Khalil Rafati 1:01:41
yeah, 10 years on, you probably,

Brad Weimert 1:01:44
yeah, I’m 44 Yeah, I’m 55 Yeah, there you go, yeah.

Khalil Rafati 1:01:49
Well, noticed you didn’t get the echo on the bunny men reference, right? It’s kind of hurt my heart.

Brad Weimert 1:01:53
That’s how this goes. Man, yeah. Chapters, right? Chapters, yes. Fortunately, still knew the shelter Nectarine, thank God. Wine pig, very few people get those references nectarine. Who the fuck would know the nectarine? Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zingerman’s. Yeah, yeah. So good. What a this was

Khalil Rafati 1:02:12
a therapy session. By the way, I feel like I need to pay you for this therapy session.

Brad Weimert 1:02:15
You did. You brought me a billion dollar smoothie. Well,

Khalil Rafati 1:02:19
we discounted it to $28

Brad Weimert 1:02:22
it’s perfect. Where do you want to point people? Where do people go to find out about you? Or Sun Life, or

Khalil Rafati 1:02:29
let me come make me Let me make you a smoothie. I mean, if you, literally, if you, if you’re listening to this podcast and you see me at one of my shops, like I interrupt me because I’m gonna be talking. I’m never. Shut the fuck up. Interrupt me, please introduce yourself. Give me a hug if it’s appropriate, if you’re into hugs or whatever, I need a fucking hug like I’m never gonna say no to a hug and let me and please, let me treat you to a smoothie. On Instagram, I gotta forewarn you, I don’t have a filter, and I am very opinionated, and I say a lot of shit that I shouldn’t say if you want to follow along on my journey. It’s kind of cool. I mean, it’s kind of inspiring. I was living under a fucking bridge 21 years ago, and three weeks ago, I was in the Oval Office of the United States of America watching one of my best friends getting sworn in and and, and I’ve done a lot of really cool stuff. I think in a couple of weeks I’m going to be in Abu Dhabi in the middle of the desert, surfing my friends, 1000 yard wave pool. I’m opening up a bunch more stores. I wrote a best selling book called I forgot to die, which has done incredibly well. Thank God I was fucking terrified and insecure and didn’t send it to publishers, and I published it myself because it fucking took off. And I get $7 every time that book sells. That’s amazing. And it tells the whole story. I’ll get you a copy. I’d love that. And so, yeah, if you I don’t know if you want to read my sad, little weird Cinderella story, get inspired, or, you know, somebody that might get some inspiration out of it. Please grab the book. It’s on Amazon. I forgot to die. Come to Sun Life. Let me make you a smoothie. Follow me on instagram if you’ve got a strong stomach and and I think that’s it.

Brad Weimert 1:04:14
There are, especially today, so many fucking people write books, and so many are not well written. And I have to just reiterate, anybody that’s listened to this point, clearly, the book is going to be written very well and be super entertaining.

Khalil Rafati 1:04:29
It’s entertaining. I mean, the reviews are fucking, I can’t look at them without crying. I mean, of course there’s going to be some idiot that always makes some comment. But in general, in general, I just, like, with Sun Life, after like the 100th review, or the 200th review, whenever it was with Sun Life, I think it was about the fifth store, I sat back and I realized, like, you didn’t fucking do any of this shit. You can stop pounding your chest. And you cleaned up the vessel. You opened up through developing an attitude of gratitude. You humbled yourself before whatever it is that created all this God, and you asked for help. That’s it, just like, when you listen to the great musicians, will say, like, I didn’t really write that song. It just like, kind of came through me. This all, I didn’t go to fucking culinary school. This all just came through me. The book. The book came through me. The book feels like, if you and I went for a walk, if we were in Miami or Panama or Nicaragua, and we went for a really long walk on a beach, and you didn’t know me. It, it reads as if I’m telling you what happened, what I went through, and where I am now, I’m excited

Brad Weimert 1:05:49
to read it. Thanks. Man, yeah, man, thank you for everything. Looking forward to more time, of course, until next time. Yeah, buddy. All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me. My name is Brad Weimer. I am also the founder of easy pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience, people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us [email protected] forward slash, EAM, again, that’s epd.com, forward slash, bam.