YouSaid · the spoken record

Dave Dahl

lines on the record: 94
first: 2019-07-01
most recent: 2019-07-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, a lot of bad luck before it was good luck. And when it comes to being a millionaire and becoming very successful businessman, that is not something that would have happened probably without having those associations. But who knows where it would have got? See, because the miracle of all this was the transformation I had in prison. That was what mattered because my mind was free. I felt free. And having a contrast between the adversity that I'd had in my life and what I was going through, I mean, just being able to create and just keep working towards something, you know, that was the miracle to me.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I realized the power of that. I realized it really early on that, look, people cared about the story. And if it wouldn't have been for the bread, the story probably wouldn't have mattered that much. But anyway, it feels good to talk about it.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's, uh... in limbo i guess i haven't i would like to think that someday we will be more family than just like former business partners but It's not, we just don't talk. Sometimes we have family gatherings that have nothing to do with, that are not put on by any of us, and we might meet up there. But what I want to do, this is weird, I'm telling you this instead of them, but I just want something real to happen. You know, I don't want to force anything. And I just hope to have at the end of this before we all die, you know, especially my brother and myself, you know, that we're going to find something, some peace, you know.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you are right now at this point in your life in recovery still and really working at it. The company sold, entirely sold. So Dave's Killer Bread, no longer owned by the family. I think it sold for almost $300 million.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you wouldn't, you're not supposed to enjoy, you wouldn't really enjoy yourself on it if you did it. So, you know, why screw around with it when it's not even going to be a good experience? And so that's a very good deterrent.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has been at times, but not from quite a while. One of the things that I have as an insurance policy, and I believe it helps is Vivitrol. That's the brand name of this thing that's kind of a modern antibuse. You take a shot. I take a shot every month.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really have a choice. I've liked alcoholics anonymous, you know, the 12 steps are just great. Very meaningful to me. I would probably go anyway at this point, but it's something I have to do.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did you do that? How did you screw that up It's a unique and over-the-moon set of circumstances. But money has nothing to do with happiness. It never has. I knew that from the beginning because I was so happy without ever making any money. I am used to having money now, so I would hate to be without it. But really, things are good because I'm good. You know, in my space.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It speaks to this idea that money doesn't solve everything and oftentimes can exacerbate things, right? It's like... From the outside, somebody might say, Dave, your life is set. How did you do that? How did you screw that up? Yeah, right. And you're saying, but you can't understand because I can't even understand. Like, you couldn't probably couldn't even explain to yourself what was going on.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I read or thought, well, that's funny breaking bread. And it's with a breaking bad logo. And I go, that's cool. And I was still in a good frame of mind. Or I wouldn't say good frame of mind, but happy until I read that article and it was the worst thing I'd ever seen about myself. And it just hit me that, wow, I have a big problem. I'm either something really good or something really bad and I'm really bad. And look what I've done. I've let down all these people, all these employees, all these investors, all these people who believed in me. And I just couldn't live with that. It just hit me so hard. And it took me a while to come out of that depression.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet, you know, after that two and a half weeks in the hospital in which I was very hypomanic and just like a laughing, joking knucklehead, I was back in my home, I hit the bottom. I hit the biggest, the most painful bottom I had ever hit. And it was after I read this story about myself and the Willamette Week called Breaking Bread, which was Breaking Bad.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is now the beginning of the next episode of your rebirth because you'd already had that rebirth in 2001 in prison and you kind of had this amazing run of success and then you crashed really hard.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to jail for like thirty-six hours and I was seeing all this stuff about me on TV and I wasn't, you know, I was freaky. But my attorney tells me, look, dude, you have to check in to Cedar Hills Hospital, mental hospital, because you're not quite right. So eventually I did follow his advice. I went there and checked in and stayed there for like two and a half weeks and it was a good move.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never liked it anyway, so I punched it and it didn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. But at the time, I realized that's, you know, it was just resentment and anger. And the day just got worse from there.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And honestly, you know, when that guy died, I was heartbroken too, you know. And finally on November 14, I believe it was. I had been not drinking for six to eight weeks. I don't know for sure. I was getting more and more resentful and there was becoming a clash between me and the company. And here's this company that I worked so hard to build a brand. So I'm feeling this loss. I'm losing my company. Losing my bread, my baby, and one thing's leading to another. And finally, that day, I showed up at bread quarters, we call it, and I'm not quite level, you know, in my mind. I see this cardboard cut out of myself and without actually forming the thought in my mind what I was thinking, what I was feeling was like this guy, this cardboard cut out of me can be here in this storefront and I can't. And so I punched it.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They must have been worried for a number of reasons. First of all, You're implicated, whether not directly but indirectly in this guy's death, and you are the brand, you are Dave, you're Dave's. It was horrible.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My car and I let him like he stole it. I was too drunk to even use my Lose my head. And this guy ends up, they find him in a ditch 40 some odd days later decomposing. It's a really ugly thing. The company, first of all, said, well, you need to get an attorney. And things started spinning out of control. Well, they must have been working.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they just, well, one of the things that happened was before this, I had gone up to my cabin. And I had taken some guys with me, and one of the people, one of the guys I took with me, I shouldn't have was an old buddy that we were dope buddies way back in the day. And we're up at the cabin, long story short, he leaves.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of a mannequin episode. I hadn't drank for several weeks at that point. I showed up that day. I had decided that day that I was going to go against the new CEO's mandate that I was not supposed to be on the property. Now, I was very resentful about this. They didn't want to.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but it wasn't until things got a little easier, it got easier, and I had more employees doing my work. And eventually it was easier to drink and just be a drinker. And look, I'm successful. I'm kind of a rock star. See, there you go. There's that bad creeping mentality right there. And so I can afford to do this. And I even would call myself the Ozzie of bread, you know, and go speak to a group of kids. High school or whatever. And then right afterwards, I'd celebrate by drinking a half, you know, half a fifth of tequila. And then I'd drink another half later, you know, and then eventually it was a half gallon.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I tried, you know, the thing that helped me so much with my transformation in life, the two things were acceptance and humility And so when this was happening, I was always telling myself, look, you know, I'm very fortunate. I'm blessed. I'm grateful for this. I was always trying to tell myself that. And unfortunately, I took my first vacation a few years into this, went to Mexico, and I discovered tequila. And it took me years for it to graduate to a level where I was really an alcohol, full-blown alcoholic. But you were drinking all.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just go out there like this. As your profile was growing, Do you think that it had an I mean, it must have had an impact on your own ego, right? This is natural, like it's normal. Like, the more attention you get, the more people hanging out, the more people telling you're amazing, the more people saying you're awesome, you're great, oh, Dave, this, like, it probably did inflate your ego, right?”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did because it was for a good reason. I always felt like I was doing good work, you know, like there was a purpose. And for the first time in my life, I had this purpose. It was just unbelievable that what was happening and the love I was getting, and I really couldn't keep up with the demand for speaking. But I never had a prepared speech. You just go out there like this. Tell your story, man.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you I mean pretty quickly, and I guess by this point 2012, you became famous. Like you are this caricature on the bread. People want to know your story. You're doing media. You're speaking. How did you feel about that? Did you love that attention”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was right. And once we got those established, and they were pretty simple, like one of them, like the vision was to make the world a better place, one loaf of bread at a time. So I was gratified that they agreed to that. And so we were able to solve some of our problems and get along and be in the same room that way.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are, yeah, I don't even know how to explain it. But what we did have, and the wisest thing we ever did, and I think this was credit to my brother, that we got someone that could advise us. This guy was actually a family business advisor, but mainly for succession plans and things like that. But he said, you guys need a vision and a mission. You guys have it, but you don't all agree on what it is.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was especially then. It's gotten a little better now. You know, I had a certain mentality about that that came from my own experience of having transformed my life. I was like, you know, this is something, this is a real thing. People do change. And when they're ready, how great would it be to give them that opportunity? And then we get an amazing ploy. So it just made sense to hire some of them. But that wasn't something we were aiming for. But once the temporary services, and that's how we create our people generally, once they found out that we were felon-friendly, it was funny. It's all they sent us. That's all they sent.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the Costco, I mean, the Costco deal clearly transformational because you had to scale up fast, you had to increase the number of employees, and it was going to create a huge revenue stream, a huge windfall. At a certain point, about a third of your workforce, so now you're getting close to 300 people, were ex-cons. Was a deliberate thing? Like, did you think, let's start hiring other ex-convicts to work torka? Because it's really hard to get a job when you've got a record when you're an ex-con.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and I'll tell you what, man, when you have a culture of a product, trying to get another culture to adopt it is a whole nother challenge. And to create that product and to have consistent quality. Was a real bear. I would go and see the operation, surprise them. And I was very unpleasantly surprised myself sometimes until we were able to get it right. But people will cut corners when they get a chance. And so we worked our asses off to make sure that that didn't happen.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Essentially, other facilities that would bake your recipe to your specifications because you couldn't possibly have done that all on your own for Costco, right? Just the scale was going to be impossible.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Costco, I would get these letters. I got this email from somebody at Costco, a buyer, saying our customers are asking for your bread. And we would like you to come up and present to us. Well, we were still at the old facility with 15,000 square feet and absolutely no way we were going to be able to handle Costco then. But the fact that we had Costco coming was a big factor in how we got that loan. Still actually executing the idea was a whole nother matter. It took us a long time to finally reach a deal and finally have the ability to produce enough bread to meet Costco demand. And we just kept working and working and working and promoting and we're able to secure partners in COMANTIC.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually my brother sold it to us for our percentage of the valuation of the business at the time that we started our project. And instead of owning a certain, a larger percentage of Dave's colored bread, I settled on a smaller percentage of the entire company.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and his house wasn't enough to completely collateralize that. They had to take a chance on everything. Maybe they would have owned everything if we hadn't made it.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the biggest challenge we had at this point, and this was like 2007, 8, I can't remember for sure, my brother needed to get, I didn't have any credit, I didn't have anything Shoby was young and didn't really have anything established. So Glenn had to go to the bank, put up his house, and Couldn't get our regular bank, you know, one of the biggest banks in the country wouldn't take a chance on us. So we had to get a local bank who was willing to take that chance at a fairly high interest rate. It cost us a million and a half to move to this new facility and a million and a half to us then was a lot of money.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were at a small location, we had a 15,000 square foot facility that was making Nature Bake when I got out of prison. And within a very short time, we outgrew that and we had to find time on the floor. We had to share our time with Nature Baked production and we had entirely different crews and they were actually kind of at each other's throats, kind of like my brother and my nephew. And we moved out of there. I don't know how many... We probably had 100 employees or so. I don't think we even had 100 at the time, probably 50 when we moved out of there to Bob's Redmills old facility. We've known Bob forever, and we go back a long way. We”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the market was coming to a close around November ish, people were like, well, how are you going to have this bread afterwards? And he was like, you never ask. Tell your local stores. Tell the stores you buy it. Tell them you want the bread there. And they did. And they started, and we got into one small co-op and we got into one vegan grocery. And then in a couple more months, we got into new seasons, which was like the first big break. But it was, boy, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work doing all those demos. Oh my God.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They, you know, it's an interesting thing. We went to a marketing firm to tell this story, this ex-con, this killer bread. And they're like, no, no, it's too risky and all this stuff. I can't remember the dynamics of all the situation, but I did get kicked out of the marketing meetings, and I was very, you know, not very happy about that. But eventually I know that my brother and my nephew came around to the idea that the killer bread idea and the ex-con thing was going to be acceptable. You know, this marketing firm was full of crap.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know how that came about was my we My brother, my nephew, and myself sitting with a copyright attorney, Mike Heubroner, he said, you know, this bread's great. You know, you got good, I think the name's great. You know, what you're missing is a logo. And my brother had been suggesting that we have a picture of me on the back with my guitar with my story. And I thought that was a good idea. And I ended up sketching the idea I had was this guy who represents me with his guitar and Dave's bread in big block letters. All this is painted on the wall, on a brick wall, in an alley. Now somebody comes along with their red spray paint can and tags killer over that. And that doesn't ever show up. Nobody ever gets that from looking at the what we ended up with. But that was the original idea. Oh, yeah.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I would sit there, I would stand there at the farmer's market, pass a loaf of bread to this doctor, this attorney, this professional person. And people I never would have met, you know, and I started meeting these great people. And they loved the idea and they loved the bread.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've got it in front of me. It starts. I was a four-time loser before I realized I was in the wrong game. 15 years in prison was a pretty tough way to find oneself, but I have no regrets. And then it went on to describe the spread. University. Trying to make the world a better place, one loaf of bread at a time. That must have been incredibly powerful for people to see that on the packaging. And this is when you're still just selling at farmers' markets, right?”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They loved what I had gone through and how I'd overcome it. But my family was too close to it or something and didn't see it that way. And they saw it as more like, wow, he doesn't deserve this. But I went out and I had a lot of love from the people in the community. You would talk about...”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. There was definitely the attitude that, wow, this guy comes out here and he's kind of a wrecking ball. He comes out here just like he's got the cowboy shooting from the hip and half the stuff he does fails. And, you know, he's just, you know, he's crazy. Was it like that?”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say it's impossible for it to happen without, first of all, my dad started what he did, even though my dad was basically a knucklehead like me. And worked his butt off, but he didn't really, you know, he wasn't really a businessman per se. That was his focus. He was a creator. And he was a hard worker. And that's what I see myself as. My brother and my nephew had definitely had more of the, they were looking at the finances and all that stuff more. I was always passion driven. And so there was a lot of disagreements on how things should be done. But honestly, There were many times that because it felt so bad the way we got on, that it almost derailed.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And Shoby was like a prodigy kid, you know, really smart kid. He graduated in three years, Magna Cum Laude, how you can say that from Willamette University, which is prestigious, good university. In economics of all things. So he gets out. He's 21 years old. He gets the same year I got out of prison. He gets out of college. And he had a whole different way of looking at things. And he really didn't like me being around. But we were partners and we managed to find ways to work together. And we had our own duties that we would do for the most part. And that kind of kept us out of each other's way.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a pretty small company, but the people who had been around for a while, there was sort of a, this is the way bread is, and this is not bread. So what we did is it was actually an opportunity. This was actually a project that my nephew and I, this was our opportunity to build equity in the company. And that was really what my brother said. He would always own 51%, but he was going to give us an opportunity to buy into the company. And in order to buy in, we had to produce sales. We had to increase revenues.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we went to the farmer's market and we sold it at $4 and the nuts and grains was $450 because the nuts were more expensive.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wanted him to love it, you know, but it wasn't his idea of a great bread. What I give him so much credit for is that even though he didn't really like my bread, he understood that it wasn't his taste buds that mattered. Like I said, I totally give him props for that. He wasn't controlling. Like most companies would say, you know, hey, we got to keep this and this price. You can't go beyond this. And fortunately, he did not say that. I remember when we got to the point of realizing we did a cost analysis on it, and we started realizing how much we were going to have to sell this for. And it was a more difficult bread to make than the average loaf of bread.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you make that loaf. Your maintenance guy comes back the next day. You know that you're onto something. And then did you go to Glenn, your brother, and say, hey, try this out. Tell me what you think.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People really didn't expect it to be to last forever because it's natural and doesn't have chemicals in it. So, uh, in fact, that was my slogan just say no to bread on drugs. And in those days.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next day, definitely. In fact, I hardly ever would eat it hot because that's really not a good test of how good it is.”
2019-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave's Killer Bread: Dave Dahl · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT