Wow.
We're gonna make you do the Pepsi-Coke challenge.
Okay. Do I have something to cleanse my palate in between--
Yeah. Every person--
No, I'm joke… I'm j…
I'm not… I'm not like a serious soda taster here. I think I can do this.
Okay, Phyllis. Here's all you need to do.
-You're gonna try both of these. -Okay.
Take a sip of each one.
And then pull the one you like better out.
Oh no, this is terrible.
Okay, wait.
Let's just… smell them a little bit.
This might bring back some bad memories.
I prefer this one.
-I like this one. -I choose this one.
I pick that one.
Oh, man!
-They both taste like shit. Horrible. -You're not gonna do it?
Can't stand that stuff.
You're gonna be the outlier.
You wanna know which one tastes better?
Which shit tastes better, this shit or that shit?
I don't know. It's shit to me. They both taste like shit.
All right. Now what?
KISW, Seattle's best rock.
I'm Joe Bryant. And I've got a very special guest in the studio today.
His story has not been told for many years,
but in the mid '90s, everyone was talking about it.
If he's right, he has a real jet fighter in the can.
I guess it is time
to hear the story of John Leonard versus PepsiCo.
Oh, yeah!
-What's up? -What's up?
The '90s had some of the greatest commercials in the history of advertising.
Proper.
The style of advertising in the '90s was building brands in the most intense way.
Yo quiero Taco Bell.
It was crazy.
No, no.
But Pepsi was famous in its own right.
Coke was the market leader, because it was the original cola.
So Pepsi was the underdog since its inception.
But its strongest weapon was the advertising.
Pepsi. Pepsi.
Take the Pepsi challenge.
-Tell me which one you chose. -Pepsi!
Madonna, Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, Britney Spears.
I'm not trying to name-drop, but I am absolutely name-dropping.
These were the people I worked with.
You felt like, "Yeah, this is a cool club to be in."
You have to have a different kind of brain
to come up with the bears dancing to the Village People.
People would have cut off a limb to work on the Pepsi business.
We were launching the most famous work in the history of advertising.
All because we needed to win the Cola Wars.
And then, I remember Brian calling me
and saying, "Hey, we have this crazy idea
to put Coke on the defensive."
And the idea was, you know, by its nature, pretty simple.
Drink Pepsi, get stuff.
The more Pepsi you bought, you'd get Pepsi Points,
and you could cash those points in for Pepsi paraphernalia.
All these things that kids like.
T-shirts, hats.
Leather jacket, jean jacket, cool sunglasses.
But the launch of the campaign was the commercial.
It was not the sexiest assignment in the world.
Buy our stuff and then advertise it for us.
The commercial had to make people laugh.
Get them interested, get them talking.
We needed to make people remember the ad and remember the program.
So we took every penny that we had for that summer
and put it behind this commercial and this idea.
And then the shit hit the fan.
Introducing the new Pepsi Stuff catalog.
Now, the more Pepsi you drink, the more great stuff you're going to get.
Sure beats the bus.
Play that again.
Sure beats the bus.
I looked at it, and I was completely dumbstruck.
No fine print.
That is a legit offer. I don't care what anybody else says.
I'm gonna get that jet.
I was like, "Oh, fuck."
Sure beats the bus.
It just went out and nobody flagged it.
The bottom of that video was very clear.
Here it is, the Harrier jet. Seven million points.
It's clearly a joke.
People don't offer military hardware as prizes.
They put this shit up there on the air? Live by your word.
You say it, you do it.
Hundreds of millions of people saw the ad,
and there's one guy who says this was a serious offer?
That was ridiculous.
Whoo!
You know, it's in my head now.
I think some would say Pepsi was my 15 minutes,
and those 15 minutes are up.
That was 25 years ago.
Different world then.
Different John.
I have to praise you… ♪
I was 20 years old,
going to a small community college outside Seattle.
Definitely not Harvard.
I had big dreams, big aspirations.
But the things I liked to do most, were be out in the mountains.
I had been up climbing in Alaska,
climbing in South America.
I was trying to figure out my way to climb the highest mountains in the world.
See different places, experience different cultures.
But trying to match it up with my reality of no checkbook.
To me, money was freedom.
It allowed for more adventures, more fun.
I'd worked in small businesses. My parents had a small business.
Oh, no!
Who would have thought?
Um, hi and… Pepsi. We're here to talk about Pepsi, right?
Tell us about John at 20 years old. What was John like?
He was a go-getter.
I mean, he always had a job.
He…
Just ad lib in your own words.
Why can't you say these things?
-It's… It's good for you. -Okay, all right.
His first job was a paperboy.
-Bike shop. -Oh yeah, you worked at the bike shop.
Then he delivered teriyaki.
And delivered teriyaki to the locals.
-He washed windows. -Oh, he was a window washer.
You cut glass at that glass company.
He sold magazines.
-Then he was a climbing guide.
Climbing guide.
Now, if he was only Harry Styles, I'd like it even better.
Can you… No, I'm sorry.
I'm a Harry Styles fan.
Mom, you're perfect.
-I'm trying to ad lib and I can't. -You're doing great. Sit down.
Pepsi was a big deal.
Pepsi, Coke, the Cola Wars. That was all front and center at the time.
They were trying to come towards the Pepsi generation.
That was their whole thing. That was where I was at.
Their association with, like, MTV.
Cool athletes.
I mean, they had Shaq.
Don't even think about it.
They had Cindy Crawford.
Coke had the polar bear.
My grandparents thought that was real cool.
If it was cool, Pepsi had it.
If you're young and cool at any age, really,
then Pepsi's the one for you.
It was your generation.
I prefer this one.
-Someone's gonna be very happy. -Yeah, see? There you go.
-In '92, I was 24.
I got asked by my agent to do a Pepsi commercial for the Super Bowl.
The casting, the music, the writing, like, everything worked.
I mean, that commercial is so iconic.
Every Halloween, on Instagram,
I see at least 30 people that go as me from that Pepsi commercial.
Pepsi is like this international, iconic brand,
but then, the advertising made it relatable for everybody.
Notice anything kind of different about the girls this semester?
Yeah, now that you mention it. They're all wearing that Pepsi stuff.
It worked for me,
and, frankly, their great advertising not only got me to drink their product,
it got me to take a swing at the fences, right?
I was coaching Little League football just outside Seattle.
One of my assistant coaches, a guy named Rob Lion,
we were walking away from the end of practice one night.
He pulled a pocket knife and cut this label off a bottle of Pepsi.
I'm like, "Rob what are you doing?"
He told me that him and the guys at work were trying to pool their points
to win this jet.
And I took mental note of it, but I didn't think too much of it.
Frankly, I felt like it was some kind of, like, lark.
Weeks later, I was at my folks' house, and all of a sudden…
Now, the more Pepsi you drink the more great stuff you're going to get.
Sure beats the bus.
Harrier Jet comes down.
I was like, "Holy mackerel, this is the commercial Rob's talking about."
I think we've all had dreams,
and you thought of hitting it big, these sorts of things.
I was at a point in my life where I was trying to start connecting the dots.
Trying to figure out how I wanted to get where I wanted to get.
Seven million Pepsi Points.
And no fine print came up.
And I go, "Wow, that's something."
Through my math and my research,
I'm trying to figure out how much a Harrier Jet costs.
I was able to put the price in the $30,000,000-$32,000,000 range.
My immediate thought was,
you could probably get seven million Pepsi Points for a whole lot less.
I really saw this as an opportunity.
A legitimate opportunity to change my world.
My mind couldn't stop racing
to try to figure out how to make this happen.
I was continually trying to crunch numbers,
come up with cost estimations.
How much Pepsi it would take. How many bottles you'd have to buy.
At night, I'd lay in bed thinking about it.
Like, I think you could do this.
I think there is a legitimate path to get the seven million points.
I had no idea how many people were out trying to do this.
In the back of my mind, I was up against the clock.
I had this sense of urgency
that I was trying to make it happen and be the first one.
I was doing everything I could to make it as cheap as I could.
Coupons and the whole deal.
We were drinking an awful lot of Pepsi. Hauling it in by the truckload.
You guys actually were gonna try to drink that much Pepsi?
-Was there-- -Yeah. Yeah, we tried.
But it didn't take long… It took a week, probably,
before we realized, no, we just couldn't drink that much Pepsi.
At the end of the day, I needed a pretty big amount of money.
So I tried to put that on paper.
And as I was working through all this,
I knew there was one person that I could potentially get to bite on this.
One person that was adventurous enough.
Was willing to take risks.
Also had the wherewithal to come up with a pretty big amount of money.
And he was the one guy that would take my calls.
I live in the moment. I enjoy the moment.
There's so many beautiful things you can appreciate.
All you have to do is open your eyes.
I've got a little pond out here stocked with trout.
But I won't tell you the address so you don't steal all my fucking trout.
You have to be spontaneous in life.
If you're wrong five out of 100 times, so what?
You had 95 great adventures.
Five times you fell on your head, you got stitches, had a broken leg and…
You would've missed the whole thing if you didn't take that opportunity.
I like this one better.
She likes Coca-Cola.
Is that bad?
I'm Phyllis Hoffman, and I'm Todd's mother.
He was a very active baby… …in the crib.
He started shaking the slats in the crib, and he broke out.
And that was a picture of what was to come.
He was going to bust out, and he did.
By the time I was 16,
I remember studying things in a classroom and going, like,
"I don't wanna learn French in a class. I'd rather be in France."
And I wanted to see everything.
So I get a map, and there's Switzerland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece,
Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal.
I was like, "Oh, okay," and started my journey.
Finally, I made it to Nepal.
And the Khumbu, the region where Mount Everest is.
I was like, "This is where I belong."
And it sculpted a large part of my life.
I was climbing all over the world.
And didn't stop until something happened to me.
I got sick in 1992,
and it was a, you know, pretty big size brain tumor.
I think they said one in 200,000 people got this kind of tumor.
That'd be like if God went down the line and said, "No. Jeff, no."
He gets to 100,647 people, and I'm standing there, and he goes, "You."
So I'm like, "What the hell?"
And it was removed in '92.
When I got out of the hospital and finally was able to go home,
I was walking a little bit crooked with a cane,
and a little drool coming out there,
and deaf on one side.
It wasn't comfortable for me to walk to the end of my driveway.
But I did it every day, and I got a little bit further.
Eventually, you know, I was getting stronger,
and my goal was to get up on a mountain again.
And, uh, I spoke with my doctors
and I said to 'em, "What about climbing? What about doing this or that?"
And they were like, "Well, it might be good to choose something different."
I was just like, "I don't think so."
"I don't think so at all."
It really rubbed me the wrong way.
So, I chose the highest mountain in North America.
Mount Denali in Alaska.
I went there with a lot of trepidation.
I still had headaches and pounding and all this other kind of shit going on.
But I was excited. I was looking at the positive side of it.
On that climbing trip, John was a junior climbing guide.
Our first trip together, we sat through a number of storms.
If you stay in a tent, shoulder to shoulder,
for seven straight days, you talk about a lot of stuff.
So I'm 20. Todd's early forties.
He had been successful in the car business, other ventures.
I grew up in the automobile business,
and then I went into publishing, restaurants, real estate.
And I was doing well in all of them.
John was much younger than everybody, and he was just the nicest kid.
One guy that was used to the finer things in life,
and this naive kid
that was trying to understand what the finer things in life was.
John was always a compassionate, really good guy, you know,
and we became friends on that climb.
We were brought together by this mutual desire
to go to climb the highest mountain in each continent.
Over the years, Todd and John developed a wonderful friendship,
and I did kind of turn over my son to Todd, and he did a great job.
He did a good job of raising him.
Having some experience in the business world,
John felt he could pitch different ideas, and I would give him my best advice.
And then he pitched this idea,
which was so out of left field.
It may have been the craziest one he'd ever heard.
I can only imagine, in Todd's professional life,
he'd had a lot of ideas come at him,
but there was a reason why he listened to mine.
Of course, I thought it was interesting, but I also thought he was crazy.
I said, "Well, can I see the commercial?"
He goes, "Well, it's on TV. You can see it on TV."
I said, "Just get me a copy of the commercial so I can see it."
And I was like, "Uh, could you play that again?"
Sure beats the bus.
Play it again.
Sure beats the bus.
Play it again.
I just want to make sure, for the 90th time,
that what I think I saw is actually what I saw.
I can't believe it. I couldn't believe it.
I was like, "Holy shit. This guy's actually gonna think about this."
He could see I was really interested.
They put disclaimers on ads all the time.
They didn't have a disclaimer on this ad. But then I had to go to the next step.
Okay, now I like what the commercial shows, which is false advertising.
I think it's false advertising. Now let's go to step two.
Write your business plan down. This is your deal, John.
I'd never done a business plan. I didn't know what a business plan looked like.
But I had what I thought was this viable thing that could be done.
I don't even know if Windows was in yet.
This is maybe even MS-DOS.
I think it's WordPerfect I was using at the time.
So, I'm in WordPerfect typing up a business plan.
You know that sound on the dot matrix printers…
Eventually, I had a formal business plan.
Todd's like, "All right, if you really want to make a go at this,
put your big boy pants on, fly down, and make a pitch to me."
-So now let's tell the truth.
-Hey, Johnny. -I presented the business plan.
It was a multimillion-dollar business deal to go out and acquire all of the points.
And to acquire the points,
it spelled out labor costs, transportation costs, storage costs.
And at the time, it would cost $4.3 million.
And I go, "What?"
So each 12-pack was worth five points.
I'd need to buy 1.4 million 12-packs to get to 7 million points.
That's over 16 million cans of Pepsi.
Where are we putting millions of cans?
"Well, you know, we'll rent warehouses, like, all over the place."
1.4 million 12-packs of Pepsi
would take up almost 600,000 cubic feet of storage space.
So, I'd come up with a plan.
Six major metropolitan areas, six warehouses,
and the associated amount of people in each of those warehouses.
People to go out and buy the points,
people to drive the trucks, people to cut the points off.
So I'm thinking probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 people.
I estimated that we could do it in three months.
Back then, there was a company called Labor Ready.
If somebody needed temporary labor, you'd call Labor Ready.
So I remember calling Labor Ready up, and getting the number from them.
That's what I put in this business plan.
And I was like, "Okay, you… You've really lost it now, John."
"Still love you, but you've lost it."
I was convinced that we could make it work,
but Todd was able to point out a lot of the… a lot of the pitfalls.
And he poked a lot of holes in it.
He had hard questions.
A legitimate question.
If somebody could not buy a Harrier Jet,
then on the face of the offer, it was not legitimate.
1995, no Wikipedia, right?
It was still going into encyclopedias and looking some of this stuff up.
And that's when I started trying to reach out to folks in the Pentagon.
My approach was, "I'm working on a school project."
Which I think, at some level, it was a, quote, school project.
I remember, somehow,
getting in touch with a spokesperson for the Pentagon.
It was, like, Kevin Bacon or Ken Bacon.
-Kevin Bacon was from Footloose-- -He's an actor.
Let's dance!
I can only imagine what he was thinking.
Somebody calling him to see whether or not you could buy a Harrier Jet.
Essentially, what I got was that, yes, you could,
but it couldn't have all the armaments on it.
That was something that would make it illegal.
But if you could somehow acquire a Harrier Jet
and it didn't have the missiles, the radar jamming stuff,
that there was not a prohibition against it.
For one, it was $32,000,000, but you couldn't just buy one.
You had to buy a minimum of six or something like that.
-That wasn't our problem. -Yeah.
But I got to that answer and I was able to get over that hurdle with--
-Yeah. -With regard to was it legal or not.
-Right. -And could you get them.
He's like, "All right,
so you get a Harrier Jet, what are you gonna do with it?"
Are we selling it right away?
That certainly would look like we were just trying to get Pepsi.
Let's talk about… What do you want to do with this?
I had to put forward a number of ways
that we were not only gonna be able to recoup the original investment,
but also turn it into something that was viable.
And you know, they're, cra-- "Oh, we're gonna do rides."
You know, like it's a Ferris wheel ride.
Todd was like,
"Best I know, there's only one seat in that thing."
He said, "Well, I want to take it to air shows."
He signed off on the fact there could be a viable business opportunity
with air shows and advertisements and movies and whatnot.
"Then we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that."
I was like, "Okay, that's your business plan."
Solved that one.
But ultimately, he did put something forward that was insurmountable,
that I couldn't have an answer for.
A legitimate question.
So, what if you get going and they end the contest?
What happens when we get 6,995,000 points, and you can't get them anymore?
Um, then what do we do?
Right, with all these cans of Pepsi?
"John, you're a great guy. This ain't happening."
"I'm just gonna tell you that. This is not happening."
"It makes no sense. It's cra-- It's insane."
Todd didn't see much of a secondary market for used Pepsi cans.
And so,
that was kind of the eventual end of that road.
I hit a wall that I could not get past.
I had been fully invested in this, right?
And I really saw this as, like,
my first opportunity to really do something.
He felt a little bit shattered by it. A little bit deflated.
Though I'm sure Todd thought it was a done deal,
it still didn't leave my mind.
It was still just spinning, right?
As a 20-year-old, this felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Back in Seattle, so I'm back going to school.
Back washing windows.
And I go into a convenience store,
and there's this whole point-of-purchase display
of the Pepsi Points campaign.
And then… boom!
There are these little catalogs.
I started thumbing through the catalog,
kind of with this what-could-have-been mindset.
Like, "Oh man, I was this close." You know?
I thought I was that close, right? Or maybe that close.
I get to the end of it, I just… I'm reading the fine print.
And at, like, the very bottom of the fine print,
it says something about being able to buy Pepsi Points
for 10 cents apiece.
And so long as you submitted a minimum of 15 points,
you could buy the balance of the Pepsi Points.
And then I did the quick math.
And I was like, "Holy mackerel."
I just went from $4.3 million to 700k.
And I couldn't get to a phone fast enough.
One of those little rotary dial phones.
And I'm calling Todd. I'm so excited.
Voicemail.
All these hurdles,
and all these holes that were punched in the business plan…
…just went right out the window.
Todd had a cell phone, and then he had two phone numbers.
I called all those numbers, and I called them all a bunch of times,
until finally, he picked me up.
I think, at the time, I benefited from the fact that there was no caller ID.
I'm like, "Todd, I got it. We're there."
And I walked him through. I read it to him.
We found a loophole. There's some meat and potatoes in there.
And I was just like,
"I need to think about this seriously now."
I'm a badger, right? I'm alive again.
The dream is back alive. I'm gonna get the freaking jet.
When I write this check, somebody's gonna see that check.
And somebody's gonna go, "Who wrote that check?"
They're gonna go, "Oh, it was this guy named Todd Hoffman."
And I'm, like, that made me nervous,
-because I always flew under the radar.
This is taking your thumb, and this is sticking it right in the eye of Pepsi.
And then I said, "You know what?"
"The hell with them, man."
I'd use different language if I weren't on camera.
This is Netflix. You can use whatever language.
Fuck them.
I'm writing the check, and I'm sending it in.
And here we go. We're on our adventure.
They never figured there ever would be a John Leonard.
And secondly, if there was a John Leonard,
they never figured there'd be a Todd Hoffman.
Bring on Pepsi.
When something comes up like this,
legal, you know, will kill anything.
Pepsi has that power.
And uses that power.
And nobody can fight it.
You gotta treat it pretty seriously,
but there wasn't a person that didn't think this was pure insanity.
And it was about to get a lot crazier.
-Ready for a flight? -Let's go.