“I never saw a Purple Cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!”
Gelett Burgess wrote those four purple cow lines in 1895 for a small San Francisco humor magazine. He tossed them in as a joke. They traveled without him, went everywhere, and he spent the rest of his life resenting it. By 1897 he published a follow-up: “Ah, yes, I wrote the ‘Purple Cow.’ I’m sorry I wrote it. But I can tell you anyhow, I’ll kill you if you quote it!”
He wrote novels, coined words, produced content nobody read. He was simply the Purple Cow guy, and he hated it. He could not stand that this was the thing people kept bringing up.
You drive past a hundred brown cows and forget every one. A purple one stops the car.
In 2003, Seth Godin built a book around that poem. Safe is how you disappear. In a federal courtroom, almost nobody arrives with something different. Same apology letter. Same character references. Same promise to do better. Not because they are lazy. Because most people facing charges do not know what different looks like.
I know because I was one of those people. I went to Sam’s couch, then Johnny Rockets, hid while the investigation closed around me, and showed up to sentencing with nothing to show for three and a half years. I let the Department of Justice write the only version of me that existed. I handed them the pen.
The investigation is not the beginning of the end. It is the beginning of a clock. Every day you wait is a day you will not have at sentencing. Every day you build is a day that exists on paper, with a date on it, that no prosecutor can take back.
The question is not whether to start. The question is what you have done today and is it documented?
No Sales Pitch
I was driving back from Los Angeles to Orange County when my phone rang.
“I’m Matt. My lawyer Diane Bass told me to call you. I spent a few minutes on your website, but truth be told, Diane said you’re the guy. I’m ready. I don’t need a sales pitch. I’m ready to get going.”
“Hi Matt. Diane texted me about three minutes ago. Can I ask a few questions to make sure we’re the right fit?”
“Justin, let’s get to the point. Diane said you are the guy, that tells me you are the guy. No one you ever work with will work harder than me. I have five kids, including a three-year-old. I have the greatest wife. I want to turn this raid into a blessing. I have fifty reporters outside my house right now. I’m ready to start.”
“Meet me at Mission Viejo Country Club in sixty minutes.”
He was already there when I arrived.
Mission Viejo, October 2023
When I got there he was talking to a few members who knew him. He ordered coffee and did not mention the raid. Federal agents had put guns to his chest the day before.
“Tell me about yourself,” I said. “Not the case. You.”
He leaned back. “No college degree. I started as a commodities broker, licensed, legitimate. I was good at it.” He paused. “I was the number one salesman. I outworked everyone in the room and I knew it.”
He put in the hours before he made real money. Learned the product, the pitch, the client. But the longer he sat at that desk the more he saw it: commodities brokers got paid whether the client won or lost. The incentive was the trade, not the outcome. He thought bookmaking was a more honest business. A bet was a bet. Both sides named their number, shook on it, and one of them was right. That was part of why he left.
“I became a bookmaker. Not small time. I had clients you would recognize, athletes, celebrities, money people. My operation ran through Vegas, Monte Carlo, the Bahamas, Panama. Casino hosts flew me around and put me in penthouses because they wanted me at their tables. I bet millions on single games. I won a lot. I lost a lot.”
“And you built all of that without a degree.”
“Pure grit,” he said. “Instinct. I am not going to sit here and tell you I did nothing wrong. I know what I did. I am not interested in playing victim. I did it, and now I am going to deal with it.”
I had heard that line before. Too many people say it and mean something closer to: I did it, and now I am going to find a way around it. So I pushed to get more clarity.
“What does dealing with it look like to you?”
“It means my kids watch me respond to the worst thing that has happened to our family and they see their father take responsibility and build something. I have a three-year-old. He is not going to remember this raid. He is going to remember what I did after it.”
“What about Ohtani?”
“He never placed a bet with me. I cannot control what people believe. I am not going to spend my time on it.”
“Fifty reporters outside your house this morning and you drove here.”
“It’s time to prepare,” he said.
I asked him about Nicole.
“The greatest,” he said. No hesitation. “She did not sign up for this. None of this is fair to her or the kids. That is on me. And the way I make it right is not by apologizing every day. It is by doing the work.”
We talked for two hours. I have sat across from a lot of people the day after the worst thing happened to them. Many of them, understandably, are somewhere else, blaming others, rehearsing explanations. Matt was in the room.
Two Years
After that meeting he treated sentencing like it was coming. Because it was.
The first thing I did was connect him to Michael Santos. Within hours of our meeting Matt was on the phone with Michael. Within days they were recording. What they built became part of the Straight-A Guide. It runs in every Bureau of Prisons facility in the country. Two years later, when Michael presented it at Lompoc, Matt was in the room watching strangers work through material he had helped create. Judge Holcomb noted those contributions at sentencing. It was one of the reasons he gave the shorter sentence he handed down.
He also wrote Recalibrate, a memoir about his life. The private jets, the velvet ropes, the $4.6 million Super Bowl bet he won, the losses just as large. He put all of it in. He wrote in the introduction: “I’m not perfect and I’m not pretending to be, but what you’ll get in these pages is the truth; raw, unfiltered, and real. I lay everything on the line because I’d rather be judged for who I am than praised for who I am not.”
That took two years of drafts and full restarts. It became an Amazon bestseller, published days before sentencing.
Banks dropped him. Casinos threw him out and put him on the banned list. When he started posting about his story online, calling himself a degenerate gambler, telling people to get help before they lost everything, the comments came fast. You are only doing this to help your case. You do not actually care. You are building a platform on other people’s addiction.
What those people did not see was his phone at midnight. Strangers reaching out to say his story pushed them to call a therapist, check into treatment, stop before they lost their family. He never charged a dollar. When people offered him thousands he said the same thing every time: I don’t want your money. I just don’t want you to end up where I am.
The celebrity clients did not do it. The $4.6 million Super Bowl bet did not do it. What people responded to was that he named every loss out loud. The money, his mental health, his sleep, the look on Nicole’s face, the morning his kids watched federal agents walk through their front door.
When Matt came to New York, he sat down with Craig Carton, a former client who served a federal sentence for fraud. Gambling was part of the spiral that pushed his decisions. Matt talked to Craig’s audience without a script. That conversation reached people the book had not.
He texted me drafts at four in the morning. I gave him honest feedback and he took it. Once, just once, he texted “I’m exhausted,” and then sent another draft anyway.
He stood in front of hundreds of students with me at USC’s Marshall School of Business and talked about what his choices cost him. He put close to a twenty hours into preparing for that one talk.
He never complained. Not about the Ohtani coverage. Not about the friends who stopped calling when his name went national. Not about the prosecutor who argued the court needed to send a message because of how visible the case was. The comments called him a fraud. For a while it bothered him. Then he stopped reading them and kept posting.
Charlie Munger said it plainly: whenever you think some situation or some person is ruining your life, it’s actually you who are ruining your life. Matt had already gotten there on his own. He could have pointed at Ohtani, at the coverage, at the prosecutor, every single day for two years. He didn’t, and he wasn’t going to model that for his kids.
The Phone Minutes
When Matt surrendered to Lompoc, more than seven people from our community surrendered in the weeks and months after.
He found them the day they arrived. Walked them around. Showed them where things were. Got them supplies. Then he used his phone minutes, the ones he should have been saving for Nicole and five kids, to call me.
“Hey. So-and-so just got here. He’s okay. Tell his family this.”
Every time.
I started texting Nicole. “This sounds selfish,” I wrote her once, “but I really miss Matt. Cannot wait to get him home.”
She responded right away. “I miss him, too.”
What I was less prepared for was what I felt reading it. I was not missing a client. I was not missing a friend. I was missing someone who found the men from our community the morning they arrived, spent his phone minutes on their families, and told them their story was not the thing to hide. They had heard that from counselors and chaplains the whole time they were inside. Matt was in the same room, on the same sentence.
The people who stopped calling when his name went national were not bad people. They just did what most people do. They protected themselves. Matt spent those same months looking for strangers who needed somebody to pick up the phone.
When he left Lompoc, the men threw him a party.
The Sentence
The guidelines called for roughly 36 months. The probation officer recommended 24 months. The government asked for 15 to 21. Judge Holcomb sentenced him to 12 months and one day, added the extra day so Matt would qualify for good time credit, and at the end of the hearing took a moment to wish him well.
The courtroom was so full the marshal had to send people downstairs to watch on televisions.
Matt never read Godin. He just made a decision the morning after the raid and made it again every day for two years. On the days nobody was watching. On the days the comments called him a fraud. On the day he texted me that he was exhausted and then sat back down and kept going.
Burgess stumbled into his purple cow and spent thirty years wishing he had not. Matt chose his the morning after the raid.
March 9, 2026
At 10:49 on Monday, March 9 my phone rang. Matt was in the car with Nicole, driving home from Lompoc. Nearly five months into a twelve-month-and-one-day sentence.
I told him I missed him. I thanked him for the phone minutes.
He said he was grateful. Grateful for the traffic. Grateful for everything he went through.
“Matt, I hope you always feel this way. I have been home seventeen years and that feeling gradually erodes. It goes away.”
“I know,” he said. “I want this feeling forever.”
I have texted him more than once and said: you have given me four times more than I have given you. Do I owe you money?
He said yes, then laughed, “yes!.”
The book is published. The videos exist. The curriculum runs in every federal prison in the country. The men at Lompoc threw him a party.
Nobody takes that back.
Burgess made his purple cow by accident and spent thirty years wishing he had not.
Matt made his the morning after the raid.
The clock is running. What are you building?
