SUCCESS IS EARNED.
FREEDOM IS DESIGNED.
Conversations with founders, operators, and builders who designed a life worth living.
Hunt for Success documents how real builders think, decide, and live — from the boardroom to the backcountry. No recycled advice. No performance. Just the honest version — on business, discipline, and the designed life.
"Success should fund a life you actually want — not a self-created prison."
This show exists for the builder who wants both. The business and the life. The discipline and the freedom. The boardroom and the backcountry.
Wade Boggs
Baseball, Hunting & the Drive to Succeed
Sam McGough sits down with Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame third baseman with more than three thousand hits and, by his own count, the only plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame with the word superstitious on it. He grew up in an Air Force household where breakfast, the school bus and dinner happened at the same time every day, and he carried that into baseball as seventy-five or eighty rituals spread across a game day, the chicken being only the famous one, so that nothing ever snuck up on him. He spent five and a half years in the minors, led the league in hitting at Pawtucket in 1981, still did not get called up, and decided the ball was in their court. He does not believe in personal goals, because a goal is a ceiling, and if two hundred hits had been the target he never would have had a season of two hundred and forty. The back half moves into the mountains: sheep hunts that wear you down mentally before they wear you down physically, twenty-four hours to acclimate at sixteen thousand feet in Tajikistan, an elephant herd tracked thirty-three miles in a single day, and a grizzly coming off a ridge on a Stone sheep hunt while Wade handed his rifle to the guide and told him he would know when to shoot. She tumbled at twenty yards and went back over the mountain. The last stretch is the one he most wants men to hear: a PSA of only 3.3 that had climbed a full point in eight months, eleven of fourteen biopsy samples, and a cancer-free date of February 7, 2025.
DR. SAM McGOUGH
A healthcare CEO and multi-company operator, Sam built his career by identifying inefficiencies and engineering systems that perform under pressure.
This show wasn't created to interview influencers. It documents peer-to-peer conversations with builders who've done what most only talk about.
For Sam, the backcountry isn't a weekend escape—it's where discipline, patience, and clarity come from. The two aren't separate.
Beyond the podcast
West Texas
Take the conversation into the field.
The people. The stories. A few days away from the everyday. The Apex Hunt brings the Hunt for Success network together for a hosted helicopter hog hunt in West Texas.
Explore the hunt, the ranch, and the experience with Dr. Sam McGough.
Explore The Apex HuntHelicopter hunting · Private ranch · Good company
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Baseball, Hunting & the Drive to Succeed
Wade Boggs
Sam McGough sits down with Wade Boggs, the Hall of Fame third baseman with more than three thousand hits and, by his own count, the only plaque in the Baseball Hall of Fame with the word superstitious on it. He grew up in an Air Force household where breakfast, the school bus and dinner happened at the same time every day, and he carried that into baseball as seventy-five or eighty rituals spread across a game day, the chicken being only the famous one, so that nothing ever snuck up on him. He spent five and a half years in the minors, led the league in hitting at Pawtucket in 1981, still did not get called up, and decided the ball was in their court. He does not believe in personal goals, because a goal is a ceiling, and if two hundred hits had been the target he never would have had a season of two hundred and forty. The back half moves into the mountains: sheep hunts that wear you down mentally before they wear you down physically, twenty-four hours to acclimate at sixteen thousand feet in Tajikistan, an elephant herd tracked thirty-three miles in a single day, and a grizzly coming off a ridge on a Stone sheep hunt while Wade handed his rifle to the guide and told him he would know when to shoot. She tumbled at twenty yards and went back over the mountain. The last stretch is the one he most wants men to hear: a PSA of only 3.3 that had climbed a full point in eight months, eleven of fourteen biopsy samples, and a cancer-free date of February 7, 2025.
Farm Crisis to Infinite Banking
Marlon Mueller
Marlon Mueller was five when his father put him in a truck to help build fence, sitting on the edge of the seat so he could reach the clutch. He became the fourth generation to farm his family's ground in Iowa, working alongside a father and grandfather who saw money very differently. Then the farm crisis and an estate lawsuit involving three generations arrived in his twenties, and knowing how to work stopped being enough. Sam McGough sits down with Marlon to trace the education that followed: an annuity he bought without understanding it, months spent studying life insurance, and the questions that exposed how differently agents designed what sounded like the same policy. Marlon explains how he uses policy loans alongside real estate investments, what he means by money velocity, and why keeping his lifestyle steady mattered before any of those tools could help. The conversation also gets into the losses he took in startups, the farm buildings he turned into boat storage, and the question he asks an investment partner before discussing returns. Underneath the financial mechanics is a more personal concern. He wants his children and grandchildren to learn how to earn, manage, and protect money before they ever inherit it, and he is still working out how to teach that without taking every struggle out of their lives.
Finding Purpose Through Hunting
Christian Zeron
Sam McGough admits at the top that he is a little starstruck, which does not happen often on this show. Christian Zeron started Theo and Harris as a college freshman with ten thousand dollars, buying and selling vintage Rolex and Omega from the sixties through the nineties, and eleven years later he still owns it, though a marketing and consulting firm now takes about ninety percent of his day. He came up around uncles who used business for one thing, independence and the ability to provide, and he still subscribes to that definition even though he says it has gone out of fashion where he lives. The strange part of the story is that he had quit. A year and a half divested from content creation, no interest in being an influencer, wanting instead to be the kind of older man who tells you to get the camera out of his face. Then a client who had become a friend invited him to a duck camp in Louisiana in January, he felt he could not say no, and he knew before dinner on the Friday that this was going to be part of his life. One funny hunting video did eight hundred thousand views and put his personality back into his work. Nine months later: turkey, hog in California, goose in Michigan, dove in Argentina, a tentative bear hunt, and still no whitetail. He also announces here, for the first time anywhere, a long form series called Meeting America, about proximity to the food source, small towns that all look the same now, and a country he realized at thirty he had never actually met.
Private Market Funds
Chris Norton
Sam McGough sits down with Chris Norton, one of his own financial advisors, who spent eighteen years in traditional financial services before noticing that his high net worth clients kept asking about companies that were not going public. Palantir was the first deal his group did, then SoFi, then SpaceX, and the business he runs now exists because of one shift in the capital markets: companies stay private longer, and by the time the ticker exists, as he puts it, a lot of the meat is already off the bone. He walks through the plumbing without any mystique. His fund does not keep a Rolodex of SpaceX employees. It works with the private markets desks at mid to large investment banks, which introduce it to a venture firm sitting directly on a cap table with the right to buy two hundred million of a round and client demand for only a hundred and fifty, and the remainder gets syndicated out for a fee. The other door is an employee at a company like Shield AI who needs to sell two million out of a twenty million dollar position. The numbers run both directions here. SpaceX bought at five hundred and twenty four dollars in 2020, two splits later, some clients up twenty or thirty times. Energy Vault bought at eight, trading near twenty when the lockup expired, then rates rose five hundred basis points and the stock went to a dollar. Anthropic at five billion, repriced to ten, and they walked. The back half moves to Long Island charter boats, a used center console named The Gambler, striped bass, and a tarpon in Port St. Joe Bay that Sam finally had to cut loose.
Hooked on Success
Dan Beaudoin
Sam McGough sits down with Dan Beaudoin, who has run DMF Bait Company for 29 of the 49 years it has existed and whose live bait now sits in roughly 12,000 stores. The company began as a mistake. His father, his father's twin brother, and their friend Fred were Michigan high school teachers in the 1970s, paid only during the school year, so they spent summers siding homes and doing landscaping until a family connection pitched them on raising worms for a company that promised to buy the inventory back. That was 1977. The worms turned out to be red composting worms, almost nobody in America was composting anything, and the buyback company skipped town, leaving three teachers with a rented building and a million worms nobody wanted. Bait shops kept telling them the same thing, that red worms are stringy and nearly impossible to hook, but that nightcrawlers would sell. So they pivoted on the assumption that a worm is a worm, which Dan compares to owning a hamster and figuring a dog cannot be much different. Nightcrawlers do not reproduce in captivity. The one on your hook was picked off the ground at night in Ontario and is probably five to seven years old. What follows is a Saturday morning phone call to Kmart that everyone said was a wasted dime, a 1988 drought they shipped through at a loss for most of a season, a decade of figuring out how to send something alive to 49 states, and a night spent picking worms off a cooler floor by headlamp while more of them fell out of the racks overhead.
Freedom After an Exit
Brian McNally
Sam McGough sits down with Brian McNally, who grew up in a Philadelphia apartment complex with a longshoreman father and a fifty dollar shoe limit, which meant that if he wanted the Air Jordans the other kids had at the basketball courts, he covered the difference himself. He and his brother figured out that the bins in the complex were fullest the day before recycling pickup, so they emptied them and cashed the cans in, and he shoveled snow and worked two jobs in high school. Years later, stuck inside a large bureaucratic organization with the man who became his business partner, he found an opening in healthcare revenue cycle where the clinical work overlapped the reimbursement side, and before they opened the doors they set a number: a twenty million dollar company in five to seven years, sold to a buyer they had already identified. He talks about what that number changed, why they refused to build departments the buyer would only duplicate and discard, and the one thing he would do over, which is tax planning started years out rather than nine months out. The middle of the conversation is March of 2020, three hundred people deployed in hospitals, half the business gone in six weeks, and three months of pizza and anger before a fork he describes as accepting failure or fighting. The back half is capacity: a soccer sideline, a mountain in Switzerland, a first cage fight at forty three, and an outfitter saying his father could ride along on the elk hunt but could not walk it.
Ready to apply what you hear? Explore build a business that runs without you, with lessons from three conversations and a first handoff to try.
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This show is built for people who have actually built something — in business and in life. We're selective because our listeners are.
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SUCCESS IS EARNED.
FREEDOM IS DESIGNED.
The best ideas from people who've built something real, distilled into one useful move. Three minutes, every Tuesday.
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