Brian Rose - The Rose Episode On Business Success TV With Graeme & Leanne Carling

Full transcript: Brian Rose on Business Success TV

0:00 Graeme Carling: Brian Rose, former trader, founder of London Real, built businesses across media, education, politics, and now moving into areas like ultra-prime real estate in Dubai. Brian, good to have you on.

0:24 Brian Rose: Thank you both for having me. I really appreciate it.

0:31 Graeme Carling: We’ve actually crossed paths before, believe it or not. Now, in 2014, there was a Robert Kiyosaki seminar at the XL in London, and Robert and Kim and Kenny McElroy, part of the Rich Dad team, had been up spending some time with us in Scotland at our house there.

1:04 There, we’d been at the Ryder Cup on the Thursday Friday, and we’d flown down to London on the Saturday to the XL, and Robert, as he does, asked you, can you join me on stage and, you know, gives you no notice at all. So, I remember going in back, in the back room, and at that time, you were interviewing Robert, and I must admit, I hadn’t heard of, heard of you or heard of London Real at that time. So, I think looking back, you know, what were you two or three years in then?

1:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, I would have been three years in. We started in 11, and I still remember dragging all of our camera gear out to the XL for a chance to interview Robert while he was eating a sandwich during lunch. Yeah.

1:45 Graeme Carling: So, I remember, I don’t know if he’d done many podcasts before that, you know?

1:50 Brian Rose: No, I don’t think so, but he was super high on our list as dream guests, because he is, of course, Robert Kiyosaki, and author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, the number one personal finance book of all time, as he says.

2:02 And we were trying to get him on the show. In the early days, we couldn’t even get anybody on the show, because nobody knew what the podcast was, and no one had heard of London Real. But his team said, if you come backstage, maybe we can help you. So, I remember we packed up all our cameras, and I got 30 minutes with Robert. And I remember he really got deep with me in those 30 minutes, and that was not what I was expecting. And yeah, it was a big moment.

2:27 Leanne Carling: And he’d had a busy few, I think, a couple of weeks. They’d been to India before they came to Scotland to see us. We had two full days, you know, or three full days, I think. We’d had a seminar in Edinburgh. We went to the Ryder Cup.

2:42 Graeme Carling: Then we’d heard them round the Edinburgh. We showed them round. Yeah, we’d done all that, and it was a late flight into London on the Friday night. I know that he was getting picked up by Richard Tanner of Success Resources at the time. He was straight into it, but that starts the guy, you know, relentless, you know.

3:01 But that was a good weekend. We had a good time with the guys.

3:05 Brian Rose: I remember watching from the back of the room and seeing, and he had a whole lineup with him. He really brings the big guns. I guess you guys were two of them as well.

3:15 But yeah, he looked tired and ragged, but I don’t know how he agreed to it or even the staff to give us 30 minutes. But it was the start that I didn’t realize of a really great friendship with Robert. And now he texts me all the time, and he’s probably done 10 more shows. And I met up with him in Singapore randomly one time and got on stage in London. And I flew out to Phoenix one time to do a show with him and Jim Rickards as well.

3:42 So yeah, and now he considers me a fellow freedom fighter. Now we’re really close, but he’s a unique guy and always lots of fun to have on the show.

3:52 Graeme Carling: Good, good. So obviously, since then, I mean, you yourself went through quite a journey, leaving a successful career in banking or finance, building the platform, everything around 2020, COVID, politics, crypto, and now Dubai real. So I think for us, this isn’t really an interview, you know, we’re genuinely, it feels like we’ve been, you know, 2014, Kia Shaki.

4:17 We’re going to come on to Dan Peña, the castle, the QLA, and here we are in Al Barari in Dubai. Right. You know, crazy. I mean, we’ve kind of always, so for us, you know, we’re genuinely interested in, you know, how you’ve, you know, how you’ve got here and what you’re up to next. So I suppose, you know, if you had to describe your journey so far in your own words, you know, I would just sum it up rather than the long form.

4:44 How would you sum it up?

4:45 Brian Rose: Well, first of all, it does feel like the universe is pushing us together. Yes. And we’re just not paying attention. So I guess this is the first time maybe paying attention because yeah, when I heard when you reached out and then you’re in Al Barari and like I’m in Al Barari a lot and it’s just like, what’s going on here?

5:01 And I had heard Dan talk about you and brag about you guys. You know, he’s very proud of what you guys have built and, you know, I guess his part in it as well. So, yeah, I know it’s great that we can finally connect here, especially in this amazing city that I think we both love. So, man, how would I sum this up? Oh, my gosh, you know, when I look at the last 15 years of London Real and we’re celebrating 15 year anniversary in October, I mean, we clearly must live in a simulation because that’s what it feels like my life has been in these 15 years.

5:31 It feels like more has happened to me in those 15 years than in the previous 35 years of my life or 40 years of my life. And yes, I did walk away from a successful career in banking in the city of London. But at the same time, I was dying in that job. I was so miserable. I had thought my whole life that money would make me happy.

5:52 I really thought that was true. And I was a young boy. I was always fascinated with entrepreneurship. And I used to sell candy on the bus and do a little low level loan sharking when I was 10. And I was always excited by capitalism.

6:05 My grandpa was a horse trader out of Arizona and a rancher. And my other grandpa was a farmer. And these guys are basically entrepreneurs. So maybe it was in the blood. But I found myself in this position where I was making millions of millions of pounds a year.

6:21 But I was going home every night all alone. Didn’t really have family or friends. And I was really trying to drink myself to death. And I thought, hmm, something’s not working here. And so I was lucky enough to take a meditation course.

6:33 And six weeks later, I went into my managing director and I quit. And at the time, I was watching a lot of Joe Rogan in the States before he was even on YouTube, before people knew who he was. And I thought, I want to do that. And so that’s what we end up doing. I had my first interview in my kitchen, in my house, flat in shortage.

6:53 And I just promised the world and myself we would publish an episode every Sunday no matter what. Nobody was listening. Nobody cared. But that was like my promise. And we kept that promise.

7:03 And it’s taken me on this crazy adventure. And I always say, I have to be careful who I allow into my studio because they will change my life. And that’s what’s different about new media. I mean, if you look at the BBC, and I love the BBC for so many reasons because of all the wonderful things they’ve helped me do over the years. But the person interviewing on the BBC, that’s their job.

7:25 They don’t care. They don’t care who you are. And I always used to say, if I’m ever sitting down for an episode and I’m looking across at someone who I’m not genuinely interested to talk to, then I’m going to quit this. And I’m going to go back to the city and make some money because this is my show. And people used to say, how come you have all these guests on the show?

7:43 It seems like you have a lot of white men on the show. And whatever we were criticized in the beginning, whether it’s, I guess, Robert’s not white technically. So there you go. But you know, it’s Pena and all these other people. And I’d be like, well, that’s who I want to have on the show.

7:55 You can have your show. But it was always about my curiosity. And so I’d bring these people into my show. And sure enough, they would take me on these crazy adventures. So I’m just going with it.

8:07 You know, Rogan says this sometimes. He’s like, I don’t even think I’m in control of this. And so with London Real, I don’t know if I’m in control. I just kind of go with it and see it’s always going to take me on another adventure. It also feels like the fountain of youth as well because you’re always exposed to new ideas.

8:24 And I think as we get older, our brains get kind of crystallized and we don’t want to take on new ideas. But when you’re here with new people, you’re kind of forced to open your brain up to new possibilities. And that’s what the show has always done for me. So yeah, we’re just kind of going wherever it takes us. And now I’m in Dubai, you know, in luxury property.

8:45 Never thought that would happen.

8:47 Leanne Carling: If you think back to the version of yourself in 2014, what did you not understand that you do now?

8:55 Brian Rose: Well, 14 is when I met Pena. And I guess I was three years into my episode. You know, I was really shy and scared to even be on camera.

9:05 I remember. I mean, I couldn’t even look at a camera and talk for more than a minute or two. I remember I’d do like seven takes because I was embarrassed. And, you know, so that whole thing was something I had to really get accustomed to and get used to. And the first few years, I didn’t talk about myself at all.

9:22 It was just always about the guest. I don’t think I was comfortable sharing any of that stuff. The other thing I think that I learned, Leigh Ann, is that, you know, I think the reason I was so miserable as a banker is because I wasn’t contributing to the world and I wasn’t serving out a purpose. And I felt like if you’re giving something back, if you’re like putting good energy out there, it does come back. And as an engineer from MIT, they don’t teach you karma.

9:53 There’s no karma class because there’s no equation for it. But it clearly exists. So when I was not putting out good energy, I was getting back bad energy. But as soon as I started putting it out, it started coming back. And so I just started trusting the process.

10:08 And I used to have this conversation with myself every year. I would look in the mirror every year of London Real. And I would be like, what are you doing? Like, nobody cares. Nobody’s watching.

10:18 Everyone thinks you’re crazy. My friends and family won’t even watch my show. OK, I did a TED Talk in 2014 where I was like, my friends and my family, who know I’m doing this full time, have you watched my show? No, I’m too busy. You’re too busy to watch my show.

10:33 But that’s the right answer because my audience isn’t them. And so it’s just how bad do you want it? And I remember I’d look in the mirror every year and my missus at the time, she was super supportive. I think only one time she asked, is this a business, honey? Otherwise, she’s very supportive.

10:49 But I would look in the mirror and be like, what are we doing here? And I would just say, OK, do you have more friends? Yes, you do. Are you happy? Yes, you do.

10:59 OK, we’re going to do it another year. We’re going to do it another year. And then that’s how I would justify getting to the next year. And then it would just slowly, we created an academy and we had some cash flow and then all of a sudden we got this guest and that guest. And the universe was giving us little clues.

11:13 But it was very hard to continue in the beginning because I didn’t know what we were doing. But I was changing slowly and I knew something special was happening. So we just kept going. But at that time, there was no such thing as a personal brand. Nobody knew what YouTube was or no one knew.

11:31 Now we know. It’s like such a powerful platform. I heard someone say the other day that one view on YouTube is worth something like a thousand or ten thousand views on Instagram because it developed such a personal relationship with people. People stop me on the street and say, Brian, I know this sounds strange. You don’t know me, but I know you.

11:51 I know you. And I used to be like, OK, I got to go. Security. I’m like, they do know me because that’s me. Yeah.

11:59 So it’s I used to say early on, we don’t know what YouTube is yet. What are you talking about? It’s television on the Internet. No, it’s not. It’s this whole new medium.

12:09 Marsh McClellan used to say the medium is the message. A new medium is completely new rules. And now it’s this whole completely different interaction with people that this platform gives you. Now, 15 years later, we’re kind of reaping those rewards of that. So I don’t know if I answered your question, but that’s been the experience.

12:30 Leanne Carling: You’ve answered my question, but generally to the whole. Yeah, just one as YouTube. So you’re advanced is still number one platform for London Real Brian.

12:39 Brian Rose: You know, it is because of what I just said. You know, it’s that long form content.

12:44 I think our average view on YouTube is like 12 minutes, which is insane, even for YouTubers. So that’s where people really get to know you and build a really serious brand and connection with people. So that I would say is the main platform is the one we went all in on. It’s the one also that threw us off a little while. So that hurt the most.

13:05 Yeah. But when I started, there was no Instagram. I don’t want to sound like an old man, but the Instagram didn’t exist. Twitter was barely there. YouTube at first only would allow 15 minute uploads unless you were a director had approval.

13:18 So this was really early on in social. But yeah, I would say YouTube is by far the most important platform.

13:24 Graeme Carling: John, when you were starting out, what was it you thought you were building? What was the what was the plan?

13:30 Brian Rose: I always tell people like it was never intended to be a business.

13:33 It was never. It was like, I don’t know. Some of my buddies in New York used to say, this was just Brian’s way of finally getting some therapy, you know, because I, I didn’t know what we were doing. I just knew I wanted to do it. I was watching.

13:47 Look, I would watch Joe Rogan. And I knew about Joe because I was training martial arts. And so I was training jujitsu and Thai boxing. And I would go to the UFC events and Joe was the commentator for the UFC. And then I found out he had a podcast which started just like one camera.

14:02 He was on his sofa with a bunch of guys really low level. And it would be on Vimeo because it wasn’t even on YouTube back then. And I would watch it and I would be basically hanging out with Joe and another guy and another guy, three cool dudes that I would normally never be hanging out with talking about cool stuff for three hours. And I would finish those on a Sunday and I would have this incredible feeling like, I don’t know. I don’t know.

14:26 Like I belonged like you had a conversation. Nobody was having you got insight into something. And I knew this was something super special. And I thought, man, I want to do that. So it was just me exploring that process.

14:40 I didn’t know where it was going. I didn’t know why. And I just felt compelled to do it. That was it.

14:47 Graeme Carling: I think for us, you know, we’re business people here.

14:50 We’re not we’re not podcasters or that’s not something that we do it. We do really enjoy it. We love meeting people. We don’t we just don’t do willy nilly. It’s not a volume thing for us.

15:03 It’s where we can really be interesting people. And we’ve really have met a lot of interesting people over over the years. So we’re we’re pretty it’s not a volume thing for us. It’s right. What’s what’s really, you know, just feel good.

15:16 They feel right. But we’re business people. So when you are going through it and starting this, then, of course, you know, you can imagine you’re starting it right at some point. You’re saying, well, is there a business in this? You know, what is the business in this?

15:31 How did how did that you kind of formulate that? Because at some point, I cannot. I think we’ve seen so many people that have started podcasts and phone by the way, say expensive business. There’s no money coming in. What’s the we look at that very not that we’re engineers, but we’re very logical.

15:51 We’re going to hold on. Does this make make money? It is makes it a business. They’re worth investing in. So I think, you know, for you, there must have been things when you thought that, you know, this is not going to work or when did you kind of figure out the business?

16:06 The business parameters behind it.

16:08 Brian Rose: Yeah, I was used to joke that the banks funded London Real, you know, for the first three to five years because it was just my saved up bonuses that were keeping us alive. I kept things really cost effective those first few years. It was just me, the one man show. And then later I added a few staff, which was good because when I had a guest booker, I would be like, I used to book the guests.

16:31 So don’t give me these excuses or when I had a videographer, I’d be like, I used to cut the trailers. Yeah, I used to position the cameras. So don’t tell me you can’t make this trailer better. So like I did all the jobs, but, you know, when YouTube started, there wasn’t a real revenue model there. I think one of the great things I did early on is I never thought to myself that I’m going to get paid from YouTube.

16:53 And I remember I used to I was invited down to the headquarters in London and they had a studio there and we were soon made partners and all these wonderful past history relationships I had with YouTube. And I saw a bunch of the young creators there because I was a bit older at the time, you know, I was in my 40s and they were all in their early 20s and they were making crazy goofy videos and they were using the cameras and I was doing boring conversations in my house, but I still hung out with them. But they were waiting for YouTube to pay them.

17:22 And I always looked at that and thought, that’s just not a great business model where they’re going to make a t-shirt this week, but it didn’t look like it’s scaled to me. And so I never thought of YouTube as the place to pay me. I thought of YouTube as distribution. And then I think it was in 2014, maybe 14, 13 or 14, where I could see some people were offering educational products. And it’s funny, they say in business that your customers will tell you the products they want.

17:50 And so my customers were asking me, they’re like, Brian, how come you don’t do an event? Brian, can you teach us how to start a podcast? And I was just like, yeah, leave me alone. I’m busy with the next episode. Leave me alone.

18:00 I’m trying to make better cameras. But finally, I listened. And so I think our very first money-making course was something actually called the Business Accelerator. And I was going to show them how we were starting to make money with our podcast. And it started off, I think, as a membership product where we would allow London realers to come together and talk to each other and learn things.

18:21 It was like $99 a quarter or something like that. And I remember people started signing up, and I started seeing revenues. And we started seeing our subscriber count get up to, I think, 10,000. And I remember, I remarked one time, I said, wow, if we get to 100,000 subscribers, like, this is going to be a business. And this was on YouTube.

18:39 This was on YouTube. Yeah, which is pretty much the only distribution platform back then. There was some audio podcast platforms on Apple. But I always knew that audio, I always knew from the beginning, you can’t build a relationship with audio. So we were always on camera.

18:53 And when I was a kid, I used to play with cameras and make little crazy movies with my friends. So I had a little background in cameras a little bit. But I remember when I finally created a course where I was charging, I think it was $2,000 for a six-week course to walk people from A to B when it comes to an online business. And I remember we sold 10 of those, and I fell off my chair and was like, wow, $20,000. Like, here I was making all this video that was being watched for free.

19:23 And that was the first time I realized, oh, my gosh, there’s something here. So that was a realization. That turned into London Real Academy. That turned into a bunch of courses. But that was the first time that we monetized.

19:35 Graeme Carling: And when was that? What year was that?

19:37 Brian Rose: I think 2014. 2014. And now we had had a couple sponsors before that.

19:41 I think Bulletproof Coffee and a few others, yeah. But those were not big moneymakers. And at the time, I think people were doing promo codes for mattresses in the early podcast space. But also, that was a lot in America and the UK. I mean, I always tell people, like, no one had heard of a podcast in 2011.

19:58 In the UK, definitely nobody had heard of it. I mean, the UK is three to five years behind the US when it comes to adopting technology. So finding a sponsor. And plus, we’re talking about, you know, ayahuasca and crazy stuff. Nobody wants to sponsor our show.

20:13 But that was a change. So I wasn’t relying on YouTube to get paid. I was using it as a distribution platform, using our own funnel to start making money. That’s how we started making revenues. And that’s how I started hiring people and started building the business.

20:27 Graeme Carling: So when you look back, I mean, what’s actually driven the reach on London Real is a real mixture of guests, you know, types of guests. You know, you’ve got Matak Chia going massively viral. David Icke, obviously, controversial guy. And for, you know, huge attention for different reasons. What actually drives that level of reach?

20:52 Is it the guests, the topic, just the timing, even? You know, if you go back, you know, during COVID, you know, what drives it?

21:00 Brian Rose: You know, in the beginning, my job was to do an episode a week, right? So that was the promise to the world, and that just kept us on pace. For me, I always wanted to talk to the most interesting person and probably the biggest person as well, right?

21:15 Because I think we were all excited by people that were celebrities or… I remember when we had our first member of parliament come over. It was like, okay, wow, this is a big deal. And, you know, these kinds of things, we were like metrics for us. But then you started seeing episodes that went viral.

21:32 So I think big one was Dorian Yates, six-time Mr. Olympia, came to our show, and no one really knew what to expect. You know, you see these guys with all the muscles, they just think they’re, you know, just dummies. And Dorian came on and talked very openly about steroid use, and he talked very openly about psychedelics, and this episode just shocked the world, and it went viral. And he was one of our big episodes to pop.

21:59 Dan Pena in 14 as well. I didn’t even want Dan on the show. I actually told him no for months, because Dan reminded me of everything I ran away from in the city. I ran away from the city because I thought money was not going to bring you happiness, and I just thought, I didn’t want anything to do with that. And here was Dan with his three-piece suits and all this stuff.

22:16 But as a podcaster, you need guests. And I think one week I was short, because I was like, yeah, but send the old man down. And so he came on, and he comes on. I remember I was wearing a skateboarding t-shirt, and I ate my shoes off for the episode. Of course, Dan shows up in a three-piece suit, looks like a million bucks or a billion bucks.

22:37 And, you know, during the show, he starts, you know, pushing me. If you want to take care of your mom, if you want to take care of your kids, you know, that takes money, not zen. And at the end, he’s like, so is this it for you, Brian? Is this pretty much all you’re going to do with your life? Just sit around here with microphones?

22:53 So, yeah, Dan’s given it large. And at the end of the show, I said, my audience is going to love you or hate you. And that’s what they’re going to do. And again, it was also a test for me, like, can I try to keep my mind open to new ideas? Because that’s what London Real is all about.

23:09 So, Mantec Chia comes on my show and starts talking about sharpening your sword as a man. You know, I’m an American Puritan here. I’m like, he’s talking about all this sexual energy. And I’m like, what am I doing with this guy? One of our most popular episodes ever.

23:22 And I’ve since had him on eight times, and his stuff on sexual energy is next level. But at the time, it made him uncomfortable. Same with Pena. At the time, I thought he was a jerk. But later, I realized that, you know, he’s very important, what he says.

23:36 But in your typical British media, you fight back, right? You’re wrong, I’m right. And you fight. But in the podcasting world, you listen. So it was this whole new way of me having new ideas.

23:51 But I guess, to answer your question, I guess I soon learned that the internet loves something unique. And so Pena was unique, Dorian was unique, and controversial as well. And so those things did really well and blew up. Dan credits me with making him famous. And also, I put his episode out, not intentionally, on Easter Sunday, in April of 2014.

24:16 And he’s like, Brian, you made me compete with the Lord. And I still did it. But he does give me credit for making him famous, and I’ll probably go to hell for it one day. But I’d say it’s timing. Because in the early days, there weren’t many other podcasts out there.

24:34 So where are you going to find a Yeats, or a Pena, or a Chia? You’re only going to find it on London Real, or maybe a few others. So timing in that sense. Then later, with Ike during COVID, it was the perfect time, depending on who you talk to, or imperfect, at the perfect moment with the perfect guests, with the perfect channel. And that was the perfect storm for us to go completely viral worldwide.

24:58 And that happened nine years into what we were doing. I always wanted the BBC to write an article about London Real until they put me on the front page and got YouTube to ban our videos. So that was the moment. And you wait nine years for something, and then it popped. And that’s what that happened.

25:16 And I’m really happy for everything we did in 2020, even though it nearly ruined our business and ruined everything. But yeah, it’s hard to really say what makes that.

25:29 Graeme Carling: Just on the guests, do you, through the conversation, when you’re having the conversation, know that the episode is going to land? Or is it just afterwards?

25:41 Brian Rose: That’s the thing.

25:42 It was interesting you said that you’re very careful with your guests. And I understand why you are, because your time’s important. But with my guests, you never know. I had one of the members of Run DMC, the rap group on, like I’ve been watching since I was a kid, and I’m thinking, this is going to be the biggest episode ever. Nobody cares.

25:58 So you just don’t know. Mantec Chia. The night before, I go to my team, and I’m like, who the hell booked this guy? I don’t want to talk to this guy. Grant Cardone.

26:06 The night before, what’s this guy on his jet throwing money everywhere? I don’t want to talk to him. All these people went viral and have all become good friends. So no, you don’t know. You really don’t know.

26:17 And Pena as well, like I never would have thought. He wouldn’t have thought. He had dismissed the internet. He did not think it was going to be an important thing. So yeah, you don’t really know.

26:27 You don’t really know. And sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes the celebrities you think are going to go big don’t. Also, sometimes they don’t get real. And also it’s weird with musicians.

26:40 A lot of times people don’t care what the musician says. They want to hear their music. It’s weird. Same with the actors that actors on. And it’s weird.

26:48 Sometimes people don’t want to hear. They just want to watch them on the screen. Yeah, I can understand. Yeah. So you don’t know.

26:55 Now look, you know, during COVID and Ike, I mean, we probably knew something would I, but I didn’t know it was going to go that big. And I didn’t know we were going to go down that adventure for sure. But I mean, I can’t say I didn’t know what I was doing. You know, I knew it was going to get some eyeballs, but I had had him on the show before. Actually, Dorian Yates told me to have him on the show in 13.

27:16 And I was like, no, this guy’s clearly insane. I’m not going to have Ike on my show. And then I had him on in 18. And after I sat with him for two hours, I thought, I agree with about 97% of what he says. And that had the relationship settled.

27:29 So when I had him on for COVID, we were ready to go. And then we were in the right place at the right time. Here I was with a studio in London with a brand. I’ve got Ike in the Isle of Wight who could come up. And my team was ready to go.

27:45 I was sober for a couple of years. And when COVID happened, I was ready. I was doing, I was doing burpees in the stairwell when the gyms closed down and we were locked and ready to go. And so when the time came, we could serve these episodes up and the world was watching. Yeah. And it was a crazy time.

28:05 Graeme Carling: So I think, you know, going back to, we’ll just go back as well. We’re students of the Kiyosaki, rich dad model. We, we first went, I first went to Scottsdale, Arizona in 2007. And I remember, you know, from, you know, going from just outside Dundee in Scotland. My people thought I was crazy.

28:29 You know, what are you going there for your, you know, for financial education? Because I knew, you know, that we, I needed, I needed a learn. It wasn’t something financial education for us. This wasn’t done, you know, at school. It wasn’t in my environment where I was brought up and, and I wanted to hear it from the man himself.

28:49 I read Rich Dad Pure Dad in 2002 after my third field business. And I was skinned, you know, ego bruised, you know, pride dented, all that stuff. And it took us five, took me five years to kind of recover from that. But, you know, got right into everything. Rich Dad read all the books and, and, you know, he was Robert Kiyosaki.

29:11 So I went, I went up there. We’re, we’re well-drilled in the Kiyosaki way of thinking. So if I go back, if you go back to 2014 when you interviewed him, at that point where you’re already thinking beyond content, where you’re getting the business, you know, way of whether it’s Kiyosaki or Pena, there’s, you know, there’s always an element to it, a financial element to, to everything they do really. But going back to that time, thinking beyond content in relation to business-wise.

29:44 Brian Rose: I wasn’t, not in 14 I wasn’t. No. No, I don’t know. I was just pursuing this, this, I don’t know. I really enjoyed what I was doing.

29:52 I was having this incredible connection with people and I was learning a massive amount. And I was on this massive learning curve when it came to creating a podcast. I’d never really run my own business. You know, I mean, in the city, you kind of run your own business because you have a client base and you get paid from your P&L. But this was really new and the tech was really new and the space was super new.

30:12 So, and again, I’d made a bunch of money in the city. And so for me, that wasn’t my prime goal. Now, if I had never made much money and I was like one of these younger guys that get online and they want to do that first, then maybe I would have been in more of a rush and that might have ruined it too. It might have ruined it because in the early days, it was just, it was the love of it. Like, how can I make a really compelling episode with an amazing trailer?

30:38 Wow, wait till the world sees this episode with Roberts. They’re going to be like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. And that’s what I wanted to do. And so it was this passion driven piece. It wasn’t like, oh, the content’s going to get me the customer, which means I’m going to sell them this.

30:51 Now that later happened, but I’d be lying to you if I said I was thinking of that. Also, media was so new. And again, I’m sure we’ll talk about Pena, but like Pena, maybe he still does. But in the first five years of my relationship with him, he used to constantly slam what I was doing. Your London realers are a bunch of losers.

31:10 There’s just a bunch of broke losers listening to you. They’re all idiots. There’s no point in what you’re doing. Now, I don’t think he would say that these days because I always say, what’s the value of London Real? It’s so hard to quantify because we have people all over the world that have relationships with us that potentially want to do business with us.

31:27 And yet Pena was like, this is stupid the whole time. And yet if we hadn’t continued what we were doing, we wouldn’t have built all this value. So it was still really early on understanding what that relationship like is with the customer. Maybe it still is. And again, even my mentors weren’t acknowledging it.

31:44 So no, I wouldn’t say I knew that. Also, when you look at Robert’s stuff, and Rich Dad Poor Dad is still an incredible book. I reread it when I went out to shoot with him in 2017 with Agora and Jim Rickards. We did a whole two-day seminar with them. And I reread it, and I was just like, this is timeless.

32:00 But even in that book, it’s like, okay, you want to acquire assets. And other people say income follows assets. And at the time, it wasn’t obvious that London Real would be an asset. Now it’s obvious that it is an asset, the brand, the content. But even when they deleted all my content off YouTube, it was still an asset.

32:21 So there are principles there from Robert, but also Robert back then was known very much for real estate. And I had nothing to do with that either. So I would say, no, I wasn’t thinking that much ahead.

32:35 Graeme Carling: And in terms of just, again, going back to the COVID period, how did that affect your business at that time? I mean, I’m just trying to…

32:44 Leanne Carling: We were speaking about this last night. I mean, I must… I mean, it was a terrible thing for everyone. Of course it was. But for particularly in relation to that interview and everything, you know, get de-platformed, de-banked, all that stuff, we know how we would feel, you know, in a position, situation like that.

33:03 How was that, Brian?

33:04 Brian Rose: It was a crazy time. Yeah. We made a movie about the entire experience called We Will Not Be Silenced. And it’s won about 20 International Film Festival Awards.

33:15 And that tells the story, I think, pretty accurately of what happened in 2020. But to be in it, it was really crazy. And again, I was like everybody else. I was in this private WhatsApp group with some doctors in London, and like they were estimating the worldwide deaths in there in January, February. And it was like…

33:33 I remember I was in the gym and I looked at this thread and it was like a really dark moment where it’s like, okay, millions and tens of millions of people are going to die. And like, what are we going to do here? So I was just like everybody not knowing what’s going on. And yet I had this media channel. And I remember trying to get some people on my channel that could talk about it.

33:52 And I couldn’t really get anybody. I didn’t really have any early doctors. And I remember thinking there’s one guy that can maybe make some sense out of this and it’s David Icke. Now, again, I had had him on the show once or twice before. I had a relationship with him.

34:05 And I brought him in. And I remember we first spoke to him in March. I think it was March 18th. And it wasn’t live. And I didn’t tell anybody he was coming.

34:14 But when we put the episode out, it started moving like everywhere around the world. And I don’t know if you ever had this experience, but when you get text messages from people in high school that you haven’t spoke to in 20 years saying, hey, Brian, I saw this episode. And I’m just like, OK, this is weird. That was my viral meter. And then I decided to have him back on, I think it was April 6, 2020.

34:35 And this time I told everybody he was coming live, which is not something I would normally do, but I did. And I even put out a video beforehand saying I’m a little worried. And I normally don’t do any of that stuff. And he came on. It was the second largest YouTube live stream in the world that day, 65,000 concurrent viewers.

34:53 The largest one was Trump’s coronavirus briefing from the White House that day. So it was massive. And based on those live numbers, it was going to be the most watched video podcast in human history. It would have beat Elon Musk and Joe Rogan smoking weed, which was the big one that time at like 20 million. This would have surpassed it.

35:12 And David and I are in there and he’s mixing it up and he’s saying all the crazy stuff. There is no COVID-19. And all this PCR tests is nonsense. David’s going large. And he’s like, the vaccine’s coming.

35:23 I was like, the vaccine. No one’s even talking about that. And he’s going super large. And we get out of the studio and we walk out and we’re like, wow, that was amazing. And my team says YouTube just took the video down.

35:34 And it made me so angry. It made me so angry. I don’t know if I’m coming from America and we have freedom of speech, but it made me so angry. And I wasn’t even thinking straight because my first reaction was to re-upload it. Of course, they deleted it.

35:49 And then I uploaded a video telling me how angry I was. And I couldn’t get YouTube to call me back. The next day on the BBC front page, they basically said, video taken down. The BBC took credit for it. Apparently, they had been watching our content and they had been pushing YouTube to start taking some action.

36:07 So there was all these people involved. And then, of course, systematically, our content is taken off Dropbox, which, by the way, it’s like an online hard drive. I didn’t think they were watching my content. Ban from PayPal, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Everybody’s taking it down.

36:21 And so that’s when we start going, oh, my gosh. But my reaction was anger. Like, they can’t do that. Like, you can’t stop us talking. So, like, people always say, oh, you’re so brave to fight back.

36:34 I was just reacting. And that was my reaction. And I did not care the consequences for the business. But they were very bad because our number one lead generation was YouTube. And they started taking our content down and giving us content strikes.

36:50 And I went from the darling of YouTube to their number one enemy. And that’s what happened over the next couple months. We had Ike back on one more time, but we couldn’t put it on YouTube. So we created our own streaming platform and we streamed that to a million concurrent people. But that is probably because I have an attitude problem.

37:09 And I just had to say to the world and to YouTube, just one more F you. We’re going to do this anyways. And that’s what we did. And to this day, people will stop me on the streets of Dubai and say, thank you, Brian. Because I watched your shows in 2020 and when I was going crazy and I couldn’t get any other real messages, everything on the channels was all the same.

37:31 I felt calm after I watched you talk with David. And to this day, I get that reaction. So, you know, I was on Spencer’s podcast, who’s also in Dubai. And he, the whole time was like, Brian, surely you regret doing that. You ruined your business.

37:46 You ruined your reputation. Like on and on and on and on. And I’m like, it’s one of the greatest moments of my life. I stood up and was counted. And the brand damage, is it damage or is it the greatest thing that ever happened to me?

37:57 They say there’s no bad press. I actually think Dubai in the last two months, I think is the best press they’ve ever got. I think it’s tens of billions of dollars worth of press and ultimately it will lead to great things. But for me, I’m glad with what we did. But we also took a lot of hits and we got haters coming out from everywhere.

38:16 Graeme Carling: Yeah. Well, I think certainly for us, we can totally understand. I mean, our first reaction would be, you know, we’re the rebels, aren’t we? You know, we run towards the gunfire. And so we’re drilled and trained over the years and we would, for us, we would be absolutely raging and totally understand the actions that doesn’t take away the hits that you’re getting, you know, and the issues that arise from it.

38:46 Leanne Carling: I can completely understand the reaction. Even what you’re saying about, you know, there’s things we’ve done and we think, oh man, is that a big mistake? And it’s not. It’s worked out well for us. It’s a struggle at the time.

38:58 A struggle at the time. Why did we do that? Why did we react like that? But it’s turned out for the better and we’re glad we went with our principles and, you know, what we stand for and it’s worked out okay in the end. But there’s obviously been that lag time in between that you think, does that do the right thing there?

39:15 Graeme Carling: Well, that’s when you’re going through the end of the storm, you know, and it’s like, and it’s stressful. And we’ve had that in numerous business ventures that we’ve done. And normally when it happens, they all fucking happen at the same time, you know, everybody just comes at once and you laugh. So you’re trying to navigate that. How long were you off YouTube Brian?

39:39 Brian Rose: So 2020 was interesting because we were getting content strike and then content strike and I was having conversations with YouTube, which I recorded and we later put in our movie. And weirdly enough, the movie is now on YouTube. It shows you how crazy the world is. Also, all the guests that I interviewed in 2020 that I had to put on my freedom platform because I couldn’t put on YouTube, they’re all in the White House right now. So Bobby Kennedy I had on my show who basically convinced me not to get vaccinated, right?

40:08 Jay Bhattacharya who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration is now in the White House. I mean, the other day there was a meeting in the White House and I could see Jay and Joe Rogan and the whole London Real cast behind Trump. They’re all in the White House. And so it’s just crazy. We’re clearly in a simulation that we went from all being banned to now running policy for the biggest country in the world.

40:29 But at the time it was stressful and I was dealing with YouTube. The weird part is that YouTube didn’t even know the rules. Now at the time if you had told me, which David Eich was telling me, that this was all coordinated by some cabal which I don’t believe in. People think I’m a conspiracy theorist. I don’t have time for conspiracy theories.

40:45 I’m too busy running my businesses on my show. I have them on my show. But I don’t really get into it. I just try to listen and learn. But at the time if you had told me there was somebody coordinating all these social media platforms to do the same thing, I would have thought that’s crazy.

40:59 It turns out later it was the U.S. government doing a lot of that. And we found out from the Twitter files and the X-Files and everything that there were people pulling the buttons. But in the early days of YouTube they didn’t even seem to know what they should be blocking. But they were really trying to shut us down and that was our world.

41:15 And so we tried to comply without… I was thinking we’re going to have our… I used to call it like our Sesame Street happy content on YouTube and then the real stuff was on the digital freedom platform. But we got very close to being taken down completely. We got two content strikes and we got to a point where they basically just almost flatlined us.

41:36 That was in 2020. They actually didn’t deplatform us until two years later when they just took the whole thing down and we were off for 25 months. And I always tell people censorship works. You know back in the day if you were in Argentina and you were talking against the government they’d take you down to the back and they’d put a bullet in your head and stick you in a hole. That’s how they silence you.

41:58 These days, the social media platforms, they are monopolies. Let’s not kid ourselves. In YouTube it’s like 92% of all the video. So when you’re off there, you’re gone. And so people stopped in London.

42:09 Hey Brian, how are you? Are you still doing London Real? I never see you anymore. Yeah, twice a week. We’re broadcasting but no one knows.

42:16 So it’s extremely effective. It worked really well. And then thank… It was the Trump administration that got us back on in October of last year and that was an incredible feeling because when they take you off YouTube they used to do this to the dojos in Venice. There was like the one bad dojos that tried to like, I don’t know, go behind the back of everybody and ruin the country.

42:37 And he’s literally blacklisted where they erase his entire existence from history. You can’t say his name, his family’s name, nothing. And that’s basically what they do. And every single piece of content I ever put out was taken off the internet. And this is the content that saved people’s lives and talked about addiction and talked about all these things.

42:54 They took it all down. It was almost like I never existed. That hurt. And again, if it’s not on YouTube, no one’s going to find it. Okay, it was on our website but no one’s going to find it.

43:03 So YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world owned by the largest search engine in the world. So all of that happening was very difficult as a business. All we could do was just be like, okay, great, let’s go. And so weirdly enough, we had some great years even though we were off YouTube because as Dan Pena once said when they asked him what he’s going to do about the oil recession, he famously said, we’ve decided that we will not be participating in the oil recession.

43:33 So I decided not to participate in the censorship. And we just kept going. And that also goes to show you sometimes it’s all in your head. But look, now we’re back. But yeah, it was challenging, challenging for the business.

43:47 2020 in a weird way, we were, again, there’s no bad press. Everyone saw the bad press about us, but everyone in the world knew who we were. I mean, crazy things. I mean, there would be some place in Australia in the outback where someone had spray paid in London Real.TV on a highway overpass. I mean, it was just everybody heard about us.

44:09 And that is still a big part of our business today. You know, with what we’re doing here in Dubai, I get on calls with people and they’re like, Brian, I’ve been watching you for 10 years. I saw you during COVID and that’s why I’m here. So something happened to the business that time. But it was challenging from the social standpoint.

44:27 Graeme Carling: How does that work, Brian, on, I mean, how fragile because it sounds bloody fragile, you know, where you’re completely at the mercy of these big platforms. It feels like, you know, and if you don’t play ball or say the right thing or or do the right thing, I mean, how fragile is that? And how do you, I suppose, de-risk it? Can you even, you know,

44:48 Brian Rose: people said probably correctly that we had gone too far all in on YouTube at that point. But I don’t know how I could have de-risked it because for long form video content, this is one of a lot of the choices we could have maybe tried to build up our Twitter following or whatever following.

45:06 But like that also just wasn’t the platform that resonated with our audience or our content. So I don’t know what else we could have done. One thing we did do that was intelligent. Is that we had built an email list because an email list. Well, actually not in the last couple of years, but it used to be a platform agnostic way of reaching your audience.

45:26 So if I send an email to you, there’s not a middleman that says you can’t talk to each other. And then let’s just be clear. I had two million subscribers on YouTube who all wanted my content. I wanted to give them my content. And there’s someone in the middle saying, no, you can’t listen to what Brian says and Brian can’t listen to what you said.

45:43 So it’s like there’s something fundamentally wrong with that. But with email, you have something that you can probably contact someone for the next 10, 20 years of their life. So we had built up an email list that was a million, two million strong. That probably allowed us to survive. And we always had that model.

45:59 Funny enough, there was some random dude at Dan’s castle that said to me when we had the dinner outside the castle that one night who said, are you building an email list? And I said, no, I don’t need an email list. I have a website, but I’m on YouTube. Why would I need an email list? And I went back and that was the one thing that we started doing.

46:18 And that saved us and saved us to this day. So that that was maybe a way of mitigating it. But otherwise you’re dealing with these monopolies. You’re not supposed to have monopolies and capitalism, but they are monopolies and they can turn you on and turn you off. Now the tide has shifted or as Dan says, the legal moral and ethical right.

46:37 And what does he say? Legal morals and ethics twist in the wind. And so three years ago, you were getting shut down for saying the wrong words on social. And now we have a new president. Now it’s going completely the other way around.

46:50 So now I can say whatever I want to say pretty much. Will it turn back the other way? I don’t know. So the answer to your question is, you know, we’re so highly connected these days. And now A.I.

47:04 What does A.I. do? A.I. goes. Who’s Brian Rose?

47:07 A.I. What are they going to do? Well, two or three years ago, they would go on Wikipedia and they would go to YouTube. On YouTube, there’s no videos from me. So what do you have on YouTube?

47:15 Everybody that hates me. Right. And so you get a version of who I am. Nowadays, maybe you get a more accurate version, but you’re only the version of what the monopolies say about you.

47:27 Leanne Carling: Just one thing.

47:28 Graeme Carling: No, I won’t tell you. You go quick. You said that the guy at the castle triggered you about the email. Just just come back to Kiyosaki. What was something that you took away that stayed with you from Kiyosaki?

47:43 Brian Rose: From Robert. You know, what was interesting about Robert is I had that brief 30 minute conversation with him backstage when you guys were there. I didn’t realize the world first time they tried to get us to meet. And then I didn’t have him on the show for many years until Agora contacted me and said, would you fly out and do, you know, a kind of a webinar thing with Jim Rickards who I’d had on the show and knew him and then Robert. And I was like, yeah, I’d love to.

48:07 So flew me out to Phoenix, read Rich Dad Poor Dad again in the plane. And then I said, I’ll come and do this on one condition. They had this huge studio with like 50 people extras as an audience. It was like a whole thing. It was like a, you know, Rich Dad Poor Dad show.

48:22 And so we were on there and all this stuff. And I said, I want to interview Richard, Robert, excuse me, the next day. And they were like, okay, we got the studio. No problem. That’s all you want.

48:32 I was like, I want. So the next day they said this huge studio and there’s this famous interview of me and Robert with this white background in this huge studio. And we had this amazing conversation for 90 minutes. And Robert starts to say, Brian, it’s not what you want to do. It’s what God wants you to do.

48:45 And all this. And it was this incredible interview that went crazy viral. I’ve seen us. I’ve seen the interview where Robert and I are talking to each other in Russian, like somebody took it and dubbed it and things like that. So that day is when Robert and I really connected for a proper long form interview and Robert showed the world what he really is.

49:02 And it was these incredible stories from Robert, you know, going down in his, you know, Huey helicopter after being shot out of the sky and having his out of body experiences. And in all of these, these basic tenets that Robert has, you know, schools teach us to be poor, you know, all everything that that really stuck with me and it probably crystallized my relationship with Robert and started getting me to think about money differently. And then the world differently as well.

49:30 So like I took that with Robert and then we’ve had him on many, many times after that. So maybe less business specifics, but maybe a little bit more of, you know, the whole, what does God want you to do? And God wants me to do, I think, what I’m doing. He wanted me to go into these crazy storms and create this media and do all these things. And I can imagine if I was just still a banker to this day, it would have been not their existence.

49:55 I think was meant for.

49:57 Graeme Carling: Well, we have been in Russia with Robert. We were in Moscow.

50:01 Brian Rose: I guess there’s a falling. I’ve seen the show.

50:05 That was a good three days. We’ve been all over the world. That was back in the days.

50:13 Leanne Carling: Just one thing, I just wanted to go back. You’re one of the first people to do long for.

50:21 Why? You know, what was the thinking behind that thing? Like you were saying, you know, YouTube at the time, we’re only 15, 30 minutes uploads at the time. But you’re stuck with that format. It would appear right throughout.

50:35 Brian Rose: What was the thinking behind that? So, again, I was very much inspired by Joe Rogan. And Joe Rogan used to have three hour shows. And for Joe, I think his attitude was if you want to watch 30 minutes, then watch 30 minutes. If you watch an hour, watch an hour.

50:50 But we’re going to have a proper conversation. So for me, that was what I was seeing at the time and what I really enjoyed. And I just thought, yeah, we’re going to have a real conversation. And we’re not going to edit as well. That was another choice we made is no editing, obviously no scripting.

51:06 I would never give questions beforehand or anything like that. It was just a real conversation. That’s what we called it London Real. It was just supposed to be real and pure. So that’s why we opened that format up.

51:16 I think my first few apps were hour and a half, two hours. I’ve had four hour episodes before. It was just like the conversation goes on as long as it needs to. And we’re not going to optimize for the end user. There’s a guy named Rick Rubin.

51:32 And he’s a very famous music producer. And he’s worked with musicians all across the spectrum, from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Johnny Cash to you name it. And he always says, you know, art is not made for the audience. Art is made for the artist. And you make something that you want to create, that you think is necessary, important, beautiful.

51:52 And that’s when you release it to the world. And once you release it, you can’t control it after that. Maybe people watch it, maybe they don’t watch it. You just do the best of your ability. And that’s why we do our films.

52:02 We make a film like we will not be silenced. I needed to tell that story. I needed to express everything that we were going through so you could understand what happened. It came out 2023, so three years after. Right when YouTube banned us, the movie came out.

52:14 It was perfect. And it was really art, poetry. But we put it out there. And so that’s the way we did our content in the beginning. It was, I’m not saying I’m an artist, but I just created something that I wanted it to be in the world.

52:27 And I do believe 10,000 years from now, or 100,000 years from now, people will be watching our content. I really believe that will be there. The other thing is, I believe, if you give me two hours in my studio, I can encapsulate your soul on a piece of video. I believe I can. With six-camera high definition when you’re in person.

52:45 And if you’re great, great grandkids, want to go and see what was Grandma Leanne, great Grandma Leanne, like, guess what? You’re going to see exactly what she was like, 90-some percent. You’re going to be like, okay, that was her. And I remember I had a guest who died two days before he got to the show. He was a very famous mixed martial artist named Kimbo Slice.

53:05 And I felt really sad that week because I thought, I don’t know, I had a chance to recapture his soul. And now it’s not going to be there. And so I believe what we’re doing is, I don’t know, I always believed it was kind of special. And so each guest was really important. I had to be prepared.

53:23 Everything had to be good and be correct and things like that. So that’s the way I always approached those episodes, just from an early on standpoint. So that’s the way we did it. And we would put out trailers and we would put out clips from the show. But it was always important to have that one piece that people could watch and that it wasn’t edited as well.

53:42 Like, I didn’t want to hear your input on editing and I wasn’t going to edit it. It had to be one piece. And I got in some fights over that with some people. Yeah. But that was important too.

53:50 Graeme Carling: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good. Dan Pena. Okay.

53:55 Dan Pena. So, yeah, we- Common thread. Yeah, it is common thread. Well, I guess it’s- Another. Another.

54:03 I mean, they’re real irony and sort of our journey and how we’ve ended up here in Albarari. I mean, it’s pretty crazy, really, because we were at- We were introduced. We lived literally 10 miles along the road from Dan Pena, Guthrie. We’d never heard of him. We had never heard of the man or the guy or anything.

54:22 We were rich, dad, die hard. Our main business when we started was real estate. We became pretty quickly one of the largest- Landlords. Landlords in Scotland and residential landlords in Scotland. Very quickly, we were following the rich dad model, particularly around cash flow and all of that stuff.

54:44 So, we were there. We were drilled. We were laser being focused. We kind of hit a plateau. But we were in Stockholm with some of our investors.

54:55 We were doing some good deals. And Kim Kiesacki was doing a- I think it was a success resources event at the Stockholm Arena. And we went across there and we met some people that we knew from Scottsdale. We used to go to Scottsdale three or four times a year for many years from 2008 onwards. And we loved it.

55:14 Nothing better than landing Phoenix Airport and staying at the Scottsdale Plaza. And we always had to have advanced. It was really impending. We didn’t want to go back if we hadn’t done another deal or bought a few more properties and had made some sort of real advancement. So, it always kept us in check.

55:31 Anyway, so we were in Stockholm. We bumped into a couple of people that we knew. Actually, a guy that had seen us on stage in London at the XL had went there, him and his wife, and they got in touch with us after the event. And he said, if you’re- We were in this arena in Stockholm. He said, have you heard of the guy, Dan Pena?

55:55 He said, he’s your neighbour. He said, he’s your neighbour. We were like, no. Never heard of the guy. She’s like, honestly, you should watch him.

56:01 You should watch him. You know, get some YouTube videos. I think this was in the August of 16. Or it was maybe the September. No, it was late.

56:09 It was later because we went- We went the very next seminar. There was two spaces. But it was December? No, it was October. October.

56:17 Yeah. We went to the seminar October 2016. We just came back in Stockholm. We were watching the videos. We were down and spending a lot of time down at our house at Spain at the time.

56:27 We had them on 24-7. You know, our kids are- Who’s that swearing? Grandpa Dan. So we got introduced to them. We went to that very next seminar.

56:38 And one of the things, well, you could tell- Yes, we were watching all the videos and Dan saying, you know, what is it? 50% of couples that come separate, you know, they don’t last long. And I was like, I want that challenge. I want to go and challenge him, you know. Take me there.

56:57 Yeah. And we were living in Spain at the time. Yeah, our property is still in Scotland, but we’d moved our kids and we’d put them at school in South Spain for a year. So we’d went back. I mean, can you imagine?

57:09 I mean, it’s literally our neighbour. He’s along the road. We get introduced to them. We watch the videos for a few weeks, then bang, we’re at the first set. That very first seminar we can get to.

57:20 And it wasn’t cheap, as you know, you know. I mean, it’s a bit of a- I’ve been through a Scotsman, you know. It’s a bit of a- It doesn’t do my- You’ve got to pay it and it was phenomenal. You know, what a week.

57:35 Brian Rose: What did you expect and what did you receive?

57:38 I’m very curious.

57:39 Graeme Carling: You know, we don’t expect anything of them in the way that, you know, most of the people that are many people that go there, you know, at the end of the day, you know, they want Dan to do it for them. They’re looking to give away their power to someone else. You know, we were already successful to a certain extent, but we plateaued. And it’s kind of a bit of an issue with the Kiyosaki model, because a lot of people we knew over the years, you kind of hit a limit, whether it was in real estate or- And we were needing a supercharge.

58:18 We needed something different, a real bigger thinking, you know, bigger goals, bigger aims. So we went there. You know, again, having seen the videos, we expected that. We loved the challenge. There was no- None of that stuff was going to happen to us.

58:37 But what we wanted to do is we wanted to unlearn. We kind of wanted them to confirm what we kind of already intuitively knew. And he told you day one, you know, I mean, that shut your business down. Get rid of the bloody properties. You know, hold on.

58:50 What are you doing? Yes, you’re a flaming time. So we kind of needed that, because there was a lot of real- Yes, we just needed somebody to tell us certain things. And we were coasting. We were coasting, you know, at the beach.

59:08 You can do what we want. We’d been financially free for many years. Again, that was due through the Kiyosakis.

59:15 Leanne Carling: I’m just going to jump back, actually. When Robert and Kim came up, there was no prouder moment.

59:21 For us, then we gave them the tour of where we were, the house that we stayed in when we met, which was an ex-counsel house, my grand’s house. We had nothing, really. No carpets. No carpets. When we reached our poor dad, then we gave him the tour of how we’d upgraded and all of that stuff we took.

59:39 And I was really proud. And by the way- He actually wrote about us in his book. Yeah. We took him around the tour, the Second Chance. Yeah, Second Chance is one of his books.

59:50 And he really started to well up, because that’s the type of guys these people are. You know, they’re brutal. They’re brutal. They want the best for you. Robert, you know, I’ve seen them.

1:00:00 We’ve been at some seminars, and I’ve seen people buckle, you know, real under, because he will go for the reasons, you know. They’re not listening. I’m like- Yeah. And you’ll know yourself. You know, Dan’s the same.

1:00:15 Graeme Carling: But we’ve seen them. How much they really want it for you. You know, they really want it for you. But you’ve got to get it. So I think from, to answer kind of your question there, we didn’t have any expectations of them.

1:00:28 It’s what we’re going to do with this information. And this, going through this week of boot camp and all that stuff, we knew we were going to survive it. You know, actually we were the last ones standing. One other guy, you know, at the end of the year, that used to do the year, you know, on the phone every week and all that stuff. It was only three of us left.

1:00:48 It was only three of us left. At the end of the year. We never missed a beat. But that’s us anyway. You know, we would normally be doing that.

1:00:57 So I think it met every expectation and more. We had a massive shift in change. I remember I never spoke to my dad for a couple of years after that. And we had a fall out. It was a rubbish.

1:01:11 Then I remember him getting in touch with me, saying, you know, where you are now, he says, I’m so proud of what you’ve done and how you’ve, you know, how you’ve advised. Because we knew we needed to dedicate ourself to it. We needed to cut, you know, cut people off, cut things off, all of that. And that’s difficult. And I think we done that.

1:01:35 You know, we said, right, okay, we’re committed to doing this. And a couple of, you know, the ventures that we’ve done, which are rolling up companies, it didn’t work. You know, we had a pivot and, you know, we made mistakes and all that stuff, but we just kept at it. And I think that that’s what the, you know, the infinite thinking of how big you could be and possibly be. And that whole part of it for us is, that was really, it blew the ceiling that we kind of found ourselves at Brian, I think.

1:02:08 Brian Rose: Well, kudos to you for doing that, because a lot of people, they stick with one guru and they idolize the guru and it’s a comfortable place to be and they get some success. And you don’t hear many people that, you know, that both have Robert and Dan, you know. I don’t know of anybody else really that has followed them like that. So that’s impressive. And I would agree, I think Robert is great when you’re starting to show you that process and you can get some incredible gains.

1:02:36 But Dan is the guy, one of the few guys, I think, that can get you to break through to that next level. And yeah, that’s what he did for me as well. You know, because I was 2014, you know, London Real had some success. We had been on the Rogan show. We’d had some things go viral.

1:02:53 And everyone was telling us how great it was. But deep down inside, I knew it wasn’t. I knew it could be so much more. And so, pain only works if you know it’s true as well. Right?

1:03:05 Pain only works if you’re willing to do the work as well. Yeah. Because you know a lot of people come there. And like you said, you don’t go there to get inspired. You know, you go there because you deep down know he’s right.

1:03:15 Maybe you need someone to say it to you and then to hold you accountable, not even hold you accountable just to say it maybe. Yeah. And then, and that’s what happened to me at that castle. You know, and I interviewed him before the castle and after the castle. This was like a famous three-hour show I did.

1:03:33 And before the castle, I said, look Dan, I know what you’re doing. This is all army trick. You separate everybody from their family. Yeah, you know, you treat them all the same. They got to wear the same clothes.

1:03:45 You know, you shave their head in the army. You’re not going to do that. And you isolate us.

1:03:50 Graeme Carling: Because apparently now they can keep it. No gem.

1:03:52 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We had a gem then. But apparently now they called out the living room and stuff. We couldn’t do that.

1:03:58 Brian Rose: When I was there, like literally he fed you. The internet was barely working. Yeah. So like literally, if you want to eat, like, you know, the zookeeper has to feed you, you know. And it was suits every day, which I hadn’t done for a long time.

1:04:10 And then the whole thing. And I was like, I know what you’re doing. It’s not going to work on me. And then you look at my interview seven days later and I’m like, I’m in my suit. And I had a come to Jesus moment, like day three from my one-on-one with him.

1:04:22 And I went in there and he’s like, sit down in his office. And I’m like, I’m not sitting down. And he’s like, he still tells the story. Although Dan does magnify stories about 10X. They’re better that way.

1:04:32 But I said, look, I know what I’m doing. I know what I need to do. And I just had a whole list even before he spoke in his office. And I just knew I needed to go back and take it to the next level. And Dan was right.

1:04:43 I’m an engineer by training. And I needed to engineer more risk in my life. That was the biggest thing. I was playing too small. And maybe you guys felt the same thing.

1:04:51 And so from then on, I got back to London. I made a bunch of huge changes. I had two shows at the time. I got rid of one show. I started dressing up, wearing suits and stuff like that.

1:05:03 And people think that Dan and I had this weird, twisted relationship. During COVID, I got all these celebrity relationships. So I would get all these celebrities that would text me. And whether it was like Dokovich in the Wimbledon or Elle MacPherson supermodel, I used to have a picture on my thing. And they’re all texting me.

1:05:21 Keep going, Brian. Keep going. And I remember I was talking to Elle in like 21. And she’s like, oh, yeah. I’m sure Dan put you up to running for mayor and all this.

1:05:30 And you guys have this plan. I’m like, no, I don’t even talk to Dan in a couple of years. It’s just like Dan’s not telling me what to do. But when you get inspired by Dan, you want to make those changes. And so I got back and started getting to work and making those changes.

1:05:43 I wrote this long blog post comparing Dan to ayahuasca, the psychedelic. Because both of these things show you a new reality. They both make you extremely uncomfortable. But once you see that new reality, it’s hard to look back at your old life. And you come back to this world, no one understands you.

1:06:03 Everyone thinks you’re crazy. And yet you’ve seen a vision of what you can be and what everyone around you can be. And it’s very lonely in the beginning. And you have to cut off a bunch of people. And you upset some people.

1:06:14 But if you follow that, you get to a brand new reality. And so I’m sure Dan doesn’t like being compared to ayahuasca. But that’s the way it was for me. And I’ve had this crazy tumultuous relationship with Dan for 12 years. I equally love him and hate him.

1:06:28 And that’s probably the way it’s always going to be with Dan. And I’ve had long conversations with Dan. I’ve accused him many times of being in a Mother Teresa. And he’s yelled at me on the show. And we both called each other four-letter names.

1:06:44 But there’s this beautiful moment in one show in the studio, Post Castle, where he says, Brian, he said, these wieners think you’re a big deal. And he’s pointing to the cameras. And he’s like, I know you’re not. He’s like, I see you 1,000 times more. And who is so lucky in this world to have someone like a mentor to care so much about you that sees you 1,000 times more?

1:07:11 And he’s angry that you’re not taking advantage of it. And you’re wasting this God-given life. Every day you’re not going for that. And Dan shows me. And then he embodies it.

1:07:22 And he’s brutal. I mean, you think he’s hard on me on the show. Try going out to dinner with him in London. I mean, I’ve been out with him and Sally at dinner at a five-star restaurant. And he is yelling at the top of his lungs at me.

1:07:35 And Sally’s like, Dan, take it easy. Take it easy. Sally, leave me alone. He can handle it. And that’s what Dan does.

1:07:41 He opens up big. I’ve gone to the castle later and seen him. And after dinner, we go out to that Scottish Fish and Chips place on the way. And we go back. And I had to lay on the floor of the room.

1:07:52 I think the both times we went out and just lay on the floor in the dark and just try to think about, because Dan just rips into me. Nothing’s good enough. You can be doing so much better, all this stuff. But if you can see that as love and inspiration, then it can take you to the next level. But it’s not easy knowing Dan.

1:08:10 Leanne Carling: No. It’s not. It’s not. And he can be very- It’s tough love. It’s tough love.

1:08:16 Brian Rose: And again, there’s been times where maybe I needed his help, and he didn’t give it to me. And later, I realized that that was the perfect answer, because I figured it out myself. And I got stronger. And I’m sure maybe that’s not in his grand plan. But don’t get a twist of a Dan.

1:08:32 He’s the medicine you need. You don’t get what you want. You get what you need. But I’ve always said it about Dan. They don’t make them like that anymore.

1:08:40 And when Dan leaves us, there will be no more Dans around.

1:08:44 Graeme Carling: No, I would agree with that point. It’s just a very unique guy who has spent a lot of his life doing this, and whether he can argue that he’s not giving back, but he clearly is. But there are very unique people.

1:08:56 Brian Rose: I meet people in this town.

1:08:58 I say, go to his seminar. I don’t get a commission. But I said, spend them 15, 20 grand and go do it, because how many more does he got left in them? I don’t know. But it’s unique.

1:09:09 So he helped me break through. I guess he did the same for you.

1:09:14 Graeme Carling: Yeah, he did. And I think the type of relationship we have with one way, we’re so grateful for that tough love. There is no doubt about it.

1:09:26 We’ve stuck with it with our kids. There’s a real sort of affinity that’s grown between us. We love Sally. When we go back to Scotland, we’ll come up and see us and we’ll go and have a chat, what’s going on, what we’re doing now. He’s so proud of us as well.

1:09:48 Yeah, he is. And we see it in his eyes and his face. We’re just so grateful for having him there. We’ve done the work. We do the work.

1:10:03 We don’t give our power away to anyone, because we’ve had to go into the trenches and do what we do, but for forget showing us the way and standing behind us every step of the way has been really beautiful. And our kids are there. He’s proud of them. He’s proud of… I mean, he’s quite happy as well.

1:10:26 Leanne Carling: You know, we were his neighbours. He calls us his neighbours. He calls me that Glasgow bitch.

1:10:33 Graeme Carling: Yeah, he calls us a Glasgow bitch. He likes Leon.

1:10:37 He likes Leon.

1:10:38 Leanne Carling: He’ll say, oh, yeah, because he doesn’t know anything. He keeps giving me a stick. But again, he was one of the first guys when the double snorted here recently, one of the first guys straight onto us.

1:10:53 Graeme Carling: Yeah, he sent me a message too.

1:10:55 Every now and then, the masks slip. The red writing comes through. And also, yeah, the red… I mean, in our movie, we show these block red capital emails and people don’t understand. That’s actually what he writes to you.

1:11:07 Brian Rose: Yeah, so… But you’re in a unique place because he has very few mentees he’s proud of. You know, you’re probably in a group of 20, 25 that are still around. So that gives you that feeling. If you had to tell me, what was the thing that Dan did for you?

1:11:23 Because look, the business model is one thing, but maybe that wasn’t it. Is it just the fact that he challenged you? Yeah. And you had been thinking the same thing? Yeah, yeah.

1:11:34 Graeme Carling: A lot of it was confirmation. You know, the stuff that… Going out and doing the hard work and being at it and that was… We were doing that. We did that anyway.

1:11:44 That was second nature to us. It’s all of that we got. You know, this is tough. It’s not going to come at us. It cleared the ceiling because we didn’t have such big goals because the environment that we were in, even though we managed to get, you know, break free of, I suppose, of Scotland and, you know, we’d went to the KSIKI seminars.

1:12:04 There was always a ceiling one. We were frustrated because we’d, you know, we got financially free pretty quick. Really quick. We started the first business. Sorry, we started buying properties in 2008 when everybody was getting out of the business.

1:12:19 So we had rapid growth there and I’d really taken advantage of that timing and what was going on in the market. But we’d been waiting on it since 2002 when I read Rich Dad Pure Dad. So it wasn’t… It was something we’d been waiting on circumstances to be right. It was terrifying.

1:12:39 We went all in. Then we kind of plateaued for ages, you know, and frustrated. We were, you know… Oh, we were just doing the same. Big fish in a small pond, boring.

1:12:50 It was, you know, we’re better than this and we needed somebody to tell us that.

1:12:54 Brian Rose: Yeah, the problem with your peer group at that point is that 99.9% of the people are telling you how amazing you are. And if there’s anybody that tells you you’re not, you probably don’t believe them because they’re probably not doing as good as you. Ping is the one person who can tell pretty much anybody in the world, maybe not Elon, that he’s not impressed. You could be so much more.

1:13:14 And he says it because it’s true and you believe him. But you probably can’t find that person in your group at that time.

1:13:22 Graeme Carling: It was probably the same feeling you were having when you were in the financial world.

1:13:28 Brian Rose: The banking laws. Or just both.

1:13:30 Just fed up, you know.

1:13:32 Graeme Carling: But you were making a good income. We needed to shake it up. You were just like, is this it? Yeah.

1:13:38 Brian Rose: There’s something more.

1:13:39 Graeme Carling: You know, we were a bit late in Scotland in the area in the region we were in. Yeah, we were. But we were. It was nothing compared to what we can and should be doing.

1:13:48 So it was a real frustration there. And he lifted that. He, you know, he put us right up the hearse. And a lot of it he told us to do. We spoke about it.

1:14:02 This is what we need to do. Is this what we need to do? We need to not send a confirmation.

1:14:08 Brian Rose: And you went into businesses and roll ups and things after that?

1:14:13 Graeme Carling: We did.

1:14:13 We did. And we’d done it separate. They didn’t work. The world didn’t work. It took us a while to get going.

1:14:20 But once we got going.

1:14:21 Brian Rose: And that’s what you were meant to do. Yes. Okay. Because the real estate, the way you were doing it, has a ceiling.

1:14:28 Graeme Carling: Yes. Yeah. I mean, we don’t do that. Okay. We just don’t.

1:14:33 Still got them. We still got a huge portfolio. But it’s not something that we, it’s not where we make it. It’s not, certainly for me. I’m way more business orientated and globally looking and thinking than the real estate side of it.

1:14:50 I think it’s slow.

1:14:51 Leanne Carling: Not really. I’ve been dumped with the real estate, Brian. That’s why I’m still involved with it. You know, I’ve got to look after it.

1:14:59 So that’s why Graham can think globally. But, you know, I love the business side of it as well. But the properties I still have to look after. Not personally, but I’ve got a team that do that for me. But still, keep an eye on that.

1:15:14 Leanne Carling: Yeah. So I’m going to ask you, Brian. Yes. This is one. Please.

1:15:19 Brian Rose: Great question. Okay. Politics. You know, why? Oh, why?

1:15:24 Oh, why? Great question. Great question. We know it’s a blood sport. You know, business is a blood sport.

1:15:32 So 2020 happened, obviously. We’re out there with Ike and fighting the good fight. And the whole world knows what we’re doing. We’re getting loved and aided. By the way, you get a ton of hate when that happens as well.

1:15:46 Because all of a sudden, you’re the public figure, and all the YouTubers come out, and they can make a video about you, and then they become famous. Yeah. So people think it was just all great. Well, it wasn’t. Obviously, social platforms are trying to take us down.

1:16:01 Government doesn’t like us. YouTube doesn’t like us. But the average person around the world loves us. But then also, people are taking shots at us. Yeah.

1:16:08 So it’s an interesting year, to say the least. But I also was in London. And I love London. My city is getting shut down. And I’m taking a taxi home every night.

1:16:20 I mean, again, there was nobody in the streets. I carried a letter in my pocket for a police officer just to say I was in the media. So leave me alone, because I’m allowed to do my job. And I got a skeleton crew of people that were still coming in to run our show. We did it all with like four or five people, including setting up our brand-new digital platform with a streamer that had done the Super Bowl the year before in order to get that episode out in May.

1:16:42 I mean, it was crazy what we were doing, right? And so it was all happening. But I would take these trips home at night and these black cab drivers and these guys were borderline suicidal. You know, they had just bought a brand-new taxi because the mayor had given them a discount for the electric taxi. And I was like the one fare in a week.

1:16:59 And they’re like, thank you so much. This 50 pounds is going to go a long way. And I could just see everything. I had friends with businesses and wine bars. At the same time, I’m listening to Bobby Kennedy and Jay Bhattacharya saying, Brian, we shouldn’t be locked down.

1:17:11 This doesn’t make any sense. And so it just, I don’t know, started making me angry again. And I noticed the city like I never had before. And I don’t know. The eye just got in my head.

1:17:20 I was just like, okay, when was the election? It was postponed because of COVID. And so it was coming up the following May. I think it was in 21. And I just got in my head that we were going to run for mayor.

1:17:31 And once something gets in my head, I don’t know. I don’t know where I came from. But I was just like, and I also looked at the mayor and every decision he made was hurting London. And it didn’t make sense to me. I thought if you’re the mayor, you should try to make the city more profitable, more this, more that.

1:17:46 But every decision seemed to be hurting it from the roads to the transport to the decisions about the business. And I was like, is this guy trying to ruin the city? Because it literally looks like every decision is trying to ruin it. And again, you can talk to Ike about maybe why he does that. I don’t know.

1:18:01 But it just made me angry. And funny enough, one of my guys, my kind of chief of staff at the time, actually had some experience in politics. And I kept messaging him. I’m like, have you seen what this guy’s saying? What the heck?

1:18:12 And he didn’t even respond for the first couple weeks. Finally, I was like, let’s run. So it got in my head. And I also thought, because of our social platforms, maybe this was the first time in history where a candidate could speak to the voter directly and not have to go through the media. And that wasn’t there.

1:18:29 And I don’t know if it’s there yet. But it’s getting closer and closer. And that’s what you see Trump doing. Trump doesn’t, he goes straight direct because he knows that’s the only way to get the message. And I thought, if I could get our message straight to the people, it would make a difference.

1:18:40 And we’d just come off all this attention. Of course, that was a lot of ammo as well for the media to get involved. So I decided to run. We announced seven months before that we were running for mayor of London. Most mayors don’t even announce seven weeks before.

1:18:54 And also in England, you know, elections are held very, you know, they’re held on a whim when the party thinks it’s the right time to hold. Whereas in America, they’re held four years. So it was really early. We thought we needed to do that to build our brand. But it ended up being just a crazy long seven months and millions of pounds.

1:19:12 And we had a battle bus with my name on it. And we were putting out all these crazy videos. And we had a policy and a team. And I was getting media trained. Because it’s one thing to do this media.

1:19:23 But when the BBC is coming for your throat, that’s a whole different kind of media. And the British are the best at it. It’s a contact sport. And they’ll cut your throat out quick. So I was trying to prepare for that.

1:19:33 And we just went for it. Obviously, lockdown was still happening. So it was a very hard time to get in front of audiences. And we ended up creating all sorts of other storms and things like that. We famously were followed by the police for 48 hours.

1:19:50 And then in my battle bus, actually my kids were on the battle bus at the time. They didn’t know that. But I got outside to film a video of me walking down the street talking to my phone. We were surrounded by five police fans, about 20 police officers got out. And they came up to me and said, you are not allowed to campaign.

1:20:09 I was like, what do you mean I can’t campaign? What does that mean? I can’t campaign. I can’t talk. And they’re like, well, we think you’re violating COVID violations.

1:20:15 I’m like, I’m alone on a street talking to a phone. I said, everybody in my bus were following the same COVID rules that Apple TV was filming at on the mall nearby. So we actually, where everything was compliant, but they detained us. Luckily, my cameraman kept the footage going. So we recorded the whole thing.

1:20:31 And then dropped the video that next day, which went viral. And millions of people saw all this happen. And so it was an interesting time to call things out and to see people doing this and to have our policies. The media is, I learned a lot about the media because they’re basically in coods with the parties. And that’s how they get their stories.

1:20:50 And so the media want a two-party system. They don’t want an independent candidate. Also, I was, you know, I got this American accent, which people had the hard time getting their head around, even though Winston Churchill was half American and same with Boris. What do you say about that? But that was an issue too.

1:21:05 And then, of course, they had seen me interview Ike before and, you know, they could call that out. Luckily, I’d been very public about my history and my struggles with drug addiction. I’d made movies about it. So you can go watch my movie if you want to find out about that. But I never remember.

1:21:19 The Evening Standard did a front page. It was like the American breakdancing, former heroin addict, former banker. I don’t know which one’s worse. It runs from there. And then they had my misses at the time.

1:21:31 We had a picture with us, and they took the picture. She’s from Bulgaria, so she doesn’t always smile. And you had this really stern look, and it looked like the House of Cards picture. So the media was not helpful. At one point, I was number two in the bookies for the next mayor of London, and yet I wouldn’t get invited to a six-candidate debate at the BBC.

1:21:49 So it’s all rigged against an independent candidate. I learned a ton about politics. I went to City Hall, and I didn’t win. And it sucked. But I got a great introduction into politics.

1:22:01 In retrospect, I’m probably glad I didn’t win, because I don’t know what I would have been able to do in all the councils and everything. But I learned a lot about politics. I had that battle bus. We drove five or 10,000 miles around London to every single borough twice. I met people on the streets.

1:22:20 Every single person I met on the streets shook my hand and said, please get rid of that terrible mayor in every single borough, and yet he won’t buy a landslide. So, look, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Go speak to Ike. But, you know, there’s definitely some interesting things going on with councils and votes and politics. That was my experience.

1:22:41 And, yeah, it really pissed off Dan for some reason.

1:22:44 Graeme Carling: Oh, you know, by the way, I find that ironic because, you know, he obviously wanted to get involved with this. He criticized everything I do, and then he copies me. I’m sure Dan’s going to watch this. I got a YouTube channel.

1:22:58 He got a YouTube channel. I ran for office. He ran for office. And now, apparently, he’s using the same Taylorism as well. I mean, the nerve of this man, right?

1:23:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. And it was funny because he was on my show in December, and he was like yelling at me in the show, of course. And he’s like, Brian, you got daddy issues. That’s your problem. That’s always your problem.

1:23:16 And I was like, Dan, I said, you’re the king of daddy issues. All you do is talk about your daddy. Now he used to beat you up. And he was like, yeah, maybe you’re right. But you’re right.

1:23:25 Now, later, he went for it. And I remember I sent him a couple of messages, and I’m just like, yeah, good luck with the circus. Yeah. But he went into it as naive as I did, which is the only way to go into probably any venture. Yeah.

1:23:36 Graeme Carling: Same with the ones you’ve been into. And, you know, I watched him do his campaign, and then, of course, he was met with very similar results. Yeah. You know, you’re going to get probably nowhere as an independent candidate. Mm-hmm.

1:23:46 And I think, yeah, he had an experience. Yeah. And he was in a similar boat. I mean, he’s in a… You know the area.

1:23:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, I don’t know the area.

1:23:53 Graeme Carling: Well, he asked us for support. I was like, you know what you’re doing? You know, it’s a hiding… Nothing can…

1:23:57 You know, it’s such a stronghold area. They just don’t… And people just don’t change. They just… So are you going to go for it again?

1:24:02 Are you going to try it again?

1:24:03 Brian Rose: You know, I ran in 2024 on a pro-freedom of speech, pro-crypto platform, because we got into the blockchain. Mm-hmm. And I ran… I think I ran because I kind of…

1:24:10 You know, I ran in 2024 on a pro-freedom of speech, pro-crypto platform, because we got into the blockchain. Mm-hmm. And I ran… I think I ran because I kind of missed it, and I thought it would be fun. Mm-hmm.

1:24:20 And I ran. I didn’t get anywhere near winning. Right. I think I’m done. Done.

1:24:25 My heart now belongs to Dubai. Okay. And look, my heart used to belong to London. Mm-hmm. You know, my children were born there.

1:24:30 I’m a citizen of the UK. Yeah. I named my show after London. Mm-hmm. But…

1:24:35 Perhaps the city has changed, but also I think my romantic relationship has changed. Mm-hmm. And Dubai has my heart now. I think Dubai has my heart now. Mm-hmm.

1:24:43 And Dubai has my heart now. It has my heart for the last few years for so many reasons, and I feel the electricity here. I feel the vibration here. Mm-hmm. I feel most alive here.

1:24:53 Mm-hmm. I feel like this is what actually America used to be with the freedoms and everything. And when I go back to London, I just feel a different kind of energy. Mm-hmm. You know, when I went back to London last time, I was walking down the street, and I saw something that I had never seen before.

1:25:06 I didn’t remember seeing. It was a strange thing. It was a slow-moving human. And in Dubai, I don’t see anybody move slow. Oh, yeah.

1:25:15 But this person was kind of ambling down the street, and I don’t know what they did, but I know they had nowhere to go. They were probably collecting a check from the government or a job or something, and they just didn’t have to move fast, whereas His Highness here in this city is famous for saying, when you wake up in the morning in Dubai, whether you’re a lion or you’re a gazelle, you run. Mm-hmm. And everybody runs here, and whether you’re a delivery driver or a crypto bro or a real estate investor, everybody here is working hard all the time, and it’s a really pleasant place to be.

1:25:45 So I don’t think I’ll run again, and I don’t think I’d be very good at that job anyways. And they wouldn’t elect me, but it was a great experience. I think Dan was really angry. I didn’t talk to him for a couple years, but then when I did see him, he was yelling at me, and he was just really angry that I did that. I don’t know why.

1:26:03 I think because he got heat from it. They were like, what’s your boy, Brian, doing? With the COVID and the Ike and the running from there. I think he heard it so much over years. He was just yelling at me, and I’m just like, well, Dan, people think that Dan and I have this grand plan, but no, we don’t.

1:26:18 Leanne Carling: Is it just on your daddy issues? Obviously, you’ve got a beautiful wife and two boys. And I heard you say that was one of your biggest transformations becoming a dad. How did that change your life through work and taking risks? How did you feel?

1:26:40 Did you feel a change at all?

1:26:42 Brian Rose: That’s the other thing that London Real gave me. It gave me so many things. I do not believe my children would have been born if it wasn’t for the show. I don’t believe I would be eight years sober now if it wasn’t for the show.

1:26:56 I don’t believe so many things would have happened to me because I was just in a different frequency doing different things. I don’t know. I needed to change a lot and open up a lot for even those things to be a possibility. And that was one of them. When I met the mother of my children, she also had a daughter, and so I became kind of a stepfather really quick, which at first, when I found out on our first date that she had a daughter, I was like, oh, man, that’s crazy.

1:27:24 I thought, wait, that’s a liability. And then I realized, no, it was an asset. And so, whether you’re a parent or not, you all have motherly and fatherly energy. And when you’re expressing it, sometimes you don’t know you’re doing it. That’s what a mentor does, really.

1:27:38 I mean, we’re all Dan’s children. Some of us are the children he never had. And he has amazing children, I’m sure. But they’re not all high-performance mentees, but you guys are, depending on the day I am. And so that’s the way he has his fatherly energy.

1:27:52 And so I was always doing that, maybe with the show or mentoring. And now I had this beautiful girl who’s now 22 and at Boston University, and she turned into quite a woman. And so I had that initial experience, which was amazing, but I was still not ready to have kids. The show helped that a lot, and then I had the two boys. And yeah, it’s been the most incredible experience of my life.

1:28:12 I can’t believe there are humans that are on this planet that don’t get to go on the A-ticket ride of being parents. And Disneyland used to have these different tickets. The best rides were A-ticket rides. And for me, it’s just such an ancestral part of the human experience, and I’ve had it. You know, what I find interesting about my boys is that I know one day they’re going to look back at what Dad did, and so for me, when I make a decision now, I do it through the lens of what are they going to see.

1:28:42 And so I recently had my first boxing match at Crypto Fight Night in Dubai a year ago, actually. And I had to think a lot about what my boys would see. And the Mrs. wasn’t too excited about the idea. And again, I’ll tell you, 24 hours before, I wasn’t too excited about it.

1:29:01 And I literally left my flat that night, thought, I’m going to wake up in a hospital. My brain started playing games with me, and I thought, OK, this is responsible, and your kids aren’t going to know you, and you’re going to be… none of that happened. But it’s amazing what fear does. This is what Dan taught me as well.

1:29:17 But I thought about it through their eyes, and I thought, you know what, they need to see that I continue to be the father that challenges himself. And so that’s the way I think of things now with my boys, is that one day they’ll watch all of this back and maybe understand life a little bit more. So that’s helped. I wouldn’t say I take less risks. Maybe I take more risks.

1:29:42 And Dan taught me how to take risks. That’s what he taught me how to do. And every year, when I look forward, I engineer risks into my life. Maybe running from air was one of them. And whereas in the past, I would run away from risks.

1:29:54 Now I see if I’m not engineering risks into my life, number one, I don’t feel good in life. Same with you guys. I can see it in your eyes. And number two, when I look back on the year, and this is a quote from Dan, everybody forgets my failures. They only remember my wins.

1:30:08 And that’s the truth. Everything that I do, they don’t remember your failures. They remember your wins, and they celebrate your wins. So that’s why I try to engineer all this risk into my life. And then I know it’s going to end up on the positive side.

1:30:20 And so, yeah, my boys, what do they think of dad? I don’t know. They probably, I don’t know what they think of me. But what does Dan say? I don’t know if I agree with this.

1:30:28 Dan says, I don’t want my kids to love me. He said 20 years after I’m dead, I want them to respect me. I wouldn’t say I’m the same. I do love my boys. But I understand the point he’s trying to make.

1:30:39 And that’s what he does with us. He’s talking about us, it’s me. He doesn’t want us to love him. Because if we love Dan, he’s not doing his job. He’s not being hard enough on us.

1:30:47 Now, Dan said he probably shouldn’t have been a parent, and maybe that’s true. I’m not like that with my boys, but I understand the attitude and I respect the fact that he does that.

1:31:00 Graeme Carling: Good. So, Dubai. Talk to me about Dubai.

1:31:03 Where is it? London, Dubai now, what’s the plans? What’s the future hold, Brian?

1:31:08 Brian Rose: Well, I started coming here about five years ago, because after I lost the race for mayor, I needed a little bit of a different shift in the energy, because it was seven months of that. I had been looking at the blockchain crypto sector for a long time.

1:31:22 I had had guests talk about it. I bought my first Bitcoin in 13, but I’d never gone into it. And we went all into crypto and DeFi. So, we started teaching it in our academy. We also started investing in companies, and we started using our media alongside our investments.

1:31:37 And I came up with this concept of London Real Ventures, the world’s first media powered investment firm. And I stumbled on this model that will eventually, I guess, prove Dan Peña wrong, that London Real has value. And it was this. At the time, we were not a fund, had no history of making investments. And so, when I could see the hot deals landing on the news feeds, when I would call up the Andreessen Horowitz’s in Silicon Valley and say, can we get in on this, they would hang up.

1:32:03 But I realized, what if we could bring our media platform in? And I could interview the CEO on London Real, do a six camera high def and put it out to five million followers. Would you give us access to the deal? And they’d be like, well, yes. Then I would talk to my community and say, OK, who here wants to invest?

1:32:19 Who’s accredited, et cetera? Let me get everybody together in a pool through a special purpose vehicle, and let’s do one off investments. And we landed on the perfect model for the London Real Media platform. So, all those hours of YouTube views finally made sense because someone in Australia was like, Brian, I know you. I like you.

1:32:37 I respect you. I trust you. And yes, I want to get into blockchain, but I have no access. Like, OK, I’m using the media platform to find investors and to break us into the deals. And so we started doing deal after deal in the blockchain, did about 100 all three special purpose vehicles, about $25 million invested.

1:32:54 And so I was coming to Dubai to do that because pre-Trump, this was really the center of crypto. And I came here, started to fall in love with the place, didn’t know much about it at first. And then the more you’re here, the more you learn, the more you kind of fall in love with it. And at the same time, the market kind of moved and everyone always said, you know, this is the place to do property. I had never done property.

1:33:17 It wasn’t like you guys. You know, I never did that. And so I started to learn to hear about it. And we stumbled upon a unique niche here in the luxury property market that also uses special purpose vehicles and collective investments to take advantage of a very strange supply demand issue. You know, we’re in a very beautiful villa here and there’s not enough of them for people like you.

1:33:38 And people find that hard to believe in Dubai because we think it’s the king of bling, right? You have all the fancy cars and the Wagyu steaks, but there’s actually only in the past few years have high net worth individuals moved here with their families and demanded a certain type of experience and home. And the big developers don’t cater to that. So it’s quite hard to find a brand new ultra luxury villa. And so what we’re doing is specializing on that very small niche of basically upgrading old villas to new ones.

1:34:09 And it’s hard to do. And they’re one of one deals. And the big developers like to Mac and a Mar. They don’t want to make one home. They want to make 10,000 homes.

1:34:17 They don’t want to make a $10 million profit. They want to make a $10 billion profit. Also, it takes a certain artistry to create one of these and to furnish one of these. And so it’s not just your normal builder that can build a thousand units. So what we’re doing is the very same thing we did in blockchain, giving people around the world to invest in these deals, working with a few of the developers here in the industry and putting things together.

1:34:41 I think we’ve got a few years before this market compresses. But right now there are some amazing returns, especially if you’re sick and tired of the returns in Scotland and the UK and the Netherlands and all the tenant friendly legislation. And I’m talking to people now in America. And I’ve been very surprised. I mean, I got a woman in Alabama who was investing with us.

1:35:01 I didn’t know they knew where Dubai was in Alabama. No offense. And so in Dubai, we forget the marketing is so good that people in America really, I think maybe, you know, maybe the Amalfi Coast 10 years ago is like now people are thinking what’s happening in Dubai. And so they want to visit here, potentially own a piece of real estate here. And I’ve been shocked that Americans who typically don’t come to Dubai because they don’t have the tax status and it’s 19 hours away are now interested in the real estate here because of two things.

1:35:31 First of all, they’ve done an amazing way branding this as the playground for the wealthy, as a unique place and as a great real estate story. But also they see the returns and it’s much higher than you can get in normal real estate. So it’s attracted in that sense. And the last thing I’ll say is there is no bad press. We proved it in 2020.

1:35:50 And even though we’re getting hated on and be getting de-platform and the government’s coming after us, ultimately more people saw us. And I believe that even in the last 60 days, even though Dubai people watched, you know, some scary things happening here, I think honestly in the long run it will be press, which is good press. And I think it’ll build this place even more. I’m actually super bullish on this area. Obviously the Emirates just left OPEC, which I think is super strong.

1:36:18 You know, they’re just building great vision. It’s the busiest airport in the world. Jebel Ali is one of the biggest ports in the area. They’re building a brand new airport that will be the busiest in the world. This is a logistical regional hub.

1:36:32 It’s not some place where fancy people have houses. It’s a place that’s here to stay. So yeah, I’m a real fan of it. And I think I found an asset class that we’ll appreciate as the country appreciates. So that’s what we’re doing here.

1:36:46 And now it’s just an excuse for me to be here more often as well.

1:36:51 Graeme Carling: Yeah, well, we love it. I mean, we’ve been here five years, over five years now ourselves. And we travel all over the world in the US quite a bit for business and we’re doing some business over there at the moment. And there’s nowhere like Dubai.

1:37:08 I mean, after all over, all over the US recently, it’s disappointing to see it. It’s tired looking. Some of the towns and cities, they haven’t recovered. Unless you’re in New York or, you know, don’t get me wrong, but certain areas are really, really depressing. I’ve done Route 66 and motorbike with it.

1:37:27 I went from Chicago down right over to LA. And we went through some wonderful places. But I mean, it was pretty, some places were pretty grim. You know, and we love the US. We love the states.

1:37:39 We’ve always loved going there. There’s no city in the world better than Dubai. And our view and our travels that we’ve seen, you know, and so for us, it doesn’t matter where we go. We can’t wait to get back, you know what I mean? Get back here.

1:37:56 As you know, we’re spoiled. You know, spoiled rotten. I think that is that you are spoiled here. You know, when you’re going to different places, the service isn’t what you get here. The facilities that you get here are not what you get anywhere else.

1:38:13 So I think it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s certainly the place to be. Someone, you know, phoned me up. We got a press from the UK. Phoned me up, you know, when all the bombs, you know, not all the bombs, there was no bombs here, but, you know, the anti-Muslim, all the bad news that was, you know, getting projected back across in the UK and Europe and the US, okay, we were there at the time. They phoned me up, we were looking for, so is that the Dubai dream over?

1:38:40 You’re joking me. Absolutely not, you know. Actually, there’s no better place we would rather be, other than the alerts and seeing, you know, you’d prefer that wasn’t going on, but, you know, it was quieter, the roads were quieter. You can get a rest on reservation within, you know, that you couldn’t get, you know, take your arm in a week to get to all of that stuff. We were able to travel freely.

1:39:05 Never at any point have we felt anything other than 100% that we’ve been in control here. I think the government have handled it really, really well. Won’t we that continue? I just think that it’s been admirable and the initiatives that they bring in quickly to try and stimulate things and all of that stuff. So I think, yeah, I think for us certainly, there’s no better place in the world, I’m telling you, for all the many benefits than Dubai at this moment in time, I think.

1:39:36 Brian Rose: That’s powerful. And it’s very interesting to get your views on America, because I grew up there, so I couldn’t see it through your eyes. And also you’ve been through the heart of America and you can see maybe that infrastructure there as well. And again, you said it’s not like New York, but like, you know, New York has its own problems in California. And one thing that we’re seeing in a lot of these luxury villas is that we believe that a lot of wealthy Americans will start moving money here because now you’ve got, what’s going to pass in California is probably one of these first wealth taxes.

1:40:05 And once it passes there, you know, Mamdami in New York is now talking about this, you know, second home tax, and now other states are considering it, probably will spread to Europe. I know Netherlands was talking about it. It’s dangerous. And this is like, so you want your assets somewhere else, and it’s only going to help this place even more. But it’s hard for me to watch America, and I love America, and I’m very happy with what the current administration has done there.

1:40:35 But I’m from California, and I spent four years in New York City as a banker. And if I ever moved back from London, I always thought it would be to one of those places, and I would not live there now. And actually, I don’t have any interest in going back to America. None. And for me, like, this is the place.

1:40:51 And I was here from New Year’s to here. I never considered leaving once. I went out to dinner under the stars. Sometimes there were more stars than others. Every single night.

1:41:02 And this place was functional, except for that one very scary day I told you about where I went at nine in the morning, and Starbucks was closed. That was the scariest moment. And then they reopened three hours later. And everything has been open and functional since. And again, it’s been still one of the safest places to be.

1:41:18 And we saw the government step up. I had no idea they had this anti-missile system. It was incredible. We saw the ruling family here, who in any other country would be six stories underneath in their nuclear bunkers, walking through the malls, having coffee, and shaking hands with people. And the restraint has been incredible, the fact that they just play it smart.

1:41:38 And now I think they’re going to assert themselves even more. And let’s be honest, this is a black cloud that’s been hanging over the region for decades. And maybe we didn’t talk about it, but it was something that always had to be dealt with. I remember as a little boy in San Diego, one of the commercial buildings had a yellow ribbon around it to celebrate the hostages in Iran. I remember I was nine years old, and I remember that.

1:42:01 So this has been an issue. And I think now 60 days after, probably one of the biggest black swan events you could ever imagine, because I thought we weren’t going to get any incoming, because typically the UAE doesn’t get any incoming. And we got more than every other country combined, including Israel. We got it. And yet we handled it in an amazing way.

1:42:19 And so I think after that black swan event, people say the conflict is still going on. There is a conflict going on, but I think we’ve already learned a lot. I think we’ve learned that it can be handled. I think we’ve learned there’s going to be a U.S. presence here in the strait and goal for at least 10 years, and that’s good.

1:42:38 And I think we’ve weathered this storm. And the interesting part is that in certain areas, we already see people buying ultra-luxury villas now, as in last week, and those things are still very strong. So, again, kudos to the government here. And they’re already introducing these laws that are dropping prices for golden diesas. And allowing mortgage financing for off-plan properties and pumping money.

1:43:03 And again, they move faster than any other government you’ve seen on the planet, because they can make things happen like this. And the leadership is incredible. And trust me, this is on their mind. So, yeah, it’s been an amazing part. Also, I was in New York City at 9-11, and I was in London for the 7-7 bombings.

1:43:20 And I remember in New York, the flags coming out, and the fact that everyone was nice to each other. And I felt the same thing happening here. And what I saw, which was amazing, was like the love between the Emiratis and the expats. Because I don’t think anybody saw that coming. I don’t think the Emiratis realized how much love they get from the expats.

1:43:45 Because the expats said, we’re not going. We’re not going. We love this place. I’d rather be here with incoming than on a street in London. And I put out these Instagram videos, just me walking down JBR, saying, look, this is what’s happening.

1:43:58 I’m not going anywhere. And everything’s good. And I’m staying. And members of government retweeting these things. And people very appreciative.

1:44:08 And then flags come out. And the civil service, we’re down at JBR. I’m taking pictures with all of them. And it felt like a very similar vibe to that in New York. And so this place, in weird ways, has gotten stronger and a lot more loved.

1:44:21 So I’m super bullish on the medium terms. I think this is going to help this area.

1:44:27 Graeme Carling: Good. I don’t know if you have a jinx or what, though, Brian.

1:44:31 Brian Rose: I know.

1:44:32 Yeah. Every night, no way. Yeah, right? I’m so glad I was there, though. It’s good to be on the ground, though, because then you can know what happens.

1:44:40 Graeme Carling: But yeah, you have a good point there. Yeah. Yeah, please don’t investigate. Please don’t investigate. But just for location.

1:44:48 Anything else? No. Do your children stay here in Dubai with you? You said they were…

1:44:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, so they’re in London now.

1:44:58 They had been over visiting me. And I had taken him over to Abu Dhabi, just me and the boys just to have a little guy time. And I was watching the USS Cole aircraft just kind of go through the Mediterranean. And I was like, when it gets here, it’s probably going to kick off. And so I was glad they went back to London before this just because it’s different with Mom and the boys and the reaction.

1:45:20 So I’m glad they weren’t here. We’re trying to get everybody to move here. Getting people to move to Dubai is always a challenge. And so we’re just trying to dial all the I’s and the T’s on that. But obviously, we’ve been in London for the last 20-some years.

1:45:35 But yeah, the plan is for people to come here. They love it here as well. And also, when they’re here, I can take them to the Maldives and we dive with the shark. I took them to Kenya and we went on safari. And so for them, they equate Dubai with doing cool stuff with dad.

1:45:51 And I don’t do that stuff in London.

1:45:53 Graeme Carling: When you went to Abu Dhabi, did you go to Ferrari World?

1:45:56 Brian Rose: They didn’t want to go to Ferrari World, so we went to Warner Brothers, which they like. I think they’re still on the young side to be idolizing Ferraris, but it was given on the option. I couldn’t get them to Sea World either, even though the original Sea World is where I’m from in San Diego.

1:46:10 Graeme Carling: And they’ve been to that one, so maybe they’ve already seen it.

1:46:14 Brian Rose: No, they’ve seen it. But Disney, when Disneyland comes, we’re going. So, yeah, that’s an amazing area. I found Abu Dhabi very quiet.

1:46:21 I definitely need to be in Dubai. But it’s great to have Abu Dhabi there, and it’s the capital, and it’s an essential part of this region. But I am definitely a Dubai person. Yeah, good. Yeah.

1:46:36 Graeme Carling: Okay. O’Brien has been an absolute pleasure. Finally, this is how stars align. It took us 12 years. What took you so long?

1:46:44 Brian Rose: I’ve been here on YouTube, right? No, I’m so glad we made this happen. I had no idea you were there at the time for Kiyosaki. Yeah, I hope you watched some of my videos that helped you get ready for Pena at the castle. Yeah, he speaks so fondly of you two.

1:47:00 So, thank you for reaching out, and it’s great to find some people that love this city as well. So, my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much.