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Dan Peña - LIVE At The Ritz: Part 1 of 3

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May 24, 2015

Dan Peña Live at The Ritz

In 2015 London Real held its first live event: an intimate day with Dan Peña at The Ritz in London, with London Real Academy members in the audience. Part 1 opens with Brian Rose explaining how he ignored Dan’s emails from Guthrie Castle for two months, why Dan’s line “that takes money, not Zen” stayed with him, and what changed after he went to Dan’s castle seminar.

Dan then takes the stage for around 90 minutes. People only change for two reasons, he tells the room, “inspiration and desperation”. He covers his childhood and army service, turning $820 into $450 million with Great Western Resources, the mentors and dream team behind his Quantum Leap Advantage (QLA) method, and the one word he hears from people at the end of their lives: “regrets”.

The day continues in Part 2 and Part 3. For Dan’s full story, watch the London Real film The $50 Billion Man.

“Money we can always make back, time you can’t.”

In short: Dan Peña, the Scottish-castle high performance coach Brian Rose calls his mentor, headlines London Real’s first live event at The Ritz in London in 2015. This is Part 1 of 3: Brian’s opening talk, then Dan’s keynote on failure, focus, mentors, regrets and building wealth fast.

Brian opens the day by explaining how Dan Peña first reached him by email from Guthrie Castle, why he ignored it for two months, and how the “money, not Zen” argument from their first episode eventually led him to the castle seminar. He describes what changed afterwards and why he thinks Dan is “congruent”: the man on stage is the same man in private.

Dan then takes the stage with his usual blunt, profane style, telling the room that most of them will fail, that personal development is a crowded business, and that the only thing that counts is action. The talk is aimed at a hand-picked audience of London Real viewers, and it is not for the easily offended.

Key takeaways

Failure and action beat theory. Dan tells the room there is no secret sauce and that reading and seminars are no substitute for doing.
Focus is the common answer. He recalls Bill Gates and Warren Buffett each giving one word when asked what drives success: focus.
Wealth gives you choices. Dan argues that you should create wealth first and then make a difference, rather than the other way round.
Mentors and a dream team. He credits three mentors and a network of people he could call on for his biggest deals, and says the QLA model is built on the same idea.
Regrets are what people talk about at the end. Dan says the people he has given eulogies for talk about what they did not do, not the games or parties they missed.
Two bank accounts. He says the emotional bank account, meaning self-esteem and self-worth, comes before the financial one.
Speed. Dan claims the mentor programme can compress a generation of wealth-building into three to seven years.

Brian Rose on meeting Dan Peña

Brian tells the story of resisting Dan’s invitations, being pulled into a dinner at the Ritz, and finally booking the castle seminar. He compares the decision to other uncomfortable experiences he knew he should go through, and says the result was a change in how he dresses, works and thinks about business.

His two takeaways are that Dan is the same person in every setting and that Dan hates to see wasted potential. He also sets out the day’s plan: Dan’s morning keynote, a working lunch with audience questions, a case study of Brian, and two of Dan’s mentees, Brian Mustard and Robert Mayer, talking about their progress.

No secret sauce: Dan Peña on failure and self-esteem

Dan opens with a story about Donald Trump telling a large audience in Australia that there is no secret sauce, and uses it to say that most people in the room will not act on what they hear. He says he does not look or sound like other coaches, and that the “success business” mostly sells talk.

He argues that political correctness comes from a lack of self-esteem, that someone who sees the world the same way at 50 as at 20 has wasted thirty years, and that people with twenty years of experience often have one year repeated twenty times. He cites a new Gallup poll on how few employees are engaged at work to back up his line about quiet lives of desperation.

Mentors, regrets and the dream team

Dan describes his early life: expelled from school several times, volunteering for the draft during the Vietnam War, and an alpha-male father who shaped him. He tells how a friend suggested he coach, and how he reverse-engineered his own career into the QLA method. He also tells a story, from a friend named Mary, about regrets being what stays with people at the end, and says it matches what he has heard giving eulogies for 25 years.

He names his three mentors, including Costa Gratsos, a former Onassis executive, and explains the dream team idea with a lunch in New York with Governor Hugh Carey that helped a deal along. He says world-class athletes have coaches, so business people should have mentors.

Commitment, Great Western and the two bank accounts

On commitment, Dan describes giving a webinar after injuring himself and getting a dentist appointment first, and recalls a reunion with his father at Le Havre. He talks about floating Great Western Resources on his 39th birthday in August 1984 and the reaction in the City.

He closes the session by saying the emotional bank account drives the financial one, that his father told an awards audience he was successful “in spite of me”, and that he still coaches because he gets satisfaction from seeing students succeed. He notes that the post-castle mentor programme is free for a year and promises results in three to seven years, which is his own claim.

Who is Dan Peña?

Dan Peña is an American-born business mentor and speaker based at Guthrie Castle in Scotland. Brian Rose calls him the “$50 billion man”, a figure Dan uses for the equity he says his mentoring has created. He says he has been a high performance coach for 22 years, floated Great Western Resources in London in 1984, and runs the QLA mentoring programme. He was close to 70 when this event was recorded.

Frequently asked questions

What is Dan Peña's London Real event at the Ritz?

It was London Real's first live event, an intimate one-day session with Dan Peña at The Ritz in London in 2015. This page is Part 1 of 3.

What does Dan Peña say about failure?

He says almost everyone in the room will fail and that there is no secret sauce, only action and focus.

What is the QLA?

QLA is the name of Dan Peña's mentoring method and seminar, which Brian Rose attended at Guthrie Castle before this event.

What are the two bank accounts Dan Peña talks about?

He says people have an emotional bank account, meaning self-esteem and self-worth, and a financial one, and that the first drives the second.

What did Dan Peña say about regrets?

He said that in the eulogies he has given, people talk about what they did not do and not about missed matches or parties.

Dan Peña's website

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Full transcript: Dan Peña LIVE At The Ritz, Part 1

0:16 Brian Rose: Okay, good morning, everybody. Thank you all for coming. I know a lot of the faces have met a lot of you before. This is a historic London Real event. It’s our inaugural live occasion, an intimate day with Dan Peña live at the Ritz. And in a few minutes, I’m gonna bring in my mentor, the $50 billion man, Mr. Dan Peña.

0:47 Brian Rose: But before that, I was just outside thinking that about four years ago, when I walked out of my career in banking in the city of London, just about two miles there, this is pretty much the last thing I ever thought I would be doing. But I just kind of went with my gut and I followed my dreams and my passions. And here I am. I know a lot of you are probably struggling with where to go next in your life and just trying to find out what decisions to make.

1:20 Brian Rose: And I was there because at the time I had what looked like everything. I had the successful career, I had the money, but something just didn’t feel right. I wasn’t taking risks. I wasn’t thinking outside the box. I wasn’t just getting uncomfortable and I wasn’t creating anything. And so something had to change. And so I just made that change and some other things happened. And so I hope you’re all kind of thinking today what changes you want to make.

1:54 Brian Rose: And if there’s anyone that can help you with that come to Jesus moment, I believe it’s Dan Peña because he helped me have mine. And I know a lot of you have kind of watched our story. I guess it’s a bit of a bromance now that I think of it. That just came to me now. With Dan, I don’t know if you know the story, but about a year ago I received an email from Guthrie Castle, which might sound strange to get an email from a castle, but I get a lot of strange emails.

2:27 Brian Rose: I get emails from people who know how to levitate. I get emails from people who want me to smoke things with them. So this wasn’t so strange. And they wanted to talk about Dan Peña. And I’d actually heard of Dan before because he was mentioned in another episode because he had mentored a gentleman by the name of Peter Sage. Has anyone seen that show with Peter? Yeah, it was a really powerful show and Peter and I had a really good connection and Peter has some great messages. So I had heard of Dan, but when the castle broke down everything about Dan to $50 billion and the castle in Scotland and the three-piece suits, quite honestly, I wasn’t impressed.

3:09 Brian Rose: And I really didn’t want anything to do with him. And so I avoided his emails and I avoided his calls. And one thing for sure, Dan doesn’t like to be ignored. And I remember asking him later after the show, I said, Dan, you are really persistent and you’re really stuck with me. You must have taken two months until I said yes. And he said, Brian, he’s like, that’s the way I do things. I decide on something and then I go and do it. I was like, okay, that makes sense.

3:39 Brian Rose: And I think my problem was is that when I went running away from the banking worlds, I ran away from capitalism and wealth creation and money. And I ran the other direction, which was probably towards spirituality. And in my mind, one didn’t exist without the other. And I don’t know if some of you have struggled with this. Maybe you all have at some point in your life if one is with the other. And I think that’s why I rejected Dan because I was like, ah, that’s what reminded me of myself that I didn’t like about myself.

4:11 Brian Rose: And so I think that was my reason, but he was very persistent. And so finally they kept asking and I said, all right, just come on the **** show. So Dan showed up and we had this interesting conversation. I don’t know if you remember about halfway through, Dan starts getting in my face a little bit and he starts getting in my business. And he said, okay, Brian, so is this the plan? Is this what you’re doing this show? Okay, is that, he’s kind of saying, is that all you got?

4:42 Brian Rose: And I pretended not to bother me. I kind of gave a laugh, but it did bother me. And there was a very famous line in that show when Dan says, Brian, if you wanna build a future, if you wanna take care of your family, if you wanna give back to the community, that takes money, not Zen. And that’s a famous line that’s rung in my head for the time ever since and it made the highlight reel.

5:16 Brian Rose: And it’s probably quintessential Dan. And you could see his frustration with me and who he calls the London Realers, who he groups everyone into, this kind of person he thinks it is. And after the show, I remember standing outside with Dan on the pavement and he stood there in front of me where we’re getting him a taxi and he stood there in front of me like this. And he said, Brian, I said, yeah, Dan. And he said, I changed people’s lives. And he said, I’m gonna change your life. And I thought, the old man is off his **** rocker.

5:53 Brian Rose: But I said goodbye to him and about a week later, the episode debuted and it was a hit. And the numbers don’t lie, YouTube always tells you right away, they say who’s hot and who’s not and everybody loved Dan. And I had to give him that. I said during the show, I said, the London Realers are gonna hate you or love you and the jury was out. And so I stayed in touch with Dan, we traded a few emails in all red caps in bold. I was gonna put a slide up here, but I left the slides for Dan, especially the 80s looking slides for Dan.

6:25 Brian Rose: But I stayed in touch with Dan and he kept emailing me back and forth. And finally, in August of last year, he invited me to dinner at the Ritz, of course, right across the hallway. And it was a Sunday night and he made me put on a suit and tie. And I was pissed. I hadn’t worn a suit and tie in five years and I was like, oh Jesus. But I went ahead and did it and I’m making you all pay for that pain today.

6:55 Brian Rose: But I went to dinner with Dan and he was a little abrasive at first and my girlfriend was with me and she’s like, who is this guy? And I was like, all right. I said, expect a little bit of that. And about halfway through the meal, he said, Brian, you need to come to the castle seminar. I really want you to come. And I thought about it and I said, I’ll think about it. And I gave it a few weeks and just finally part of me said yes. But I was really struggling with that decision and I think part of me knew it was gonna be painful. And I know I likened this a little bit to some of my experiences in the past with things like ayahuasca.

7:27 Brian Rose: I knew I had to do it, but it was not gonna be fun. And so I decided to go, but even up until a week before I went, I was thinking of excuses. Knowing full well Dan was gonna give me an earful or say I was a **** or all that stuff. But even a few days before, part of my brain was thinking, okay, I’ve got this crisis at home. I’ve got to do this episode. And now I’m learning my subconscious. That’s my way of, it’s like almost your ego know it’s gonna be destroyed and it’s trying to protect itself a bit.

7:57 Brian Rose: And so luckily I pushed through but I had my bags packed and ready to like go on a moment’s notice. I was ready Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or that seminar, Brian was there, Robert was there to leave if Dan disrespected me. That’s what I was ready for. So, but I made it there. But right when I walked in the door I just felt differently about the whole situation. And the rest is pretty much history. You’ve probably seen the videos I did before and after the castle. I act different, I’m different. My dad watched us and he said, both of you are different in that interview after the castle.

8:28 Brian Rose: But in the first one, I looked kind of like a punk kid. I still have my goatee. And afterwards, I don’t know, I seem different. And since I came back, I act different. You’ve probably seen I’m a lot more open. I’m a bit more proactive about my business. I dress different. This isn’t part of the Dan Peña dress code. It’s not part of the QLA. It’s just when I got back, quite honestly I couldn’t physically put my old clothes on. If you know, I used to wear the combat trousers and the boots and all that.

8:59 Brian Rose: And I just can’t put them on anymore. It’s strange. So I don’t know what really happened to me up there, but something did. It’s funny, my 11 year old daughter came up to me about a month afterwards and she just walked up to me and she was kind of concerned and she put her hand on me and she said, Brian, what did that $50 billion man do to you? From the mouths of babes, right? So if she can see it. But if I have to put my finger on two things that I noticed up there about Dan, it’s this.

9:32 Brian Rose: And like I said, a lot of it I think just happened subconsciously or just by inspiration. But those two things were this. Dan Peña in my mind is 100% absolutely and completely congruent. As in the Dan you see is the Dan he really is. And the Dan from the front is the Dan from behind. The Dan in the three piece suits is the same Dan you see when he’s in casual clothes. And everything that he says he is, he is. And I was up there waiting for the cardboard castle and I was waiting for all these little things but there was nothing incongruent.

10:09 Brian Rose: You know, the nine hole golf courses, the greens are cut this tight even though no one plays golf on it. And just all the little things, I was just like, okay, wow, the game is tight and everything is run really well. And everything that Dan says is true. Either that or they’re the best **** stories I’ve ever heard. So either way, it’s just powerful being around him. And the only other thing that I can think about that really hit me and it hit me from the first day is that Dan actually gives a **** about your success.

10:44 Brian Rose: And I’ve gone back and forth with him about this and he says he’s not Mother Teresa and that he doesn’t give a ****. And maybe he doesn’t, maybe it’s just because he wants to put all of our numbers on the board because he’s now the $50 billion man because that’s the amount of equity and value that he’s created through his mentoring programs. And he wants it to be a hundred or to be a trillion. And maybe that’s true. And maybe that’s good reason enough. But part of me thinks there’s something else to it. I think that he just hates to see wasted potential.

11:16 Brian Rose: I just think it bothers him. He’s a military guy, ex-military guy. And I think that’s what he saw in me in that studio. I just think he’s like, he’s always says to me, he’s like, Brian, I see so much potential in all of you. And I think it just pisses him off. So those are my takeaways from Dan. And so all of you are here today. This was an event that we wanted to put on. It was sold out in about six hours. It’s been oversubscribed about five times or people emailing this week that wanted to be on it.

11:47 Brian Rose: But Dan and I chose all of you to be here because we saw potential in all of you. You’re not here because you’re the richest or because you’re the best business people, but seems like you want to make some changes and you have some positive aspects. And I kind of feel the energy in the room already. And I always said, Dan Peña is great on London Real. And I think we’ve done a great job of trying to get Dan portrayed if you’re going to do it on video. But I always say he has to be experienced in 3D.

12:18 Brian Rose: You really have to feel Dan’s energy and have him really get up in your face and feel what he’s about. Because in my opinion, they just don’t make him like Dan Peña anymore. And they never will again. So part of me feels like I’m just with a piece of living history that’s just not gonna be here anymore. And so I just feel like I want to spend time and be around him and see what I can learn.

12:46 Brian Rose: The bad news is today is that this isn’t gonna be a lot of fun. This is a time to get uncomfortable. And this is the time to really look down inside and think about those big changes that you have to make. Because I would guess that for 99% of you, the problems you’re having are not about your business. They don’t lie in the markets. It’s not the economy. It’s not your friends or your business partners or your wives or your girlfriends. It’s most likely you.

13:18 Brian Rose: It’s in your head. And I was there too. Maybe it’s a fear of success or a fear of failure or not taking enough risks. Or maybe you’re too busy tinkering in your business, working on your business and not in your business. There are a lot of different pieces. But it’s really gonna come from inside of you. So I would recommend that you just try to take your ego and check it at the door. It’s gonna wanna fight. I know, which is why I tried to avoid going to Scotland that time.

13:48 Brian Rose: But for the next four hours, eight hours, if you could just try to check it at the door and just try to open your mind to some of the ideas in here and just see what you think. It’s funny. Dan always says that on the third day of the seminar, people come up to him and they’re like, Dan, I love what you’re saying. But when are you gonna talk about the **** money? And Dan always laughs, because that comes on the fourth day. Because most of our problems don’t have to do with the business. It has to do with things inside of ourselves.

14:20 Brian Rose: And so that’s something I would like you to try to think about today when all this happens. So in a few minutes, I’m gonna bring out Dan, the man himself, just a few schedule ideas and a few details. Just no laptops and mobiles in this room. If you can go to airplane mode, just for the speakers and things like that. I’m gonna bring Dan out soon. He’s gonna have you for the morning. We’ll have a short coffee break at 11 o’clock, then we’ll go through to lunch at 12.45. It’s a working lunch, so we’re gonna bring the food out here and I’ll be up here with Dan during the lunch and I’m gonna field a lot of the questions that you submitted.

14:56 Brian Rose: So I’m gonna be asking him to answer your specific questions. And that’ll go on for an hour. It’d be much more casual. We’ll be having lunch and we can talk more freely. And then at two o’clock, it’s time for me to get uncomfortable. I’m gonna come up here with Dan and we’re gonna do a little case study on Brian Rose. And we’re gonna break down what I was doing or wasn’t doing, what happened to me at the castle, what I’ve been doing since I got back, what I’m doing right and I’m waiting to hear what I’ve been doing wrong. So I think Dan’s gonna be not so nice to me.

15:28 Brian Rose: So I’ll be joining you in the uncomfortableness and it’ll be interesting for you all to see what goes on, all the details if you wanna know about the weekly calls and the monthly things. But really be interesting for you to see what I’m learning and what I’m figuring out differently. After that, we’re really lucky to have two of the gentlemen that were on my course in Scotland that decided to come today, fly from Canada, from Germany and that’s Brian Mustard and Robert Mayer who’s here with his 15 year old son, Christoph. Thank you so much for being here.

15:59 Brian Rose: And we’re actually gonna dive into their progress as well. They have a little bit more of a classic Dan Peña QLA model because they’re building boards and making acquisitions with dream teams with me. I kind of have this media platform that I’m making better and it’d be great to drill down and find out as well why Brian went there before, after and so they’re gonna be really open about their thoughts. So we’ve got that, after that we’ll have a quick break and then we’re gonna open it up to questions from all of you. You can ask us anything you want. Dan, myself, these other two gentlemen and we’ll do that for an hour and then Dan will be back up here and he’s gonna bring it all home for the last hour and explain to you why it’s time to just **** do it.

16:41 Brian Rose: And then we’ll be done. We’re gonna go across the room for a well-deserved drink for about an hour in the reception. I might grab a few of you for some testimonials on video to let us know what you thought of the day and then we’ll have, for those of you that subscribe for that, we’re having a private dinner with Dan and we’ve got another restaurant nearby that Beth can direct you to with a whole nother table that you can have dinner at. We’re gonna have a Facebook group opening or as Dan says, a face **** group opening up tomorrow with everybody’s contacts so you’ll be in contact with everyone.

17:12 Brian Rose: If I ask myself what’s gonna be a good day, it’s not gonna be if you come up to me at the end of the day and say that was a lot of fun or that was great, Brian. What’s really gonna make me happy is if I get that email from you in three months or six months or nine months and you’d say, I got rid of this business partner or I made this acquisition or I shut down this **** business or I made some big changes. So that’s really the way I’m thinking about this, really long-term. So I look forward to getting those emails from you. And that’s it, I think our staff is all around. If you wanna grab anyone that’s Beth back there, she’s running the event.

17:45 Brian Rose: My better half, Marianna’s here as well. If you need anything, there’s other people around. So just ask them for anything. If you want drinks or anything else, just ask. We’re here at your service. And there you go. So here we go. Enjoy your journey. And now I introduce you to my mentor, the $50 billion man, Mr. Dan Peña.

18:19 Dan Peña: Thank you very much, Brian. You’re welcome. Good morning. Most of you shouldn’t be here. And we don’t give you your **** money back. You’re gonna find out after the, well, some of you already know. Donald Trump, two, three years ago, made a speech in, legend has it, in Australia.

18:49 Dan Peña: Took two years to organize, yada yada, first class tickets, even though he’s got his own plane. As legend or myth has it, I’ll only talk if I think the audience is getting it, et cetera, et cetera. He made all these deals. You’d think it was Cameron debating what’s his face. That never happened. He gets up in front of the audience, 3,000 people in the audience. And when he got behind the podium, all of a sudden from a lot of noise, you could hear a pin drop.

19:22 Dan Peña: And he walked around the podium. He got in front, the first row, and he said, you’re all expecting me to give you the answer where you find the holy grail. What’s the secret **** sauce? There is no **** secret sauce. And I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, almost every single person in this **** room is gonna fail. Not fail once and fail fast and then do it again.

19:52 Dan Peña: Just **** fail! Because there’s a **** reason why you paid X Australian dollars to come and hear me talk. And he turned around and left. Now for the smart people that were in that room, which I had a couple mentees in the room, they understood what he said. For all the other **** in the room, they didn’t understand.

20:25 Dan Peña: Because the personal development and the success business or whatever, I don’t even know what a **** life coach is. A life coach is a guy that has maybe one or two degrees, it’s out of work. I don’t know what a life coach does. But as Ted Nicholas told me in 1993, Ted Nicholas, who’s still alive, God rest his soul, who’s the only other guy at that time, a high performance coach, and I invented the word high performance coach, or the phrase, he said, Dan, it’s a billion dollar business, one dollar going around to a billion **** people.

21:01 Dan Peña: As you would say, it’s mental masturbation. And if you get anything out of this next nine, 10 hours, and I hope you do, but most of you won’t, because hope springs eternal, it’s that quit wasting your **** time. Because it’s not in you.

21:25 Dan Peña: And if you want to get up and leave now, we’re not giving you your money back, irrespective of whatever **** Brian told you. Or might have told you. Or we’ll tell you at the break. It’s called pay price to action. I don’t look like the rest of the guys. I certainly **** don’t sound like the rest of the guys. And I’ll be 70 in a couple months. I will have the same intensity and high energy, the last minute that I close this thing down at 10 o’clock, for those of you that are having dinner with me, that I have now.

21:55 Dan Peña: I’ve been up since 20 to **** five, practicing. And I could give this **** in a coma. I could give this **** in my grave. And people say, why do you talk that way, Dan? Because this is the **** way we talk. And the reason you’ve never heard anybody like this, is because you’ve never been around a high-performance person in your **** life.

22:21 Dan Peña: You’re just jerking yourself off. By the way, how many non-English speaking people do we have in the audience? No, the pretend to speak English, you really don’t. You’re staying? Okay, that’s too **** bad. You shouldn’t have come. But normally what we do is, Robert, Bavarian Bob as he’s called, we sit him next to the stupid Germans. How many of these non-English speaking people are German?

22:52 Dan Peña: No, okay, well you two are, but you’re sitting next to your son. By the way, this is his son that just turned 15, when? How long ago did you have your birthday? For, to me he’s 14. And we got somebody I’m gonna introduce a little later, who’s 16, and you’ll see when I go to a couple of these slides. By the way, for an MIT engineer, this **** thing’s already 25 minutes late. And we’re gonna do three case studies today. Not like the **** B schools at Wharton or Princeton or whatever, the London School of Economics, but there’s three people in this audience that I personally have trained and still training.

23:32 Dan Peña: One’s from Canada, one’s Brian QLA Rose, as I call him now, and one’s Robert from Passau, Germany. We affectionately call him Bavarian Bob. Now, raise your hands, Brian Mustard, Robert, okay.

23:51 Dan Peña: We put him up, spread him out, so hopefully they won’t be too inundated. But it’s an important point to make here. Brian Mustard went to the Castle Seminar, and I’m not here to sell you ****. I’m here as a favor to Brian QLA Rose, because I don’t give a ****. I don’t give a **** if you drop dead in your **** chair today. And we’ve had people piss their pants, **** their pants, and pass out hearing me talk. Pass **** out, fall over their **** chair onto the ground.

24:26 Dan Peña: And the guy that **** his pants, or **** himself as the English would say, was a partner in one of the big four accounting firms. We have any accountants in the room. Nobody brave enough to tell me, okay. He **** himself. My youngest son says, no **** way, dad. Does the **** himself mean the same thing as **** himself? I said, yes, he **** **** himself. And he wrote me on big four stationery. I didn’t know I was still **** alive till I **** myself.

25:01 Dan Peña: And I used to use it in the seminars, and the other accountants, professionals, said, Dan, you’re giving us a bad name. Can you take that **** slide, and just tell the story like I’m doing now. But otherwise, it’d be right up there. And he signed the ****. And he’s still here in the city, and he’s a senior partner in one of the big four.

25:26 Dan Peña: The person that passed out was a psychiatrist. She flopped over and hit her head on the **** back wall, cut her head open. I said, leave her there. **** her, ****.

25:49 Dan Peña: [Imitates a Glaswegian accent] **** youse, you ****. That’s how they talk in Glasgow. And then they give you a Glaswegian kiss, which is a headbutt. Anybody hear from Glasgow? Anybody hear from Scotland? There’s a reason why Andrew Carnegie in his infinite **** wisdom left Scotland when he was 12 years old. My idol of all time is Andrew Carnegie.

26:19 Dan Peña: Not Steve Jobs, who I knew, and have a lot of respect for, God rest his soul. But dollar for dollar, pound for pound, Andrew Carnegie was the greatest entrepreneur that ever was, and never will be, probably. His fortune measured in today’s dollars would be in the trillions, in the **** trillions. Now, I came late to this game, as Sir Richard would say, if you aren’t making a difference in other people’s lives, you shouldn’t be in the business, it’s that simple.

26:51 Dan Peña: I don’t believe that. But what I do believe is that unless you make wealth, you have fewer choices. I have a lot of choices, more than most people in this room, almost everybody in this room, because I’ve created wealth. You are making the mistake, you’re trying to make a difference first, because that’s politically correct. I believe, with all my heart, and I just told Brian, this is an announcement, an exclusive, that political correctness is a manifestation of lack of **** self-esteem, because you’re all ****.

27:33 Dan Peña: I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but I mean, a **** not one of them. I’m gonna say that again, because I can just see it’s glossing over like you’re **** dead, or you’ve been doing ayahuasca, and I’ll get around to drugs later. Political correctness is nothing more than a manifestation of a lack of **** self-esteem, because you **** all want everybody to love you. I don’t want anybody to love me. I don’t want anybody to even **** like me. Do you think Donald Trump gives a **** what you think of him?

28:05 Dan Peña: Do you think Steve Jobs, when he was alive, gave a ****? Do you think Mark Zuckerberg gives a ****? Only you weak **** give a ****. The man who views the world at 50, the same as he did at 20, has wasted 30 years. Muhammad Ali. Some of you have got five years experience, 10 years experience, 20 years experience, but you’ve got 20 years times one. You’ve been doing the same **** thing for 20 years, so you’ve only got one year experience.

28:38 Dan Peña: I was up at 20 to five practicing. Again, I could give this **** in a coma, because I’m a professional. You expect to have macro results, micromanaging your businesses. I’m gonna say it again. You’re expecting macro results through micromanagement.

29:05 Dan Peña: Loss of life is mourned, but only if the life was wasted. Spock, I can’t do that thing, but anyway. Well, your lives have all been wasted. If you went home tonight and you ate a gun, nobody’s gonna give a ****. In the cosmos of time, there’s not a **** in this room that’s more than a fart in the wind. I’m gonna say it again. In the cosmos of time, there’s not a **** in this room that’s more than a fart in the wind, including Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, et cetera.

29:42 Dan Peña: There’s no one, there’s no I in team, but there’s definitely a U in ****. I’ve met about 15, 16 people here. My schedule’s posted. I normally stay at the Ritz. In fact, I always stay at the Ritz. So in the last two days, I’ve talked to one of these, devotees, a few mentees, and the first guy I met with a couple of days ago, a Asian descent but a Londoner, he’s crying.

30:16 Dan Peña: I’ll make somebody cry here today. And I asked him the question, do you think, first of all, how old are your children? He said six and eight or six and nine. I said, do you think your children are proud of you? He said, I hope so. As soon as he said, I hope so. If your kids aren’t proud of you at six and eight, you’re ****. And if you say you hope so, you’re really, you’re double ****. And I said, do you think your kids think you’re a ****?

30:48 Dan Peña: He says, I don’t know. Look at you. Tears start rolling on his cheeks, like this. Look at you. Look at you! Forget looking at **** him.

31:12 Dan Peña: This is a new Gallup poll. Just came out three days ago. You **** fall into almost all the categories. Worldwide only 13% of employees are engaged at work, meaning they like what they do. That’s one in eight. Majority of American workers are not engaged in their jobs. 70% of Americans are emotionally disconnected and their definition of emotionally disconnected and not engaged is different. I’m not gonna explain it so you can read the poll. 19% in the US and 25% in the UK are disengaged.

31:44 Dan Peña: One in four are disengaged, meaning they hate their jobs. Unhappy employees outnumber happy ones two to one worldwide. Most workers hate their jobs and have checked out. Checked out. The worst countries in the world are Asia. Six, seven, eight percent, Thailand, Manila, and I believe it’s, I can’t remember the third country. Because, and this just reinforces what I’ve said for 22 years, and my 22nd anniversary for being a high performance coach next month, or excuse me, May 22nd, is that most people are living in quiet lives of desperation.

32:24 Dan Peña: Most people are living in quiet lives of desperation. Otherwise you wouldn’t **** be here. And you’re the winners of the **** contest. Which is a **** joke. I told Brian, I said, what are you smoking? Well, which is more appropriate for him. What are you **** smoking? These are the winners. You all have a different reason. You all got a different story, and the truth is you all got a **** different excuse.

32:59 Dan Peña: I have a drill the first night that people come up to the castle, and I said, okay, how many of you have been one of the following? Physically abused, mentally abused, or emotionally abused, bullied, and I go through this litany of ****. And I said, how many, raise your hands. Every swinging dick or pair of tits that was in the room kept their hand up except for one guy. One guy. And I knew he was full of ****, and I walked right up to him, and I told him he was full of ****.

33:32 Dan Peña: And then, during the private time at the seminar, he sobbed. He sobbed, telling me his litany of **** that had happened to him growing up. But he couldn’t admit it, even for a microsecond in front of the group. We didn’t ask you to give examples, but some of you, we can’t **** shut you up. And by the way, you’re not here to **** bond. I saw you out there, I mean, it made me sick. And if I see anybody passing a **** business card or that, I’ll **** slap ya.

34:06 Dan Peña: That’s why you are the **** where you are now. Losers! Now, we got one guy who’s got potential in here. And he wrote me this little email a while back. It says, Vinica, who’s my longtime assistant. I’d like to share with Mr. Peña that after watching his first London Real episode, he really inspired me. I was reassured to know his thought of living rich before you are rich. Is it vital to condition your brain to help you along the way?

34:39 Dan Peña: After a few months, I called Rolls-Royce Mayfair, I believe that’s Barclay’s Rolls, and had a tour of all the models. I did exactly like Mr. Peña, like Dan Dan. Now I have the smell, the feeling, the images locked in my mind to visit and motivate me. This was a big thing to a 16-year-old. But my comfort zone has been raised. Thanks, Dan, I’ll see you at the QLA once I’m 19 or 20. He also wrote me a bunch of other emails.

35:11 Dan Peña: Should I wait till I’m 19 or 20? Okay. Now, this is Barclay’s Rolls, Mayfair. And there he is sitting. Would you please come up?

35:27 Dan Peña: Now, what were you **** doing when you were 16? Just have a seat there, please. What were you doing? You were jacking off. That’s what you were doing.

35:42 Dan Peña: In 22 years of coaching, less than that many people have done smell the leather. That’s what I say, go to the Rolls and smell the leather. That many, and I’ve touched a couple million, less than five **** have gone to smell the leather.

36:05 Dan Peña: Less than five, because that’s what I did. And I was 25, 26 when I did it. And the first car, not the first car I had, but I’ve been driving Rollses, I had a Silver Cloud. It was used since 1976. I was, no, excuse me, 1972, I was 26 years old, before my 26th birthday.

36:35 Dan Peña: And I’m still driving Bentley’s and Rollses since then. Now, what if I hadn’t gone to the Rolls dealership? Now, some of you, all of you are here for maybe one or two exceptions, because you’ve outgrown your vision. You may say that you haven’t completed your vision, but I’m here to tell you, you’ve outgrown your vision. And you’ve run out of things that you can do. Because people only make change for two reasons, guys. Inspiration and desperation. And I don’t see any inspired **** in this room.

37:06 Dan Peña: You’re desperate. I’ve read your essays. Now, what if I hadn’t smelled the leather? And what if he hadn’t gone to the Rolls dealer? This is real. I don’t make this **** up.

37:29 Dan Peña: He’s got a chance to be a high performance person. And he’s had a tough, not as tough as I did, but his parents were well off and then they lost their money, right? And then the sheriffs were knocking on your door, taking furniture away and **** like that. Okay, I asked them to be here because I wanted you to see what it is to be a potentially high performance person in the **** flesh, in the **** flesh. And that’s why young Christoph has a chance, even though he’s got his dad as a dad, he’s here and he just turned 15.

38:08 Dan Peña: Now, I actually am much, much better with young kids as we’ll exhibit another one of my phenoms. He came to me when he was 17. He’s now 19. He wanted to drop out of high school, just like you. And I convinced him to stay. He gave up a seat, as I understand it, to Oxford. Which are hard to get, I think. I don’t know. Those kind of schools I didn’t bother to apply to.

38:38 Dan Peña: And I don’t want to embarrass anybody to ask how many Oxbridge **** we got in here because I don’t know why you’re a loser. I’m not gonna do that. In the castle, I do do that. He’s now making 40, 50 grand a month. He’s 19 years old. Most of you would sign a pact with a devil to make 50 grand a month. Today, this **** Michael Second!

39:07 Dan Peña: He supports his mother, his twin brothers, and his dad. He lives in Lithuania. And they grow up to be people like Klaus Kleinfeld on the left, with the premier of China, another one of my mentees, who came to me as a middle manager. Seven years later, he was appointed CEO of Siemens. 400,000 employees, 100 billion in revenue.

39:38 Dan Peña: There he is again, at the World Economic Forum, which is a waste of time. You’ve read about Mikey the Pizza Boy, the midget, the good-looking blonde who came to me with pizza under his **** fingernails, and said, Dan, I want to be Steven Spielberg. I said, what the ****? You want to be who? He’s about this tall. He’s from Albania. So I told him what to do. I’m not gonna go through the whole story.

40:11 Dan Peña: If you can read this, highest grossing film. He had his first premiere of his big movie a year ago, March, a year ago, November, and he just sent me an email last night sitting with Robert Duvall, the actor, who he’s directing in a movie, who he’s directing in a **** movie, Mikey the Pizza Boy. He couldn’t even spell **** pizza. But he did what I told him to do, and when we get to the case studies here, and we talk about what Brian should be doing now, and what Robert should be doing, and what Brian the Mustard should be doing, the people that actually do and follow, instead of a 12-step program like AA, mine’s a seven-step program.

40:59 Dan Peña: But there’s two big differences between a 12-stepper and my seven-stepper. You gotta do my seven steps. We don’t have an Al-Anon to send your wife to. You either make it or you **** don’t make it. I’m not gonna read this, but the guy that couldn’t be here, who Robert convinced to come to my seminar five years ago, and a lot of you read books. I’m not gonna ask you about the books you read. It’s a waste of time. Better that you jerk off on your computer.

41:30 Dan Peña: This guy has never read a **** book other than mine. He’s never listened to a podcast. He’s never been to another seminar. He has never done one **** thing that all you stupid **** do. And it talks about the seven million deal and the five million, and he just did a 20 million and yada, yada, yada. But he understands focus. He was on the Austrian ski team, world-class skier until he blew his knee out. He understands commitment.

42:01 Dan Peña: Many years ago, 25 years ago, Bill Gates wanted to have Warren Buffett as his mentor. So being a good mom, his mom said, oh, I have a dinner party and I’ll invite Warren Buffett. This is all on the internet, on Google. And so Bill Gates comes in to have dinner with his mom and his family, and he sees Warren Buffett sitting at the goddamn table. He says, what the ****? And so they’re sitting around and there’s a lull in the dinner conversation, as there will be sometimes. Wasn’t enough alcohol yet. And so Mrs. Gates says, I’ll throw out a question.

42:33 Dan Peña: What do you, and there’s a lot of other successful people there, none of the successful is Mr. Buffett. What do you attribute to success to? Simultaneously, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett came back and replied, within a millionth of a second with one word answer, one **** word, focus.

42:54 Dan Peña: That may be the only thing I know how to do, but I **** know how to do it. Focus. I’ve looked at your little bios. Many of you should just turn the **** key on your business and walk away.

43:17 Dan Peña: So another couple, these kids started losing my **** at 13 and 14 years respectively. 13 and 14, they got my tapes on Torrent. That’s why, see, I give all my **** away, why? Because I don’t want you to use the excuse like they used to, your **** too expensive, Dan. So I give it to your ****. Now you don’t have that excuse. You still don’t **** do it. They got all the **** on Torrent. These two young guys, last year, now I want you to pay attention to these **** melon heads, they turned down $20 million for 5% of their company.

43:56 Dan Peña: They’re 21 and 22 years old. I’m gonna say it again. They turned down $20 **** million for 5% of their company. Now they’re 22 and 23.

44:11 Dan Peña: They got thrown out of their office building because they play my tapes so loud like rock music. What were you doing at 13? Jerking off, making your computer, the keyboard, sticky.

44:30 Dan Peña: Some people just need a sympathetic pat on the head with a **** hammer. The reason you’re here and wasting your money is because nobody’s called you a ****, nobody’s called you a worthless, and we need some technical assistance, which we’ve practiced now because of Brian being an engineer 38 times and it still didn’t work.

45:18 [Clip from the film Whiplash plays, partly inaudible.] … I want to be one of the greats. … Why would you let him get away with what he did to you? … There are no two words in the English language more harmful than “good job”.

46:08 Dan Peña: You don’t know how many people I’ve said. Dump your wife, dump your girlfriend, and he’s easy on them compared to what I am. I got so many emails and texts, et cetera. Dan, you gotta see Whip… ****, Whiplash. This is you. Now you’ve never met anybody like that. That’s all I know. I may be the first alpha **** male that you’ve ever met and I don’t want to be your friend.

46:41 Dan Peña: You want a friend, buy a **** dog. I don’t want to touch you. If I catch anybody doing texts or what do you call it, I’m gonna break your **** phone. So just before I forget, if people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all. Michelangelo. If you’re not winning the war of life, you’re **** losing, no matter what anybody else might tell you. Man up or suffer the consequences of the future regrets.

47:12 Dan Peña: Today, if you all die tonight, nobody’s gonna give a ****. You will not alter the world one **** iota. Hunger makes beasts of men and demons of beasts, and in that regard, because I was inspired by this young man, and because I was inspired and I got an idea, I was recently on Grant Cardone’s what the **** network, whatever it’s called, and he did the Confessions of an Asshole in his little baby rolls, and it gave me an idea, and I’m gonna make two big announcements later on.

47:46 Dan Peña: And so I decided, well ****, I haven’t done anything off the wall lately. I have, bungee jumped about a year and a half ago. So I started calling Jack Barclay to buy a new roll, a stretch, and my wife is telling me, you don’t need that, Dan, you don’t need that, and so I keep pressing it, pressing it, and then she says, Dan, I already bought you one. It’s a surprise, but now you **** it all up like everything else you do. Okay, so I haven’t even seen it yet, and they delivered a new Phantom stretch to my house a couple days ago.

48:17 Dan Peña: I need a Phantom stretch like I need a third testicle. 400,000 pounds, what do I… It’s not like I had bad looking cars, I got a DB9 and a Bentley, but because of him, and the idea of what I wanna do with the phantom, I went out and bought it. I have more choices, because I’ve created wealth. You have no choices, and I’m not demeaning the fact that a lot of you had to borrow money or stretch to get here, pun intended, stretch to get here because you didn’t have the money, but you already know that if you couldn’t afford to come here and you’re 30, 35, 40 years old, something ain’t right.

49:01 Dan Peña: You already know that, right? Are you so **** up beyond all recognition that you think where you are in life is correct? Okay, now, that’s it, how do you…

49:23 Dan Peña: Somebody turn it off for me. Now, this is the foundation for what we’re gonna talk about. I’m gonna talk about how I went from the barrio, being arrested five times, to castle man, briefly.

49:45 Dan Peña: And Brian’s got it all broken down into segments every two seconds or whatever the ****, and so we’re gonna try out of respect for him to follow it. You already look shocked. This morning in preparation, not that I need preparation, I looked at two of my, one of my podcasts and one of my DVDs, not DVDs, MP3s. One on how do you get the **** money, which is a podcast I did recently, it’s 46 minutes.

50:19 Dan Peña: I’m not gonna embarrass the group by asking how many **** listen to it, but if you listen to that, you shouldn’t be here. I also listened to another thing that I’ve had on my site five years, it’s called how to create deal flow. Watching how do you get the **** money and creating deal flow, you don’t need to be here, you wasted 1,000 quid. But on my site, those are the two least watched, has the least amount of traffic on my site.

50:52 Dan Peña: The two most important **** are the least watched and listened to. Why? Because guys, you’re only pretending to wanna be successful.

51:10 Dan Peña: You’re only pretending to wanna be a high performance person. I asked later on after lunch, I talk about the two reality shows that appear that they’re gonna happen now. But I was being interviewed by one of the production groups in Los Angeles. And she was the daughter of the minister of finance to Saudi Arabia. So she comes from a high performance family. She said, I had to leave Saudi Arabia because I’m never gonna amount to anything as a woman in Saudi Arabia.

51:45 Dan Peña: So I said, how, and I was talking about one particular hedge fund, when they look at deals and they look and they’re looking at allocation of funds and they ask you about your work habits, et cetera, I asked the two that were interviewing me. Actually, I was interviewing them. What do you think that Blackstone, for example, looks for the entrepreneur to be working per week, hours per week before they even considered his or her deal? I’ll ask you, doofuses, ****, what do you think? How many hours a week?

52:17 Dan Peña: Was that 80? 90, yeah. Okay, anybody else? She said 60. Minimum 100. Oh, they’re not interested in your **** deal because they know when the **** hits the fan, it’s you that they’re gonna have to depend on. I work 60 hours a week and I’m **** retired, **** around on cruises. I just came back from the orangutans in Malaysia.

52:50 Dan Peña: I didn’t know till day before yesterday, my seminar, that’s April 1, I didn’t know it was Easter week. I didn’t know that the little **** are gonna have to be away from their family on Good Friday and Easter and what’s the Jewish day? Passover, I didn’t even know. I laughed, I **** howled. **** them. I’ve scheduled seminars on **** Christmas Day and then had to be told by my staff because I schedule them when I have **** time.

53:26 Dan Peña: Now, I don’t give a **** when you have time. I didn’t even know it was Easter. I don’t give a **** either, but full house. There’s a lot of desperate **** out there. What do you think these guys, we have one gal, these guys and this one gal are gonna tell their families. What do you think? I’m gonna go get the **** **** beat out of me by some **** psychopath at his 15th century storybook home.

54:01 Dan Peña: So I got in a lot of trouble. That’s an understatement. Before I was 10 years old, I was expelled, not asked to go home or suspended. I was expelled from grammar school three times before I was 10. Once for breaking a guy’s arm in several places on purpose. Once for punching a guy in the face and those days they had real glass in the glasses and almost blinding him. And once because I was on the second floor, you would call it the first floor in Britain and I dropped an aquarium on my teacher, trying to kill him.

54:36 Dan Peña: By the grace of Allah, Buddha, God, whoever, if he hadn’t moved six inches to scratch his balls and the aquarium hit him in the shoulder instead of the head, I wouldn’t be standing here, Paulie. I was a bad ****. And having spent time with my cousin, God love him, who stayed in that neighborhood but my parents had the presence of mind to get me out. My dad was a cop on top of it, the presence of mind to get me out of that neighborhood.

55:08 Dan Peña: So, and I volunteered for the draft at the height of the Vietnam War, which is not a sign of intelligence, by any stretch of the imagination. But I knew I was either gonna go to the military or go to jail. Although I wasn’t given that choice, but I knew I could look down the road. And I volunteered to go to officer candidate school infantry, Fort Benning, Georgia.

55:38 Dan Peña: And the first high performance act I ever performed was being commissioned as second lieutenant in July of 67. And it’s the first high performance thing I ever did. And I realized I had to compete, et cetera. And the rest has been, the world has been my oyster. That was the first high performance. Many people in this room have never performed a high performance act. You show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. Most of your friends are losers. And that’s why you’re a loser.

56:10 Dan Peña: As Jim Rohn said, one of the few things I agree with him, God rest his soul too, I believe I’m pretty sure he’s dead, is that you’re nothing more than the average of the five people you spent most of time with. Now, who’s that normally? Your mother, normally. If your dad wasn’t working or if he was working just your mother, an older brother, a grandmother, you know, right? Those are the five people. None of which are trained to train high performance people. None of which. And you wonder why you are the way you are.

56:42 Dan Peña: Now, I was fortunate. My dad was an alpha male. The, had been to two wars. The Second World War and the Korean War. And my mother, God love her, God rest her soul, read a Reader’s Digest article about a book in 1946. I’m one year old. And it was this book. Up until 1995 when he died, it was the highest selling book in copies behind the Bible.

57:13 Dan Peña: 50 million about child rearing. And my mother followed this like a religion. Self esteem is built from zero to seven or eight years old. So I had a lot of self esteem. My mother did a lot of, one of the simple things is you never tell your kid no. Well, you’ve raised, for those of you who raised, it’s **** hard not to tell your kid no. But my mother never told me no. My dad always said no, but my mother never told me no. Okay, so that was one thing my mother did different.

57:44 Dan Peña: Now, you gotta remember, my mother swam across the **** Rio Grande River as an illegal alien to come from Mexico to the United States. So I chuckle when I see Obama and all these guys fighting about, trying to keep illegal aliens. And I’m fighting like hell to get a Mexican passport now. It’s not so easy. You’d think that I could get a Mexican **** passport. I can’t. And if I can’t, nobody can. Okay, that’s one thing that we did different, or that she did different.

58:15 Dan Peña: My dad was an alpha male. All his friends were alpha males. I am the first alpha male many of you have ever seen up close. And you wonder why you are the way you are. We had a very bright Chinese kid. The last seminar said, this is the alpha male that we always, never had and always wanted, the role model. I’m not trying to be your father, believe me. I don’t give a **** about you. I’m here selfishly, because I wanna, when I put dirt on me someday in 50, 80 years from now, I wanna be known as the Latter-day Saint of high performance coaching, the greatest high performance coach that ever lived.

58:52 Dan Peña: Much not dissimilar to what Napoleon Hill and his reputation. I’m certainly, I’m the only one that talks about creating wealth, because I’m the only one that **** has ever created wealth. Did you ever wonder why none of the other guys talk about money? None of them. Not a **** one. Because they never created it. The only money they ever **** made is putting asses on seminar seats selling you **** books.

59:22 Dan Peña: You **** morons. You **** [inaudible]. So I had alpha male. I had the Dr. Spock book. And I rebelled against my cop dad. And I got in a lot of trouble. Went off the army, the army made a man out of me. As it does, I believe that the world should be going back to conscription where they draft people. I believe in that. I believe in that system. So, I founded Great Western with 800 bucks.

59:56 Dan Peña: A lot of you know the story. I turned it into 450 million dollars in eight years in a collapsing market. With my infinite timing, I got into the oil business when oil was $41.40 a barrel. It went immediately into six bucks a barrel. Everything I’ve touched, bought, was out of business before the ink dried. And I did it here in London, in the city. And so when the shareholders threw me out, because I got paid too much money, I owned 80% of the company on the London Stock Exchange.

1:00:31 Dan Peña: What am I gonna do? So one of my friends said, you’re a great speaker, Dan, why don’t you coach? I tried teaching university one year. It was very unfulfilling. Kids were **** 20 years ago. I can imagine what they are now. I developed a QLA methodology. I went back and I reversed engineered. How did I do this step by step? And I put together the seven steps and I taught it. I thought that that would be more than enough since there was nobody else there had created anything to collect a lot of people to follow my programs.

1:01:05 Dan Peña: That wasn’t the case. Because everybody would say, I’m not Dan Peña. I’m not a gifted speaker. What you’re really saying is I’m a ****. And I have no balls. That’s what you’re really saying. But it took me 10 years to figure that out. And I’m **** smart. And so, as I said earlier, I took away the excuse that Dan’s **** is too expensive.

1:01:37 Dan Peña: I gave it away. I gave these seminars, the first gig I’ve done this century outside the castle. Because these deals fail. You’re all gonna fail. Every **** one of you in here. And if Brian told you any different, he’s full of ****. Because one day for the guys, one day sleeping with, who’s the hottest chick around now? Movie actress. Who’s a hot chick?

1:02:11 Dan Peña: Doesn’t anybody sleep with, I mean, what the ****? What’s wrong with? Well, pick one. Sleeping with her one time or sleeping with him one time does not make you a Lothario. Lothario, a seducer. The guy that gets chicks or got a girl. So this isn’t gonna change your life. What it’ll do for most of you, it’ll reaffirm that you’re wasting your time. Better that you go home and eat a 45 or a 38. And I know it’s hard to get handguns in the UK, but I can help you out if you need one.

1:02:42 Dan Peña: I can help you out. When Brian was at the seminar, the second day, I think, he went back from the seminar room to his room. He turned off the lights. He lied on the floor, right? And he shut his eyes, more or less collapsing, because he’s smarter than most of the guys in the room. I don’t know how long it took Brian the mustard, but he realized how **** up he was.

1:03:16 Dan Peña: And you all look up to him like he’s something. He’s not a fart in the wind either. He made a few bob, walked away from a successful career. I like the way he puts from Banker to Broadcaster.

1:03:33 Dan Peña: Banker to Broadcaster, maybe he’s left-handed. Okay, Banker to Broadcaster. But he’s got that, what do you have? Nothing. But his message resonates with a lot, a lot of people. You’re all Realers, for the most part. In most cases, that’s not good. That’s not good. Because most of the Realers don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.

1:04:03 Dan Peña: So I coach, I became successful. I created billionaires, et cetera, et cetera. I created Mikey the Pizza Boy, kids like this. And I was discovered, more or less, by Brian Rose early last year, although I had to push him and punch him, and not physically punch him, and beat on him to be on his first show. And that first show was a success.

1:04:36 Dan Peña: And then people wanted documentaries about me. They wanted to do, there’s two reality shows in the process of being planned, one in the UK and one in the US. He interviewed me again, went to the seminar. He interviewed me at the end of the seminar. Now I’ve done, I don’t know, 20, 25 different podcasts. I initiated my own podcast, where I’m not interested in interviewing anybody, because nobody got anything worth listening to.

1:05:09 Dan Peña: I mean, that’s why I don’t understand. And the reason why they listen to your podcast is because they’re all melon heads, because they’re not bright enough to know that they got nothing to say, these other people. They got nothing to say. And if you think you’re gonna pay your bills with **** zen, eat a gun tonight.

1:05:30 Dan Peña: Speaking of zen, I go to Asprey’s biohacking conference in September. I didn’t even know what biohacking was, never heard of it. And my wife and I and one of my mentees, who’s a biohacker, and I went into a room because I wanted to get a good seat, because I wanted to hear De Sena, the Spartan guy. I wanted to hear him talk, so I get there early, so I get up in the front row. But it was five or six minutes, the yogi or shaman or whatever he was, was late.

1:06:05 Dan Peña: So he says, I’m gonna do one more exercise for you guys. One more. So he says, we’re gonna see if we can transmit through our third chakra. I don’t know what the ****, I’m in the back of the room. And they told us to take this position and all this, and then I can see through it.

1:06:32 Dan Peña: And I kind of break the trance a little, and I tell Chris and my wife Sally, I see you. I got this position, and then Chris says, no **** way. I says, yes, **** way. And I says, he’s walking across the stage to the right. He’s going back to the left. And the people around me start to gather around me, just like you’re gonna gather around me during the breaks, like **** little melons. No way, dude! No **** way! I’ve been meditating for 800 million years!

1:07:04 Dan Peña: And I never looked so off through my **** third chakra, because you’re a ****! I have never meditated one **** microsecond before that, nor since then. So, we’re going to have lunch with a friend of mine the day after the seminar. And I got everybody in a buzz talking about this. And her name is Mary, and she had just died. Been pronounced dead. And the paramedics, when they’re taking her back to the hospital, dead, they said, well, why don’t we give the old, good looking woman, why don’t we give the old hag a couple of jolts?

1:07:43 Dan Peña: She had already had seven jolts that had fried her chest. Why don’t we give the old hag a couple of jolts? I know it’s just because they wanted to play with their big tits. But anyway, let’s give the old hag a couple of jolts. And they brought her back to life! By serendipity, by **** accident! I personally think they also **** her, but that’s me. And her husband, I know they banged her too. And so I went over to her house, the rich.

1:08:14 Dan Peña: He came to my first seminar, her husband. We had already known them. And so I said, oh, you gotta tell me about this. Tell me. No, I didn’t see the bright light, Dan. What the **** did you see? Dark. Dark. And I didn’t even think of this. But I did think. What’d you think about? I don’t wanna reinforce what you already know. Tell me the word. Please, Mary, tell me. Regrets.

1:08:46 Dan Peña: Thank you. I regretted. That’s all that went through my **** brain. All the things I didn’t do. Regrets. I have been saying that for 22 years of coaching. And 25 years before that, I’ve given a lot of eulogies.

1:09:17 Dan Peña: I’m a world-class eulogy giver, and I normally go and see the person, because I think they’re gonna die and they’ve asked me to give the eulogy, and I’m by the bedside. I’m listening to them, you know, their last conscious words. Not one time has anybody ever said, I regret not having gone to the football game of my son. Not one **** time has anybody ever said, I’m sorry I missed my sweet 16 birthday party for my daughter. Not one mother **** time. They all say the same thing.

1:09:48 Dan Peña: I wish I coulda, I **** shoulda. Their last conscious thought are **** regrets. And when Mary told me this, having been dead, that it carries over, I was so **** happy, I didn’t know whether to **** or go blind. I wanted to jack off on the **** bar stool. Because I’ve known this. Because I know when the last conscious words are in my ear, I regret, it’s gotta carry over.

1:10:21 Dan Peña: We’re all energy, right? It’s gotta carry over. Now just imagine if you **** miserable **** died tonight, the regrets you’re carrying to the grave.

1:10:38 Dan Peña: So I’m a high performance coach, and I’m good at it. I’m great at it. I’m arguably the best that ever was. Certainly by measuring how much money I’ve created. Well, for yous, not for me. For yous. And the number’s a lot higher than 50 billion, but a lot of people want wealth, but they don’t want notoriety. So I got about 60, 70 billion, I gotta be on the down low. But as they start dying, I’ll be able to release the numbers.

1:11:09 Dan Peña: But I got a lot more than that. And the reality show people, God bless them, I have probably about 10,000 stories. Episodes, vignettes, et cetera, maybe more. And whenever I get with them, I go through 15, 20, don’t tell us them all. We gotta save them for the shows. And I go, I could talk from now until I’m 100 years old. Don’t worry, I got plenty of stories.

1:11:41 Dan Peña: Yeah, you’re right about that. They’ll run out of film first. And the, but in the beginning, the stories were my mentors. QLA system is based on the mentor system. Mentor, and that’s why it’s a team. Mentor, dream team, et cetera. And the, my three mentors, great guys, Costa Gratsos, the former CEO of Onassis Shipping Lines, the boyhood friend of Aristotle Onassis for 65 years. They swap wives, legend has it. What a great friendship that was, you know?

1:12:15 Dan Peña: And Costa Gratsos, I had Jerry Orman, founder of Orman Industries, the fastest growing company in the American stock exchange in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. And I had Jim Newman, who wrote Release Your Brakes!, who was part of the brain drain of IBM along with Ross Perot in the early 60s. And those three guys mentored me for about 25 years. Of course, they’re not that long because he passed away. And they used to say some of the greatest compliments I ever got. Costa Gratsos, you remind me of Aristotle Onassis when he was young.

1:12:49 Dan Peña: And you don’t have to be an alpha male because, you know, there’s two ends of the management continuum. There’s the General Patton, Dan Peña end. **** you, you ****. And there’s the Henry Kissinger end, okay? And 95% of the world are at the Henry Kissinger end. 5% of the world is at my end. But you don’t have to be an alpha male to make QLA succeed. But you better have some **** alpha males on your dream team.

1:13:23 Dan Peña: Because you don’t have what it takes. Because if you had what it takes, you’d already done it. And that’s why the dream team makes up for the lack of balls, the lack of grit, lack of whatever other **** word you wanna use.

1:13:44 Dan Peña: And even though I used my dream team, for example, I’m sitting in La Grenouille in New York City, having lunch with Governor Hugh Carey, the former Governor of New York, who arguably saved the state of New York from bankruptcy, saved it, blah, blah, blah. And he’s saying, how’s the deal going? I said, we’re having trouble, Governor. He said, what? I said, I can’t get any **** to finance this $85 million deal. He asks the maître d’ to give him a phone. He says, Walter. This is Walter Wriston, the CEO of Citibank.

1:14:14 Dan Peña: Walter, can you come over for a martini? No, I’m real busy, Governor. He said, well, I got a young man I want you to meet. Maybe you can help him. And so he says, well, he tells the Governor, call my secretary, we’ll make an appointment. He hangs up, he says, go over there right now. Okay, I had a drink with him. I went over, make a long story short, I got $135 million in financing. But without that member of the Dream Team, how am I gonna call Walter Wriston the CEO of **** Citibank?

1:14:48 Dan Peña: I’m not. And I got 100 stories like that. Whereas the Dream Team member allowed me to do something, allowed it to happen, plus my mentees, they were able to facilitate transactions based on their Dream Team members. It’s a simple concept. World-class athletes have coaches, have mentors. Bill Gates’ mentor is Warren Buffett. I can go on and on.

1:15:20 Dan Peña: And now it’s vogue you have, not just coaches. I mean, you got just sports, you got psychologists, you got this, you got that. I’m not telling you to get all of those. What I’m telling you is a mentor, you use it like an anchor chairman. When you have a big building, you wanna let 40% of it, the General Motors, and then the next 60% is easy because you got General Motors in them, 40. That’s the same concept for chairman mentors in the rest of the Dream Team. Then you go on and collect accountants and law firms on a success basis, and yes, they do it on a success basis.

1:15:55 Dan Peña: Now they call it, they like it better to be called delaying fees until you have a successful transaction. And all this is on my website. Every single thing that I’ve said so far is it’s free on my website, free. You got no excuses. You’ll come up with new ones, but you got no excuses, none. And I say this tongue in cheek, I mean, and you’re the guys that won the contest.

1:16:25 Dan Peña: What the ****? But I told Brian before we got started, if we had picked all the people that lost the contest, the results would be no different, none, zero.

1:16:48 Dan Peña: But I’m gonna explain to you why, because I can tell by looking at your **** stupid faces, you don’t understand anything I’ve said so far. Just because you had a better story, and Brian picked you, there’s no correlation whatsoever that you’re gonna use it.

1:17:12 Dan Peña: Zero, in fact, I would argue there’s a reverse correlation and the people that can’t express themselves as well or had a slightly lesser story to say about why they’re not more successful are more desperate than as desperate as you look in are. And that’s been my experience in almost 22 years of doing this. There is no correlation.

1:17:44 Dan Peña: It’s how much you have it in here. I talk about, how committed are you? I just gave a 45-minute webinar, or whatever you call it, for one of my mentees to a sales organization, two or three hundred people, a couple of weeks ago. And I couldn’t be there, I forget where I was.

1:18:10 Dan Peña: Might’ve been, I don’t know where, anyway. So one of my most famous commitment speeches is in the difference between my generation, me and you, is that I had an appointment with Klaus Kleinfeld in Frankfurt, Germany, to introduce him to some important people. He had just taken over as CEO of Siemens USA. He hadn’t been Siemens worldwide yet. And they roll me in to the meeting, and there’s four or five people standing there, and Vinica, the one that was on that email that talked to you, I’m in a wheelchair.

1:18:48 Dan Peña: And this is also on my site. And I’ve got one of those blankets that the Red Cross puts on you, that makes silvery, whatever, to keep you warm. And I’m wearing a jogging suit, and my head, I can’t straighten my head up. And she rolls me in like this, and Klaus says, my God, Dan, what happened to you? Why are you here? I said, I told you I’d be here. Now, three days before, I’d been involved in a near-fatal accident in Cabo San Lucas, racing dune buggies with my two sons. Where I shattered my collarbone, collapsed all my lungs, punctured my liver, punctured my spleen, cracked my sternum, which is almost impossible to crack, and almost bled to death internally.

1:19:40 Dan Peña: Patched me up the best they could. I said, I gotta be in Frankfurt by the day after tomorrow. See, when I tell you I’m gonna do something, unless I’m dead or in a **** coma, I do it. So I’m giving this talk to this webinar to these guys. Now, coincidentally, three hours before the webinar, I’m in the kitchen, and I slip on some **** water, and I fall into the wall and knock this tooth out. Right here. I had a black hole there.

1:20:12 Dan Peña: And I got this webinar in three hours. Now, you **** would’ve taken a week off. I told, I have a private nurse, personal full-time nurse, I told my nurse, I gotta find a **** dentist. I don’t care what time, just get me a **** dentist. So I go to the dentist, and the dentist says, you gotta pick a mold, and all that **** they do, nah. You’re gonna fix a **** right now, I’m gonna snap your little skinny neck, ****. And I don’t have time, no novocaine, because I don’t want my lips like this when I’m talking.

1:20:48 Dan Peña: So they did the work on me, no novocaine. And so when I got the end of the commitment talk to these guys, I said, and by the way, three hours ago, there wasn’t a tooth, and I told them the same thing I’m telling you. That’s the difference. Where did I learn that commitment from? From my alpha male dad, when I’m five, six years old, he came to Le Havre, France to pick us up when we sailed during the Korean War.

1:21:20 Dan Peña: My mother and I sailed, he said, I’ll see you at Le Havre, I’ll pick you up. He didn’t tell me I’ll pick you up if I’m not feeling well, but he said, I’ll pick you up. So I go running up, I’m about this tall, I go running up to my dad and I put my arms around him like this, oh, I’m so happy to see you, daddy. And then I put my arms back, blood, soaked blood. So then I step around the back to look, his whole back is from his ass to his shoulder blades, soaked blood. So I’m five, six years old, I go, oh, daddy, daddy, but don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it.

1:21:51 Dan Peña: Come on, come on, let’s get in the car. Eight hours before, he had undergone surgery. Eight hours before. They took a tumor the size of a cantaloupe out of his back and he wouldn’t let them put him under. Sound familiar? And he watched the surgery with mirrors with a .45 automatic on his chest, cocked.

1:22:20 Dan Peña: Because my dad was the head of the CID, Criminal Investigation Division for United States Army Europe. And he didn’t, you know, this was in the Cold War and he didn’t want to go under where he might tell secrets and **** like that. Then they stitched him up, had local, you know, which had already worn off by the time he got to Le Havre. So when you see that growing up, as opposed to your **** parents, how do you think you’re gonna turn out?

1:22:51 Dan Peña: How? You’re **** up because of your mom and dad. They’re **** up because of their mom and dad. I told you by serendipity, by all his good will, my mom saw the Reader’s Digest version of this book.

1:23:12 Dan Peña: And my dad was an alpha male who had served in two wars. And all I saw was alpha males around me, instead of the miserable **** you’ve seen. So there’s a difference. Also, when somebody like me tells you, I’m gonna **** you up, I mean I’m gonna **** you up. You’re not gonna get a letter from my lawyer. I’m gonna rip your head off and **** down your **** neck.

1:23:49 Dan Peña: That’s the difference. And those people are still around. They’re still available. Not you, but your dream team. Not you, but your dream team. And we’ve made it work for a little mealy mouth, 95 pound nobodies, to six foot seven, 300 pound ex-American footballers.

1:24:24 Dan Peña: But again, it’s what you have in here. How bad do you really want it? Most people, if you get nothing more from today’s event, it’s not for me. You’re a lucky man, a lucky guy, a lucky whoever. Lucky that you found out cheap. Cheap in time. Because money we can always make back time you can’t. I had one of my, at the castle we have this wall is influencers, there’s about 100 people that have influenced my life.

1:24:58 Dan Peña: The back wall is Hall of Famers and this wall is Hall of Shamers. Most of which have gone to jail. And the Hall of Shame and the Hall of Fame, they’re both the same, high performance. Just as Adolf Hitler, who’s on my wall over here, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Vlad the Impaler, all high performance people. You know, high performance doesn’t mean you’re goody two shoes. High performance means you get **** done.

1:25:31 Dan Peña: In spite of the circumstances, I’m happiest when the **** hits the fan. You know, it’s a sexual experience for me. It’s like when I floated Great Western these many years ago, I picked my 39th birthday, August 10th, 1984, to float. All the pundits, all the city guys said, no, no, no, no, no. Maggie Thatcher’s coming out with her first big privatization of Jaguar, for those of you that are old enough to remember.

1:26:02 Dan Peña: I said, who gives a ****? She was like, I don’t care if it’s Easter or ****, who gives a ****? The old hag, I don’t give a **** what she’s doing. Then every pound and pence is gonna be sucked into that privatization. No, it’s not. They’re gonna, my deal. All the, oh no, Freshfields were my lawyers. I had two of the big, that time, two of the big eight accounting firms. So I personally sold, not with the help of my stockbrokers, I personally sold every **** share.

1:26:36 Dan Peña: I remember pitching the Church of England, the Bank of England, all these people. The morning, August the 11th, the headlines read, the one that really roared, Great Western Resources, up 20%, Jaguar down 20%. I get a sexual experience every time I see a **** Jaguar, I sit in one. I personally fought the city by myself and brought them to their **** knees.

1:27:17 Dan Peña: To the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been a deal like that since, nor never will be. And I didn’t. We had to convince the takeover panel for the first time in the history, and I don’t know how long the stock exchange has been around, but in the first time of the history of the London Stock Exchange, someone took something public they didn’t own. I had an option. It was the first option ever to that time to ever be floated, taken public.

1:27:53 Dan Peña: An option, I didn’t even own the ****, I took public. 15, 20, 30 people followed me, they changed the law, changed the rule. So then I went to the Netherlands, did the exact same **** thing. Took an option public. And if the law hadn’t been changed worldwide, I’d still be taking the **** options public. Because you’d think that melon heads like you would figure, oh, that’s a good **** idea.

1:28:23 Dan Peña: Just like smell the leather. You know how many people have taken options public that I’ve ever met in 31 years? Maybe in another 31.

1:28:46 Dan Peña: When Richard Branson’s jet plane or rocket ship went down six months ago, eight months ago, killed that poor guy. Do you think, did that slow Sir Richard down any? I’m sure he cares about the guy that died, as he should.

1:29:07 Dan Peña: Got him a lot of publicity. Fall out was minimal. Just kept moving forward. Do you think Sir Richard gives a **** what you think? In any way, shape, manner, or form? No, only you care. Because you don’t want to be liked. And in some cases, you even want to be loved. And you trade love and like for money.

1:29:42 Dan Peña: I’ve told my children since they were little, since they were like they said, we’ve been listening to the five credo crap since we were second trimester in our mother’s tummy. I don’t want your love. I want 20 years after I’m dead, your respect. Now that’s a heavy duty thing for a parent to say to their kid, your dad’s love’s not helping you.

1:30:12 Dan Peña: Now you all look like you just saw a **** ghost. Do you think Steve Jobs gave a **** what you thought of him? And I don’t like to talk bad about people that are dead. But he was a ruthless ****, full stop.

1:30:36 Dan Peña: Friends are problems. Now just imagine me raising my kids, my three kids. Friends are problems when they’re five, six, seven, eight years old. Just try to ponder that a second.

1:30:57 Dan Peña: I’m not tight with my kids. I have one disabled child. Other two are successful. They went to great schools, multiple degrees. You don’t have to go to school to be successful. You don’t have to have multiple degrees like they do. They did it that way because I didn’t, so they did, although I did get out of university after flunking out three times. But you’re starting to see the differences. Just, I’m just touching on some of the more salient points.

1:31:28 Dan Peña: What differentiates me, not just the way I look, not just the way I sound, to give you some idea why, for most of you in this room, the QLA process isn’t for you. And I’m not trying to negative sell you. Trust me. So don’t get that out of your **** brain. But it’s not. Like I told a successful lady lawyer yesterday afternoon. You saw her when she was, Brian, when she was just leaving.

1:32:00 Dan Peña: She’s the older sister of one of my mentees. I told her that, I listened to her story. She was a lawyer at 20. She, here, and I said this isn’t for you, sweetheart.

1:32:18 Dan Peña: I hope you didn’t waste too much time coming down to see me. Because I’m not trying to sell you anything. One of my billionaire guys on the Hall of Fame says, Dan tells you what we’d like to tell you, but don’t have the balls to.

1:32:46 Dan Peña: But the high performance guys that I know, other than they think I’m wasting my time trying to teach melon heads like you to be successful, they think it’s a joke. Actually, they think it’s worse than that. And the fact that I give all the ****, I had dinner here about a year and a half ago with one of the top guys in the UK, a mentee of mine. And he said, Dan, we can’t compete with you. Forget the 800 into almost half a billion.

1:33:19 Dan Peña: Forget that you’ve been in the castle 30 years. Forget this, that, and the other thing. Now you give all the **** away free. Your USP is off the charts. And you don’t wanna sell them anything. The only reason I still have a castle seminar, because for the few that I touch personally, there’s a higher probability that you’re gonna make it. But 99% of all the people that have made it with QLA, I have never met, never spoken to, never touched, never emailed, sky ****, link ****, face ****.

1:33:55 Dan Peña: 99% of them, you don’t need me. The 1% that I’ve touched, I’ve laid hands on, like a spiritual cult leader revivalist. I’ve laid hands on them. Now, truthfully, those are the billionaires. Those are, I laid hands on those ****. But if you just wanna make 50 million quid or something like that, ****, go **** yourself, leave now, you don’t need me.

1:34:27 Dan Peña: And in the old days, just like in that Whiplash, I used to hit the guys. Literally, in the 90s and early 2000s, I used to smack them, not them, hit them. Now I guess I am getting pretty quick, because I don’t do that anymore. Not that I’m afraid to, I’ve had people come up to me and say, Dan, Dan, please, hit me in the face.

1:34:56 Dan Peña: Look around the room, see who’s the witness, you know. No, no, no, I remember I had a special forces guy. I had a French foreign legion guy too. I’ve had a lot of them. Come on, come on, give it to me. I’ve had a fourth degree or sixth degree, dan, sixth dan, black belt, bad ****, supposedly. I did hit him. I had to hit him, because he didn’t think I could hit him. Knocked him unconscious.

1:35:26 Dan Peña: On top of it, I’m still pretty tough, which is the irony of all this. But when I was younger, I was really tough. Now I just sound tough, but I used to be really tough. Sound tough. About five, six years ago, I’m in Panama. And I’d never been offered a bribe by a former president before until I was there. And some guy, one of his, some guy who was a loud mouth, and I said, okay, and he was a 35 year old, ex this, body builder this, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:36:02 Dan Peña: And I said, okay asshole, come on, let’s go out in the parking, let’s see how tough you are. Now, this is when I weighed 280, and I was a weight lifter, so. And I gave up weight lifting a number of years ago because my knees, and for every pound you got up here, it’s 40 pounds on your knees. But I used to be a big ****. And I said, but he was a big ****, and he was about half my age. Now fortunately for him, he says, no, no, I don’t want any problem with you, Mr. Peña. Because I’m sure he had the capability of kicking my ass.

1:36:32 Dan Peña: But I didn’t think about it, I don’t care. See, one of the things high performance people do is they put themselves in a corner so there’s no alternative but success. They put themselves, they’re back against the wall, and you’ve been trained to do just the opposite of that.

1:36:52 Dan Peña: I put myself with my back against the wall. I told Brian, Brian QLA Rose, after our first interview, he walked me downstairs, we’re waiting for a cab, right? Okay, I said, words to the effect, I can change your life, right? He’s shaking, yes, I can change your life. And I have. It’s been a hard **** thing. It’s like, you’ve all seen the movie Forrest Gump.

1:37:22 Dan Peña: And Forrest Gump, when he’s dragging all the people to safety, you know, he’s running back, he was looking for Bubba and he’s running back and to save all these people, like Lieutenant Dan didn’t want to be saved. The kicking and screaming. That’s why my wife says, I got a sore back from arthritis is because I’m carrying so many **** across the goal line. So I mean, he hasn’t made it easy, he’s still not making it easy. And when we talk about the case studies, I’ll show you exactly where intellectually he understands what he should be doing, but emotionally he’s not doing it.

1:37:56 Dan Peña: Because we got two bank accounts in life, we got an emotional bank account, we got a financial bank account. Now Brian the Mustard, he’s made real progress since he learned how to deal better with his emotional bank account. But him being a Canadian, Canadians are all ****. I mean, it’s not easy. And sitting next to a Canadian, yeah, Canadian, well, oh ****, that’s too bad, anyway. But I mean, so we got an emotional bank account, we got a financial bank account, and most of you are concerned about the wrong bank account.

1:38:29 Dan Peña: You’re concerned with the financial bank account. And it’s your emotional bank account, your self-esteem, self-worth, et cetera, that leads to your financial bank account being built.

1:38:46 Dan Peña: I got a couple of big awards from where I went to school, I ultimately graduated. I was on the eight-year program for my undergraduate degree, eight years, but I spent four years in the military, but eight year, and I got this big award as the most distinguished alumni. And they’re talking to Dr. Shirley Teter, the head of the School of Business. Dr. Teter, you’ve known Mr. Peña a long, long time. This is Connie Chung, who used to be an anchor for CBS a long time ago. He says, yes, yes, well, you’ve seen him grow up, da-da-da-da, what have you seen change in him in all these years, nothing.

1:39:20 Dan Peña: The only thing that’s happened with Danny, they used to call me, is that his accomplishments have caught up with his big **** mouth. Now, this is Dan Peña day, where I went to school. What kind of **** is that to say about me? It’s true. So, 10 years later, I don’t know, sooner, that was the same thing. And a similar result from somebody who’s getting the award, and I got the award, I was Hispanic Man of the Year in 1981 or 83 or something, I got some big award, because I am a minority, I’m a blue eyed Hispanic.

1:40:00 Dan Peña: Anyway, and I’m going through my acceptance speech, there’s about 3,000 people in the audience, and about where Robert is sitting, my dad’s sitting in the first row, I get about 15, 20, 30 seconds into the talk, my dad starts sobbing uncontrollably. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, like that, okay. Now, I’m a pretty focused ****. So, I’m trying to block this **** out, and I had a three, a seven, and an 11 minute speech. I hadn’t planned the different speeches because I thought my dad was gonna start sobbing.

1:40:35 Dan Peña: And I got through it, I got through the seven minutes, I said three minutes is too short, I’m getting a big **** award, I gotta talk more than three minutes. So, I’m focused, you know, and so I get through it. So then, they’re interviewing them, again, they put a microphone on my dad’s face, and they ask him, you must be very proud of your son. And he says, yes, I am. About his accomplishments, his success, et cetera, et cetera. But my son, Dan, is successful not because of me, but in spite of me.

1:41:10 Dan Peña: I’m gonna say it again. He’s successful not because of me, but in spite of me. Because my dad knew that he had nothing to do with my success, but he didn’t know, and when I told him years later, you did, you gave me integrity, strength, alpha male role model.

1:41:33 Dan Peña: Yeah, example, exactly. But as far as the business, all he used to say, when he came to the castle, and he was at the castle once, and he just says, tell me it’s not drugs. Tell me it’s not drugs. Now, this is a cop from East L.A., okay? Went to Lincoln High School. But my dad’s emotional bank account wasn’t too strong. He had big balls, wasn’t afraid, fought in two wars, et cetera, but I mean, his father died three months before he was born.

1:42:06 Dan Peña: He was the youngest of seven, he was supporting his family as a shoeshine boy during the Depression, bootleg. He would put the packages in the shoeshine box, and that’s how he supported his family, starting at seven. I started working when I was 11, okay? And it’s like Napoleon Hill says, the worst thing you can do is leave your children, they could be born into wealth, okay? Bill Gates and guys like that, they’re doing a little different.

1:42:37 Dan Peña: He’s giving each kid 10 million or whatever. He’s not gonna give him the billions, he’s not gonna give him more than the same. I’m giving my kids zero. **** all, nothing, not 50 pence, nothing. They are completely cut out of my estate.

1:42:57 Dan Peña: And my wife and I, God love her, are doing the very best. We’re never gonna spend all our money. I have to live to be 1,000, but we’re doing our **** best, though. And we support charities, we support three orphanages in the Philippines, a school in Rwanda, a mission in Sri Lanka, something else, and a scholarship fund where we give four to eight scholarships for high school, student athletes where my dad used to go to high school.

1:43:33 Dan Peña: But we’re doing something about where we see there’s need, but we had to create the wealth first, instead of carrying placards around the embassy complaining about ****. And that’s more in the mode that you guys are in.

1:43:53 Dan Peña: So I’m different, and I don’t care what you think. And I’ve had a whole string of successes now with guys that are equally as stupid as you. One of my great success stories is a guy with one O level, okay? How many Brits in the room? Okay, you know what an O level is, right?

1:44:24 Dan Peña: Okay, his O level was in joinery. He got a C. Now during the break, not that I don’t want you to bond, the Brits can explain what that means, getting a C in joinery for his only O level. He and I did a 450 million deal. At the time, it was one of the biggest privatizations. It was a healthcare, public to private. It was a Crestacare and Four Seasons merger, and with one O level.

1:44:59 Dan Peña: But the guy had big balls, I mean. Very persevering, and he wanted it. Maybe because he only had one O level. One O level is like you graduated from junior high school when you’re 15 years old before you go into high school. That’s what I call the equivalent. It’s not exactly that. And you can do it. And why do I still coach?

1:45:30 Dan Peña: Why do I still coach? I coach because I get off on bringing sorry **** across the goal line. I’m living vicariously through your successes. And fortunately, I’m very good at it, so I’ve got a lot of things to be happy about. But because I’m not trying to make money off you, or et cetera, I can tell you. And the mentor program, although I don’t expect any of you to come to the castle, I already told Brian that.

1:46:00 Dan Peña: But the mentor program after the castle is for free. I mentioned it for a year for free. So that means I can throw you out any **** time I want. Why throw you out even if you were paying for it? But I mean, it’s for free. And his class is already four down, four down.

1:46:20 Dan Peña: January’s class is already two down. August’s class is nine down, maybe 10. Yeah, nine or 10. They’ve thrown him out. No, no, I’ve thrown him out. I’ve thrown him out. We had one guy in January’s class who resigned at the graduation dinner. He never even started. Although he gave a great testimony. It’s a great program, a great program, a great program. But an Irish guy after a couple glasses of wine and some Jameson, he said, this ain’t for me.

1:46:55 Dan Peña: I’m not gonna do this ****. And he was successful. He was one of the more successful guys to come to the seminar. And, but that’s great. But it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s certainly not everybody’s cup of tea. But it’s the only legal way that I know at an age almost 70, where you can take what normally takes a generation, 20 to 25 years, you can create the same wealth in three to seven years. Three years if you’re a dynamo, **** par excellence.

1:47:28 Dan Peña: Five years if you’re average, and seven years if you’re a ****, **** melon head. That would normally take you a generation, depending on what you want to count a generation, 20 to 25 years. And we’ve done it over and over and over and over again.

1:47:49 Dan Peña: And I actually, I find it insulting that I have to keep telling people, most of the people, and if I had been coming to this to listen to me, I would have read every **** thing on my website. Every single thing. I know more about you as individuals than you know about me. And that’s a sad commentary. Not from my end, but on your end. But that’s how you approach life. And unless you’re willing to make that jump across the chasm, that quantum leap, you know, this is a waste of your time and money.

1:48:26 Dan Peña: And the time is more important than the money. We’re gonna take a break now, a pee break or whatever. Normally, I don’t take breaks. Okay, that’s easier to get them to pee their pants if you don’t take breaks, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a whole other story. But we’re gonna take a short break, 10 minutes. Yeah. Okay, thank you very much.

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Dan Peña - LIVE At The Ritz: Part 1 of 3

Dan Peña Live at The Ritz

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Who is Dan Peña?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Dan Peña LIVE At The Ritz, Part 1

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Dan Peña - LIVE At The Ritz: Part 1 of 3

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Key takeaways

Brian Rose on meeting Dan Peña

No secret sauce: Dan Peña on failure and self-esteem

Mentors, regrets and the dream team

Commitment, Great Western and the two bank accounts

Who is Dan Peña?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Dan Peña LIVE At The Ritz, Part 1

Latest Episode

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

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Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

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