Full transcript: Dan Peña LIVE At The Ritz, Part 2
0:18 Dan Peña: And as I said at the beginning, inspiration or desperation, most people that are here, and even the guy that came up to me at the break, who’s successful, he was looking for another, what’s the thing to do now? What is the equivalent to taking an option public? Where’s the beef? That’s more or less what he was asking me. And I said, we don’t get into the beef here. We get into the beef at the castle, but not in the beginning of the seminar.
0:49 Dan Peña: We don’t get into the beef. And we don’t get into the beef because notwithstanding, even if you think you’re prepared for, where’s the **** money, it’s like on my site. In 47 minutes, I tell you, you don’t have to be here. Almost everybody that filled out the form, that won, needs money. 90, you know, maybe two of you out of 34, is it 34? Two out of you of 34 didn’t say you needed money.
1:20 Dan Peña: And I’m sure the 32 didn’t read, or listen to my podcast, how do you get the **** money? Or how do you create deal flow? So when I think of it, I said, you know, are they inspired or desperate? Well, maybe they’re, they think they’re inspired. They’re really not inspired. But some of you, because of your lack of, not education, formal education, but the lack of your education and lack of the economic milieu that you’re associated with now, i.e., show me your friends and I’ll show you your future, don’t know enough to when the **** sign on my site says, how to create deal flow, get the deals done.
2:06 Dan Peña: Now, I can’t make it any **** simpler than that. And I’m not gonna embarrass the group by asking you how many looked at the ****. Because if you had looked at it, you wouldn’t be here. And when I go for the 47, and I listened to them again this morning when I got up at, you know, 20 to five, I just wanted to make sure they were still there. Maybe somebody put some hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo on there now. And how do you get the **** money?
2:37 Dan Peña: I’ve got another special podcast. Is this really for me? Nobody in this room listened to that. Otherwise, you wouldn’t **** be here. Because it’s like, I have the ability, you were the guy I was talking to, I have the ability because of my experience, and Robert from Bavaria says it quite often.
3:06 Dan Peña: What would you rather have, a guy that read 700 books coaching you, and we all know who read 700 books, or a guy that’s done 700 deals? Yeah, I mean, it’s a no-****-brainer, right? Yeah, I know a lot of you, and I’m not taking anything away from him because he’s helped a lot of people, a lot more than I do. Would, could, or plan to. Because that’s not my axe to grind in life.
3:37 Dan Peña: But, are you really, really, are you inspired, or are you desperate? If you’re inspired, how come I know more about you than you know about me? Why? But that’s every place I go, every medium I go to. Every medium, now in this particular case, Brian helped me because he did briefs on everybody. But normally, I have my crack staff do the research because I wanna know, you know, I wanna be prepared.
4:13 Dan Peña: The guy that’s the most prepared almost always wins, not always, but almost always wins. Now, there’s no question, when we get into the question and answer, which I always, and by the way, there is such a thing, I’m gonna beat myself to the point, there is such a thing as a stupid **** question. So don’t insult my intelligence with your questions, because I’ll rip you. I don’t believe in that there’s no bad question, that’s ****. That’s why you are the where you are now, because you believe there’s no **** bad question.
4:46 Dan Peña: So, when we get to the question part, you know, think them through. Now, maybe we won’t have any questions, that’d be good, we quit early. I’m not asking you to do anything. You know, when I came back to university, after flunking out three times, arguably four times, I didn’t count the fourth one as a flunk out. Because I dropped all the classes before you got the Fs, did they still do that?
5:17 Dan Peña: Where you can drop before you get a grade, anyway. And when I came back to school, because I had gotten Ds and Fs, and the Fs aren’t good, you can’t graduate with Fs, and you can’t graduate with incompletes, I don’t know if you can count Ds or not, but I had to start all over again, to make a long story short. So, I finished 128 units in two and a half years. I was taking as much as 26 units a semester. I took 30 units over summer school. I went to two universities simultaneously. It was like, I was inventing **** even back then.
5:48 Dan Peña: I went to UCLA and I went to California State University in Northridge at the same time. And I used to drive my little beetle back and forth to classes. I used to go in and I have Tuesday and Thursday and Tuesday and Thursday, same timeframe, 10 o’clock. And I’d go in and I’d talk to the professor, and I’d say, I can’t go to your class. And I’d, can I write a paper? Can I just take the final, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he’d say, no, you gotta come to class. I’d go to the other professor and make this, try the same deal. He’d say, sure. So then I’d do that. Or, and then after I was back in school, a semester, a semester and a half, and I got all As, and I’d go into the professor and I’d say, they were grading, I’d find out who was grading on a curve, and I’d say, I’m gonna come in and I’m gonna **** up the curve.
6:31 Dan Peña: You’re gonna have to **** everybody else because I’m gonna be the only A. So I’ll cut you a deal, da, da, da, and the guy’d say, okay, if you’ll teach my lab course for me, and then, you know, so I finished four year degree in two and a half years and graduated with honors.
6:51 Dan Peña: So, but I wanted to get out of **** school fast because I had looked at the four years that I spent on active duty, almost four years, wrongly. I looked at it that I, you know, wasted time, and all my contemporaries were ahead of me. What I didn’t understand then, which I know now, is they weren’t ahead of me. They were behind me based on my training, this, that, and the other thing.
7:23 Dan Peña: They were so far behind me, I didn’t really appreciate how far behind me they were. But I certainly learned quickly, and I’ve always been in a hurry, desperation or inspiration. Some of you, you know, think that you’re inspired to be here. You’re not. If you look at the facts, you know, and, you know, some people in this room have made a million euro, a million pounds, a million dollars last year. So **** what?
7:53 Dan Peña: Why are your expectations so low? You know, you know what I mean? It’s because your parents’ expectations were so low. Mikey the Pizza Boy is directing **** Robert Duvall. What the ****? He didn’t know who Robert Duvall was 10 years ago. But the little **** did what I told him to do. And I think this story’s worth saying.
8:24 Dan Peña: When he comes to me, I wanna be Steven Spielberg. He’s got pizza **** dough under his fingernails. I said, okay, have you been to school? Have you been there? No, no, no, no. Okay, well, go be a limo driver, I told him. In Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and you’ll bump into stars. Two years later, he comes back. Now he’s wearing a suit like Men in Black. I mean, he looks sharp. And I said, and I forgot about him.
8:55 Dan Peña: He says, Mr. Peña, Mr. Peña, can I come in? So he came to see me at the Beverly Wilshire where I live when I’m in Los Angeles. And that’s where the movie Pretty Woman was made. And I said, so what have you been doing? And he says, limo driver and all this. I said, well, I told him, limo driver, you’re gonna meet Barbra Streisand, you’re gonna meet so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so. And I said, well, who have you met? And then he pulls out his cell phone. He’s got Steven Spielberg’s cell phone number. All these **** stars.
9:28 Dan Peña: And I said, well, what have you done with him? He said, well, you didn’t tell me what to do with him. You just told me to get them. Yeah, yeah, and I said, what do I do now? I go, ****, this kid listened to me. Okay, I said, you gotta be a bit player. You go be a grip on a movie set. You be this, you be that, and you gotta get some bit parts. Comes back to me two years later. He’s been in 11 movies, and he’s really athletic, so he did some stunts, he did this, and he did that.
10:01 Dan Peña: And then a year and a half ago, he made this movie, he’s doing a movie, another movie he’s making is with Franco, James Franco. He’s an actor, right?
10:19 Dan Peña: Yeah, I mean, but he did exactly what I told him to do. You won’t do that. Because he wanted to be an Albanian Steven Spielberg more than life, he would rather be dead. And like the hip hop guy, what’s the hip hop guy’s name? Yeah, huh? Thomas. He said, you gotta want success more than you wanna breathe, or something like that. And I say, you want success, you’d rather be dead.
10:55 Dan Peña: And that eliminates most people, you know? And I go, if I was dead, I mean, how is my daughter gonna finish school? And my, well, most of you don’t give a **** about your ex-wives, **** them, you know? And I tell the story, and this is the difference between yous, me and Jobs, kind of. Okay, we put a two by 12 down on the ground, two by 12. Construction, I used to work construction. Two by 12 is a board that they built scaffolding with, you know, on the sides of buildings.
11:27 Dan Peña: Now, almost everybody in this room, not everybody, because some of you look feeble, could walk up and down a two by 12 all day long and pick up 1,000 pound notes. All day long, you wouldn’t get tired, okay? Couldn’t walk up and down a two by 12 and pick up 1,000 pound notes, okay. Now, you put that two by 12 10 stories up between two buildings. Now, I can still walk on that two by 12.
11:57 Dan Peña: A good portion of you would be eliminated. 10 stories up, because you’re gonna start thinking, well, ****, what if I fail? ****, it’s only 1,000 pounds, ****, you know? Maybe it’ll take me a week or two weeks or whatever to make, nah, I can do that, okay. You put a 50 stories up, you gotta probably eliminate, oh, you know, some, oh, maybe I can crawl, you don’t have to walk, I can crawl, I can make it, okay.
12:27 Dan Peña: You put a hundred stories up, the wind, now, well, I didn’t need that 1,000, you know, I don’t need that money that bad. Now, you put Jack the Ripper, Vlad the Impaler, Charlie Manson, somebody on the other side with your wife gonna set her on fire or your significant other, burn the ****, you don’t give a ****. But you do it with your child or your grandchild, some of you sorry **** will stagger across there somehow.
13:02 Dan Peña: That’s the difference. Remember commitment? Remember what I said about commitment? I’m committed to success and have been and I’m committed now in recent years to your success. See, I cried at your seminar, remember? Because it galls me, I got a lump in my throat, just think about it, I know what you’re capable of, I know what you can do more, not just because it’s a thought process because I did it, because I’ve carried like Forrest Gump all these kids now.
13:45 Dan Peña: I know, see I act like it’s the last two minutes of my last **** Super Bowl every **** hour of the day. Why do they score so many touchdowns in the playoffs in the last two, three minutes of the game? Because they know how to do it and it’s all on the line. They put their back to the wall. Some of you in this room have never had your back to the wall.
14:17 Dan Peña: You’ve done everything humanly possible, remember inspiration? To avoid putting your back to the wall because your parents raised you, keep a low profile. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Keep your mouth shut, et cetera, et cetera. My parents didn’t tell me that and my parents, and this is before this book came out, when this book came out, she had death threats, she was spat upon, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
15:00 Dan Peña: She raised her kids just like I raised mine, and she was even tougher than I was. No overnights for her daughters, no playtime, no soccer, no **** ballet, you had to play at least three instruments, death threats.
15:25 Dan Peña: Both her kids are at Harvard now. I think one just graduated, she’s a lady lawyer if I remember correctly, Chinese. What I, you know, a lot of other people have done this. I’m not the only one, but people hated her. Now she’s a **** genius. You wanna know how to produce? I’m not saying Harvard’s the end all be all, or Oxford or, but you wanna produce a kid like that? Read this **** book.
15:58 Dan Peña: Peter Drucker, God rest his soul, said many years ago that what’s the field, he asked the question to his class, he’s the father of modern management, consulting management, he died maybe 10 years ago, five years ago. What is the biggest producer of leadership, and we’re gonna talk about leadership after lunch, the leadership and leadership roles in the world today.
16:26 Dan Peña: Who has produced more leaders than anybody else? Military, correct. 61 or 62% of all the Fortune 500 companies, CEOs have one thing in common, military background. Two thirds of those two thirds have something else in common, martial arts, discipline, discipline, focus. Now look at you, sorry, ****.
16:58 Dan Peña: This might be a slight exaggeration, but I probably can take five of you at a time. Maybe a few more, because some of you are English. Now I’ll be 70. When I was young, 10 at a time. Now, inspiration or desperation, my leadership style is not new. Forget the fact that I’m an ex-military guy.
17:30 Dan Peña: A study done about 15, 20 years ago by Siemens, and I know this because Klaus Kleinfeld, who was the CEO, came to me as a middle manager in 1997, 1998. He says, Dan, I wanna be on the corporate executive board as a director. European companies have a supervisory board and an executive board. Executive board runs the business on a day-to-day basis. The supervisory board sits around with their thumb up their ass and tells them what they can do or can’t do on a general basis.
18:00 Dan Peña: And I told Klausie, why do you just wanna be on the executive board? Why don’t you wanna be CEO? Well, he was a non-Bavarian, a non-Bavarian had ever been CEO of Siemens at that time, yada, yada, yada. Bavarians have a different kind of accent, which Robert will tell you, you know, the lesser Germans are the non-Bavarian Germans. Anyway, but that’s a whole other story. And he comes to me and so we put together a plan and that was in 2005, he was appointed CEO of Siemens, 100 million of revenue, 400,000 employees.
18:38 Dan Peña: And the first phone call he made was to me. But military has been producing leadership. And so Siemens, it’s a study, what are the, if you wanna follow on the leadership model, US Marine Corps, arguably the best of the leadership models of all the services worldwide. The Catholic Church, forgetting the paedophile [inaudible], but I mean the leadership model part. And the Red Cross and the Boy Scouts of America, not Boy Scouts here of America.
19:14 Dan Peña: That’s what they asked your team. Now, speaking of the Catholic Church, our current Pope, his holiness is a Jesuit. And I was taught by Jesuits. So on top of the military ****, and they invented 600, 800 years ago when the first Jesuit, a thing called heroic leadership. And it’s been around since forever, since forever.
19:46 Dan Peña: Very politically incorrect. And I’m being nice when I say that. Very politically incorrect. So guys, this is not new ****. This is old ****. And some of it is serendipity, just cause I was, I didn’t know I was gonna be a Roman Catholic. I didn’t know my mother was gonna read that **** book or actually the Reader’s Digest form of the book. You know, I didn’t know my dad was gonna be a superhero alpha male.
20:19 Dan Peña: He makes these **** Marvel comic book guys look like **** wusses. I didn’t know, but it happened. But many people will tell you, inspiration or desperation, Dan has gone the farthest with the least of any human being on the **** planet. The farthest with the least. Because I’ve taken every bit of fiber in my being that can be productive and made it productive.
20:54 Dan Peña: Many people, guys that I went to my 50 year reunion a year and a half ago, high school reunion. And I wasn’t voted to be most likely to succeed or any of that stuff. I was voted to be most likely to be dead. My dad only had one goal for me in life, inspiration or desperation. To keep Dan alive till he reaches the age of reason.
21:20 Dan Peña: He was hoping 20, 30, 40, he didn’t know when or if ever. The last time I was arrested February the 10th, 19 and 77 for assault with a deadly weapon on a policeman. I had matching Mercedes in the driveway, Peña 121 and a Rolls-Royce. I lived in a Frank Lloyd ****, not a Frank Lloyd, Frank Lloyd Wright type house. Had a beautiful, big [inaudible] blonde wife who adored me.
21:54 Dan Peña: And I’m getting arrested for **** like that. I had just gotten a big **** award. And I was drinking champagne, 151 rum and something else out of this big silver thing and I was just pouring it all over my body. My life is good Dan, life is **** good. I’m driving my 450 SL brand new Mercedes down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles with my right hand tire in the gutter because you know how it go like this?
22:24 Dan Peña: And so I keep it straight, keep it straight. After that arrest, that was my last arrest. I got a driver and to this day I don’t drive. I have a driver’s license but to this day I don’t drive. And I haven’t driven since 1977. So I was inspired, see I thought, you know, whether you believe in a higher power or a Buddha, all or whoever the **** you believe in or don’t believe in anybody.
22:58 Dan Peña: I believe that we’re put on this planet to be all we can be. Joe Batten, the mentor of Ross Perot, mostly in this room aren’t old enough to know Ross Perot but he was a billionaire when a billionaire was a billionaire. And he’s a guy that pretended to run against, for president to make sure Bush too, Bush one didn’t become president. That’s a whole other story. Joe Batten wrote two books and these are two of the books that I recommend, Tough-Minded Management, Tough-Minded Leadership by Joe Batten.
23:32 Dan Peña: He told people that he came up with a saying for the United States Army, be all you can be. When they went from a conscription army to a volunteer army and he was my business partner for a while but we’re here to be all we can be.
23:52 Dan Peña: And so that’s why every day is the last two minutes of my Super Bowl and that’s why when I needed to see Klaus Kleinfeld in a wheelchair and the rest of that story is I told Vinica, I said, could you straighten my head up because I don’t wanna talk to him sideways. So she pulled my ear like this, like this so I could see him. But to this day, if you ask Klaus Kleinfeld who’s currently CEO and chairman of Alcoa, if you ask him to this day, whenever I feel I’m gonna wuss out on a meeting, I can’t because I think of you, Dan, I think of me.
24:28 Dan Peña: And when I, well I hardly ever feel I wussing out on anything but when I do, I think of my dad. What do you think of? Are you inspired or are you desperate?
24:44 Dan Peña: See, I don’t really care if you’re inspired or desperate as long as you take action because I told Brian last night or this morning I forget which that why it doesn’t make any difference if we took the winners of the contest or the losers of the contest. There’s no meaningful difference between the results because not many of you will take action. And for those of you that have made a few bob, a few shekels, a few pounds, you’re less likely to make change because you’re comfortable, you’re in your comfort zone.
25:17 Dan Peña: And all change requires you to get out of your comfort zone. And that’s one of Brian Rose’s biggest challenges is to get out of your comfort zone because comfort zone connotes all the negatives. In the book, Release Your Brakes! by Jim Newman, my mentor, he came up with a theory that for those of you that are old enough to have driven a car that had, you still had to take the emergency brake off.
25:48 Dan Peña: Now you put it from park to drive and the brake goes off. But in the old days you used to have an emergency brake. And just for those of us that have driven a car with an emergency brake on, it’s kind of sluggish and it doesn’t really move forward and it’s bad for the universal, the tires, the engine, the car, it’s bad for everything, right? But then you release the emergency brake, release your brakes as the name of the book, and you surge forward like in Star Trek. You know, when you go to warp speed, you guys have lived most of your lives with the emergency brakes on.
26:23 Dan Peña: Self-imposed for your parents, their parents, et cetera, et cetera. Fred Smith, who is a similar military background that I do, the founder and chairman of FedEx, and his infamous, he made a speech, this is 35, 40 years ago. He said, as soon as I discovered that decision-making, the collateral damage was not limbs and life, all future business decisions were easy.
26:56 Dan Peña: I’ll say it again. As soon as I discovered that all bad decisions or mistakes, the collateral damage was not limbs and life, all the decisions, the business decisions I made from that point forward were easy. Same as me, we had the same training. He was a Marine officer, I was an Army officer.
27:20 Dan Peña: You know, you manage your lives like Sophie’s Choice. The movie made in 1981, Meryl Streep got one of her Academy Awards. It’s about a woman who was in a concentration camp with her two children, and she was Buchenwald or Auschwitz, one of them. And she was sleeping with a commandant so she could get extra blankets and food for her children. And then Hans woke up one morning, and he decides that Meryl didn’t give him a good enough **** that night. So he says, you have to make a decision.
27:55 Dan Peña: We will teach you, you insolent ****, to **** the commandant better. One of your children must go to the gas chambers. One. Well, yeah, and the whole movie’s about which one? Does she send the little girl or the little boy? The whole movie’s about that. And now that is Sophie’s Choice. Now that’s a **** dilemma, guys. Which one do I pick? You’re gonna pick one of them. And then the rest of the movie, she picks one, not the one you think. She picks one, then she goes off to New York, she meets and falls in love with a writer, and they write this up in a book, and then they both commit suicide, like Cleopatra and what’s his name.
28:35 Dan Peña: Okay. You manage your lives like it’s Sophie’s Choice, like it makes a **** what you do. Nothing you do is, you know, in the cosmos of time, is a fart in the wind. Nothing you do, or ever will do. And when you come to that realization, it is a sobering ****.
29:00 Dan Peña: I was telling the young man about, you know, some of my favorite stories are taking $60,000 and turning it into a hundred million in a hundred days. Pre-internet. Now that, you know, that’s hard for most of you to fathom. That’s one of my faves here in the city in London.
29:29 Dan Peña: Now most of the guys that know these stories are dead now or in jail, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I only was brought to my attention by one of you meatheads about 15, 18 years ago. I didn’t even never did the **** sums. Now you would think that that would be high on my priority. I didn’t know turning $820 into $444 million was 55 million percent.
30:04 Dan Peña: One of you meatheads did the sums. I didn’t know that that was 67,000% a year. One of you **** meatheads. Now if I don’t do the **** sums and I don’t know what **** percentage, why do you meatheads figure it out? Why?
30:30 Dan Peña: And so most of these numbers, stories that I relate to, I never figured out some **** meathead like you showed me. Now that’s a sad **** commentary from where I’m standing. Absolutely that’s right.
30:50 Dan Peña: Okay, when I go in and look at a person or a business, I wanna hear him talk about his dreams, not his history. His **** dreams of the future, not his history.
31:06 Dan Peña: Last night I dreamt, get this, I dreamt that I led the last bayonet charge of the United States infantry. That’s the difference. What did you dream of? And you don’t come back from the last bayonet charge.
31:38 Dan Peña: What did you think of last night? And that’s why so many people follow me. We lack leadership in this world today.
31:56 Dan Peña: We don’t lack people that need to be led. We lack the leaders to lead them. I’m asked often who am I gonna hand the baton off to, the baton, who’s gonna, nobody. I have no intention. My kids aren’t interested. I wouldn’t wish this on my kids to deal with people like you. It’s a debilitating ****. There is not gonna be any second act.
32:27 Dan Peña: And that’s why I give everything away. I plan on it, and people ask me all the time, Dan, why don’t you change the product? The reason I don’t change the product, because doing deals and raising capital has not changed except for crowdfunding. Not one ****’ iota in 20 years. Crowdfunding. That’s the only thing that’s changed. That’s new. And there’s a good book on it, which I skimmed called Bold, B-O-L-D, if you wanna know about crowdfunding.
33:00 Dan Peña: It’s a watered down QLA book, basically. But it’s called Bold, B-O-L-D, on crowdfunding. But other than that, doing deals, nothing’s changed, nothing. Now, what does that say? That nothing’s changed in 22 years.
33:19 Dan Peña: And yet, you’re all going to seminars, and you’re all buying books, and you’re all doing all this ****. And I’ve been misquoted lately when I tell you, don’t read books, no, no. Don’t read motivational books. Don’t read personal development books. Don’t read life coaching books, whatever that means. I’ve read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and **** like that. But on six or seven fingers, the books that are worth the ****, to read about making money so you can have more choices in life.
33:59 Dan Peña: That’s what it’s all about, is making more choices. I didn’t really think that I touched as many people as they’ve talked about, but I met a kid, a 27 year old kid, who came to see me in Beverly Hills. Had a **** life, blah, blah, blah. He got ahold of my **** six, seven years ago. He followed, he found a mentor. They built a dream team. They did all this stuff. It’s not funny at all. He comes back from lunch one day, and he sees the FBI, you know, where there are little things they wear around him to say they’re FBI, and the police, and they’re closing this company down.
34:30 Dan Peña: They’re arresting the founder. So the guy he picks to be his mentor, his chairman, unbeknownst to him, is a **** crook. And so five, six years of his life, down the toilet. Now I’m laughing, he’s telling me this, and he says, Mr. Peña, it’s not so funny. I said, well, I’ve been there because I’ve had a business closed down on me many, many years ago when I was a graduate student. Anyway, so I said, then what did you do? He said, well, I had to pay the bills. Like some of you, I had to put food on the table. So I went and got a job.
35:02 Dan Peña: Not too proud. He waited tables, he did this, and he finally got a job in a bakery. And he sees the woman that owns the bakery. She’s only a few years older than him. And then she says, this is a girl that’s a melon head. I mean, she doesn’t, she can’t spell bakery. And he says, so I immediately says, I quit. I gave her two weeks notice, and I started my own bakery. And the bread companies, et cetera, will give you credit, so it’s easy. Okay, so now I got a bakery.
35:32 Dan Peña: The first year, I made $45,000 net to the bottom line. The second year, I made $85,000. This year, I’m gonna make about $150,000 net to the bottom line. Margin in baked goods is 90% in some. And he says, but now what do I do? He’s back, like the Pizza Boy. Now what do I do? And I never met this kid. And I said, I’ll meet you in three days back here at the hotel. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I want you to go out and find out how many businesses, how many bakeries that do a million dollars a year revenue between one to three million dollars a year that are within a five mile radius of where your bakery is.
36:13 Dan Peña: He comes back three days later, and he says there’s about 20 or 23 of them. And so I said, and? I’m waiting for him to make the leap, and? He thought I didn’t hear what he said. 20 or 23. And I said, and? Like you, I like the looks on your faces. And? You’re gonna roll the **** up! You’re gonna buy them all! Every **** word of it! His eyes, I mean, it was like all his birthdays came at once. The ****, the bread companies give you the credit, right?
36:48 Dan Peña: It’s a no-brainer! That’s where you are! I had another guy, **** lawyer, 60 years old. Any lawyers in the group? I love beating up lawyers. Anyway, 60 years old, he comes to me, he had planned for 25, 30 years that he was gonna turn his practice over to his daughter. Bright lawyer. Three months ago, his daughter, and I mean, he’s got, he looks a little teary-eyed.
37:18 Dan Peña: In Miami Beach. He says, my daughter comes to me three months ago and she says, daddy, I wanna have some more kids. I’m leaving the practice. 25 years of planning. Down the toilet. And he says, ****. Now, of course, he’s happy for my daughter. Oh, I’m happy for you. He’s not happy for it all, okay? How many times, I don’t tell my kids I’m happy for them when I’m not happy. **** you, you ****! Anyway, and so I, he says, what do I do?
37:50 Dan Peña: I’m 60. I says, I got money, you know, I got 10 million bucks or something like that, but ****, I’m too young to retire. And you look like a pair. He was a cute little guy, little pudgy guy. And, hmm, what kind of lawyer are you? He says, immigration lawyer. Okay, are you a good one? He says, yeah, I’m the best in Florida. Yeah, yeah, okay, the best in Florida. You know, like I’m an MIT engineer, yeah, the best, okay. And so he said, but I’m risk averse.
38:22 Dan Peña: I said, okay, you’re risk averse. What percentage of cases do you win or lose? I win 100% of my cases. When was the last case you lost? He says, 36 years ago, my first case. I haven’t lost a case since. Bells went off in my head. This isn’t just braggadocio **** from a little short fat lawyer, is it? No, no. I said, so you have confidence in something in life, don’t you? I says, yeah, you’re gonna be the first no-fee
38:58 Dan Peña: If you’re not successful, you don’t pay me. Immigration lawyer in Florida. I mean, he lost 40 pounds instantly. He sat up straight, his eyes stopped watering. I can do that. This is what I do. There’s not a problem. I used to do a deal. You tell me your business idea in 60 seconds, and I’ll tell you in 90 seconds whether it’s worth a ****, you can make it work, or whether you should **** can it.
39:29 Dan Peña: I also used to go around and say, you’re gonna make it, you’re gonna make it, you’re not. But I don’t do that anymore. And you ask me why. Because I’m only right 99.9% of the time. And even though I told you you wouldn’t, you may be the one-tenth of a percent that I’m wrong. But I can’t remember the last time I was wrong, but I am not 100%. And I change people’s lives instantly right there.
40:02 Dan Peña: And I wanna change your lives not because of that, just because I’ve been through so many transactions. And plus I can tell. I can tell by the look in your eye. I can see fear in your eye. I can smell death. So I don’t do that exercise anymore. I don’t do the 90 seconds, 120 seconds either anymore. But I used to in the early days when I used to whack them, not hit the attendees.
40:34 Dan Peña: So I mean, when you’ve been through so much, and I can tell, and does the guy that’s inspired have a better chance than a guy that’s desperate? No, there’s no correlation. Just like we took the losers, as opposed to the winners, there’s no correlation. The correlation, and the only correlation, and you should remember this, is how bad things happen to good people all the time.
41:06 Dan Peña: All the time. Life’s not fair, hopefully we all know that. But it’s how you process what happens to you that determines how you move forward. Not what happens to you. It’s how we process it. That’s the only thing that matters. So of the people, if we took the winners in this group, or the losers in the, if we had another group, it will be how they process the information.
41:37 Dan Peña: And who, either by action or design, happens to put themselves or their back against the wall first. Because you don’t do it on purpose, guys. Put your back, believe me. But by accident, some of you will get your back against the wall, and then you’ll perform. There’s a great story in Sun Tzu, the Art of War. The old generals down there, with a bunch of young generals, and they’re gonna, and anybody knows anything about military, you want the high ground for the superior force, if you can. But if you don’t have a superior force, at least you want the **** high ground.
42:10 Dan Peña: So the old general whips everybody down to the low ground. And he puts the raging river at their back, and the superior force on the hill above. And the young general says, what the ****? No, what are you doing to us? And so the old general says, we’re here, gentlemen, because we’re either gonna fight or die. That’s it, fight or die. And the preservation instinct will get you through most times, but that’s the last thing you want, is to be put, or either back against the wall, preservation, you know, fight or flight, life or death.
42:59 Dan Peña: We’ve been trained. There’s, for those of you, we’ve got any anthropologists in the room, any paleontologists, or any of that kind of, okay, well. About six or seven years ago, a new form of being was discovered between a joint venture between China and Australia, and it’s called the Red Deer Man. It was in a cave, on the, a series of caves on the eastern part of China, just above Hunan Province. And just in the last couple years, it’s been ascertained, these guys that they found, they originally, when they saw them, they thought they were three, four, 500,000 years old, because of the features, they were kind of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, et cetera.
43:39 Dan Peña: But when they did the DNA testing, they were only 13 to 17,000 years old. Now, for those of you that understand history, the Homo sapiens, you guys, had been around between 40 and 70, 80,000 years, supposedly, and looked more or less like humans. Well, how is this possible when these guys looked like **** apes, and they were around 13 to 17,000 years, and Homo sapiens, erectus, whatever it goes, it was 40 to 80.
44:14 Dan Peña: And it came to the realization that most of the, what we’ve learned about evolution is probably wrong. And they call the guy the Enigma Man. Those are the guys they found in the caves, okay. Well, to me, you’re the Enigma Man, because everything that I’ve said here today, so far, and you’re gonna be a lot of other stuff I say, throughout the day, is not new.
44:50 Dan Peña: It’s between 400 and 2,000 years old. So what have you been **** reading? What podcasts have you been listening to? And like I said, you can’t pay your bills with a **** zen.
45:10 Dan Peña: What have you been doing? Have you been just jerking around, you know, trying to fool yourself? And that’s why I get back to inspiration and desperation. How serious are you about being a high-performance person? And money’s not everything, it’s the only thing anybody keeps track of, since the pyramid. My pyramid’s bigger than your pyramid, yada yada, okay. I read just yesterday, or no, today, this morning, do you realize the water level has risen since 1991 or 1993, 30 millimeters.
45:49 Dan Peña: Now, I don’t know how much 30 millimeters is, but it’s not too much. And it’s now thought that we are grossly underestimated the rise in water, and that in the next 30 to 50 years, the water level’s gonna go up between 30 and 70 centimeters, which is a lot more, okay. Now, I’ve been saying this since 1993. New York’s not gonna be there anymore. Miami Beach, Los Angeles, the Netherlands, all these places that are near the water level are gonna be, they need, forget about it.
46:30 Dan Peña: So the next big round of major lawsuits is gonna be class action malpractice for lawyers not describing this and their perspectives when you buy all these **** buildings. I’ve been saying this since 1993. I’ve also been saying since 1993, we got too much **** debt, which is not, that’s a no-****-brainer, I mean, right? But, you know, I was hoping that the US government would let everybody go under in 2008, nine, 10, but it didn’t happen, and I doubt I’m gonna live long enough to see a president or somebody not bail everybody out, but the free market is best, but I’m not gonna get into that.
47:14 Dan Peña: So, enigma men, you are an enigma to me. I don’t understand, intellectually, how you can be so **** stupid. Some of the things I told Brian the Mustard in not such a kind way, I might add, but he sucked up his pantyhose, manned up, and he got through it. I don’t understand. Some of the choices he made, and when we talk about the case study, he can elaborate on it.
47:44 Dan Peña: I just, I’m trying to think, what the ****? He’s 40 years old. What could he have possibly been thinking? And then, about 15 years ago, 18 years, it doesn’t matter what they’re thinking. All I got to do is slap them in the head and get them to do the right thing. But I used to be an engineer-ish, anal kind of person and want to know why. I don’t give a **** why now, and have it for a long, long, long, long time. All I know is what the **** works.
48:16 Dan Peña: Correct, correct. And now I’ve got so many case studies. I didn’t need any **** case studies. You guys needed the case study, not me. I knew what **** worked. And I know what other people do that don’t teach this, or coach, or mentor. I know how successful they’ve been doing the same thing I do. They call it something different. But it’s always action-related, and the reason why I tell you not to read books is because you’ve been deluded into thinking that reading books is part of the learning process. It’s not pulling the trigger, and failing fast is part of the learning process.
48:53 Dan Peña: See, you all have a lot of dots because you’ve read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, but none of you know how to connect them, ****. And the only way you connect the **** is by doing stuff, is by doing stuff.
49:08 Dan Peña: And I think that slide that I just alluded to about connecting the dots is one of the revelations that Brian Rose had when he saw that from an engineering point of view, is because we teach you how to connect the dots. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody else does. And even if there is somebody else I don’t know about, I’m sure there may be, then produce any results.
49:37 Dan Peña: Because if you produce results, you wanna talk about it. Like I just recently, in my endeavors to try to get a Mexican passport, found out what my mother’s real name was, what my grandmother’s real name was, both born in Mexico, my full name of my grandfather, and that means what my real name is. And my real name isn’t Daniel Steven Peña.
50:07 Dan Peña: My real name is Daniel Steven Ortiz Ortiz Tenoco Peña. And in 1836, the president of Mexico was named Peña, 1836.
50:29 Dan Peña: Which doesn’t mean dick to me, but I think to myself, if the president of your family, or just the relative that have been the president or the prime minister of Canada, or the president, or wherever the ****, don’t you think you’d know about it?
50:49 Dan Peña: I would’ve thought somebody would’ve told me that my great-great sixth grade’s grandfather was the president of **** Mexico. So to say I’m suspect is an understatement of biblical proportion. Inspiration or desperation. Go through the thought process, not here, and when we share information, and when you get to talk, what was the final thing?
51:20 Dan Peña: When value is clear, decisions are easy, okay? So at some point, value was clear for you, and so the decision to come here and write and compete, and a couple of you wrote a whole bunch of emails to me, or to Brian, I should say. And I met with a kid last night. I have a contest that if you enter questions, ask the $50 billion man, and you can win a free castle seminar. And our first recipient and winner of that is gonna attend the April Castle seminar next week.
51:54 Dan Peña: He’s a guy from, I think, Bulgaria, and he had to ask the best question, and then the second place winners were four people, supposedly, asked the second best question, that I would spend the afternoon, we’d take the lunch, as I travel around the world, they gotta make an appointment. And there were so many good ones, I picked eight second places. But this kid, who I met with last night, who flew here from Munich, okay, he submitted 101 questions to this contest, and he’s got them here, 101.
52:24 Dan Peña: And he’s not the most, we’ve got one guy that submitted 250 questions, but, and we’ll pick the winner for the first six months of this year in July or August. And, but I thumb through them, then read everyone. And he says, he has read every single thing on my website, which is kind of anal German, he may have. He’s 27 years old, he looks younger than you.
52:55 Dan Peña: He’s 27, though. Three-piece suit, he’s got a mentor chairman, he’s built a dream team, the whole nine yards. But he still wants to compete and get a free seminar, because the one thing that under leadership, his leadership, you can build a dream team, and that’s all great, but if you don’t pull the **** trigger, it doesn’t make any difference. And when I told him that, he looked at me. I mean, he didn’t, he didn’t [inaudible] what, why he had done this the last year and nothing’s happened.
53:34 Dan Peña: How many acquisitions did you go after? None. And I went through this five, six questions, none, none, nein, nein, niet.
53:49 Dan Peña: You gotta pull the trigger. So you can do all the spread sheet, and you can’t, you want to, the rest of your **** lives. And then none of these questions are earth-shattering. You’ve got 101 of them. But unless you pull the trigger, and he’s inspired, I believe the kid really is inspired. He took a lot of time, and he came, he flew here for a 25, 35 minute meeting with me.
54:20 Dan Peña: But unless, even when you’re inspired, I would rather have you desperate than inspired, because I can suck **** out of you better if you’re desperate, because most of us have been trained to be risk averse. I like risk. I write a blog once a month for Brian, and I think in one of my, the first blog or the second blog, I talked about, I failed at 20-plus things last year.
54:52 Dan Peña: I didn’t make it up, it’s for real. I’ve failed 20-something times. But nobody’s interested in the 20 things that I failed in, and see, that’s what you guys keep track of. People are only interested in, I could write 20 books on my failures. I keep pulling the trigger, and I pull the trigger much faster now the last five or 10 years than I did the first 10 years.
55:25 Dan Peña: Now, some of you should turn the key on your business. Down deep in your heart, in your gut. Some of you know that. Hard to do, it’s hard to do, it is. And I tell the story about inspiration and desperation. Many years ago, I used to teach a thing called the Center for Entrepreneurial Management. It was in Newport Beach, if I remember correctly.
55:57 Dan Peña: And they had a guy come, he was the third generation to a big lumber yard fortune or something like that. And lumber prices were going down, and this was in the 90s, and he was losing, and he had lost in the last five years two-thirds of the equity that the two previous generations had built up. And we talked briefly, and I said, well, why don’t you just turn the key and pay off the pensions, et cetera, and you’ve got enough money to retire.
56:31 Dan Peña: Because I don’t know when lumber prices are going to go in your favor, because they were imported from South America and all these places. You can take lumber, because I was in the lumber business in the last couple years, too. You can take lumber from Florida and ship it to the EU cheaper, and you can take lumber from Austria and sell it in the EU. Yeah, I mean, it’s unbelievable. Anyway, so I tell this guy what to do. The next year, I’m back, and he says to the center, and he likes to go to classes.
57:04 Dan Peña: He likes to do books and all that ****. This is before podcasts and ****. He’d be a Realer, for sure he’d be a Realer. A do-nothing Realer. Anyway, so he comes back again, and now he’s only got 20% of the equity, retained earnings left of the company. And he told me privately, in confidence, that he had gone through, he had an overfunded pension fund for his employees, and he had started dipping into it.
57:36 Dan Peña: And I went to the head of the guy, and I told him, you gotta tell him not to do that. He’s gonna go to jail, but anyway. The next year I come back, he’s not there. I said, what happened to Rufus Doofus? And he says, oh, they went BK, the IRS came in, took him away, because he couldn’t pull the trigger. Now, that’s a harder trigger to pull with it. I had another, and I can go story after story after story about these guys that couldn’t pull the trigger.
58:08 Dan Peña: And they wound up, you know, unfortunately some have committed suicide, some of them this, some of that. But the bottom line is, you know, even though they were desperate, if you have desperation or inspiration, and you can’t pull the trigger, you’re no better off. You’re no better off. Oh no, you’re a third-generator. Yeah, I did, because by definition, that means he’s **** up with the other guys that created. And, correct.
58:39 Dan Peña: Yeah, but the other guys are the ones that created the wealth by taking the risk, and now the, well, he’s gone now, and he’s dead now on top of it. Not because of that, I don’t believe. And, but we get countless stories. And the thing is, these stories are all the same. And when you’ve been doing it 22 years, when I say I would rather have you desperate than inspired, I mean it. Because I may be able to suck some action out of you if you’re desperate. It’s not likely I’m going to suck some action.
59:09 Dan Peña: You could inspire desperate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not likely I’m going to be able to suck much out of you if you’re inspired. Because if you’re inspired, you had some success. You made some money. And I understand all that. I’ve been there, done that. But give me a desperate guy, like the old saying was, give me a desperate woman every time. Give me a **** desperate woman every single time. I don’t want any inspired **** starlets.
59:40 Dan Peña: Give me one that’s grateful. Yeah, give me, I’ll show myself a good time. I’ll show myself a good time. And it’s the same with you kids. It’s the same with you kids. But none of it’s new. I now know, after almost 22 years, that the guys or the gals that are able to use this methodology the most successfully are guys and gals that feel that they’re trying not to have regrets when they get older.
1:00:30 Dan Peña: And I want you to, when you die, I want you to have a regret purse that is half as big as this book. You know how the man purses they carry around? Half as big as this book. And right now, if you were to die tonight, your regrets could fill up this room. One of you, not the group, cumulatively. And the closer you get to running out of runway, and I’m running out of runway, people tell me, you know?
1:01:03 Dan Peña: I don’t particularly think I’m running out of runway, but I’m in great shape. But people that are my age or a little younger start to think about legacy. You don’t have to be the outgoing president to think about your legacy. And you’ll start to think about your legacy. Those of you that are a little older, have you led a desperate life, a quiet life of desperation, or have you led an inspired life?
1:01:39 Dan Peña: I almost hired Tom Cruise’s assistant a few years ago. And the guy was a sharp guy, and I asked him, well, what’s the lifestyle of Mr. Cruise? Not withstanding a Scientologist, which doesn’t mean anything to me. And he says, he gets up every single morning like he never made a movie. He gets up every single morning like he never read a script. He gets up every single morning and works out physically so he can try to maintain his useful look as long as he can, because he knows that’s part of his shtick for being a hero in movies.
1:02:15 Dan Peña: But every morning he gets up like he never had a success. And what are we taught, especially here in Britain, pop a bottle of champagne, kick back. I mean, the high performance people, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, myself, and a bunch of other guys all have something in common. We all used to sleep in our offices. Richard Branson, excuse me, Ted Turner also, on his 75th birthday at CNN.
1:02:47 Dan Peña: Funny that CNN would do a special on the 75th birthday because he was the founder of CNN. He said, you can accomplish so much more in a 24 hour day, 24 hour day. Many years ago, they thought that Bill Gates had been kidnapped and they got the FBI and they’re searching around for him, and they found him asleep in a sleeping bag under his desk. I used to sleep in my office. Jobs used to sleep in his office. We did a chart of man hours, and this is based on Michael Milken, for those of you that are old enough, who was an inspired guy, the father of junk bonds.
1:03:26 Dan Peña: When he paid himself 550 million dollars back in the middle 80s, why is it that you’re so much smarter than anybody else, Mr. Milken? No, I just work harder. He says, I work 364 days a year. I take the highest holy day, which I think is Rosh Hashanah, off, he’s a Jewish guy. I work 20 hours a day, I only need two hours sleep. And if you add those, you do the sums. He was 46 or 47, now I’m 88 years old.
1:03:58 Dan Peña: Again, one of you meatheads did the sums for me, and we double checked them. If you work 15 hours a day, for the number of years that I have worked, I’m 131 years old.
1:04:19 Dan Peña: I’ve got 61 more years experience in my 70 years. In the years that I created most of my wealth, bricks and mortar, for 10 years, I focus on one thing. And if you would come to visit me at the castle, I’d have dinner with you, and I’d go back to my office, and my wife would entertain you. I’d get up, and I’d have breakfast with you, have a cup of coffee, and I’d put you in one of my cars, and I’d send you off to Carnoustie or St Andrews to play golf, and I’d go back to work.
1:04:50 Dan Peña: For 10 **** years, there were weeks I never left the house. I never went into the fresh air. There were months I never left the **** estate, 156 acres, there were months I never left the estate. And those are the years I turned 60 grand into 100 million. I turned 480 into 450 million. It’s no accident.
1:05:21 Dan Peña: Now I was desperate when I started the company, but I became inspired because I like success. And I like more than anything doing **** that people say I can’t do. That’s a sexual experience. And doing deals is so far and way better than sex, you have no **** idea. I mean, sex on a list of one to 100 is in the 90s.
1:05:50 Dan Peña: Doing deals and doing one after another after another. I mean, it’s an aphrodisiac. Like I told Asprey, I’m high on life. I don’t need DMT, what’s it called? DMT or ayahuasca, ****, ****, whatever, that’s all ****. Those are for losers. I’m high on life and have been for almost 50 years. And I’m like this normally.
1:06:22 Dan Peña: This isn’t an act, this is how I talk. And I treat everybody the same as my children would say. Dad doesn’t discriminate, treats everybody the same like ****. And I do. And I’m harder on my kids than I am on you.
1:06:42 Dan Peña: But I would rather, I hope that you’re desperate. You’re not inspired. Because then you got a chance. You got a chance. And even if you’re desperate, unless you’re willing to put your back against the wall and take risk and the risk that you guys wanna take or risk that’s measurable. No, I want you to take unquantified risk.
1:07:13 Dan Peña: It’s not like shooting craps, no it isn’t. It’s more like putting your money on red. And I allow people that I’ll let you take hits above the water line all day long. I’ll let you make mistakes all day long above the water line. I won’t let you take a hit below the water line because then you can **** sink the ship, the business, everything. And you’ll say, well Dan, if you’re only 99.9% right, how do you know one of those things are gonna be a hit below the water line?
1:07:49 Dan Peña: I don’t. But if you’re only wrong once every 10, 15 years, the odds are in my favor. So I’ve stacked the odds now. But when it happens to you and you fail, it’s 100%, Dan’s ****. And what I’ve tried to teach Brian when he’s trying to read you through your stories, they’re only telling you the obvious ****, Brian. They’re not telling you the whole truth.
1:08:22 Dan Peña: Because if you said the whole truth, contrary to what you think, you are all ****. You’re a higher level ****, but you’re still a ****. Because you don’t tell the whole truth. Because the whole truth is too **** debilitating.
1:08:42 Dan Peña: Scary. Not for me it’s not, but for you it is. And even though I intellectually understand, I don’t give a ****, I don’t give a ****. Because I realize, I now realize, I don’t know if I told Brian this or Sally this, Sally, my wife is visiting her mother in France right now, but I now know, after all these years, a doctor’s gotta learn to lose patients.
1:09:13 Dan Peña: Even the best doctor loses patients. And how do you get used to that? I know how you get used to it. Some just aren’t gonna make it. Now, I’m not much for bedside manner, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out. So I’d be a **** doctor as far as that concerns me. But some of the best surgeons I know, friends of mine, they make my style look like bedside manner.
1:09:46 Dan Peña: But when you’re pushing the edge of the envelope, and success, Ross Perot told me many years ago, success is on the razor edge of failure. Success is on the razor edge of failure. When you’re pushing the envelope all the time, you’re gonna have casualties. But as long as you know it’s not Sophie’s choice, as long as you’re cognizant of the fact that collateral damage is gonna be human life, then you can do it.
1:10:16 Dan Peña: Then you can do it. And you guys over-complicate the issues. You make spreadsheets, garbage in, garbage out. You can run a million permutations, but unless you change the information in, the answer’s not gonna change coming out. So you run countless spreadsheets, countless analysis, and you become paralyzed. Research is an excuse not to take action.
1:10:50 Dan Peña: Procrastination is an excuse not to take action. Because if you’re waiting for the perfect scenario, it’ll never come. There was a slide earlier on by Michelangelo. People knew how much work I put into this mastery. People would not be so surprised. It wouldn’t be so envious. Some of you, as Earl here on the right alluded to, when he said, and I made $12 an hour, if you take all the money I’ve made, and divide it by an hour, it’s more than the minimum wage.
1:11:25 Dan Peña: But it’s not like you would think. And it’s Four-Hour Work Week, and that’s all ****. That’s just unbelievable ****. But when you think about it, how stupid is the public to believe in the four-hour work week? How **** gullible is the public to believe in the four-hour work week? Exactly, but I mean, anybody that’s more than 20 years old ought to know better.
1:11:56 Dan Peña: The operative word there is ought to know better. But they don’t. They don’t. And the two things I’m gonna announce tonight before we break, one of which is gonna make it easier for you to enact QLA, and I never have to see you again. I’m so happy I don’t know whether to **** or go blind.
1:12:28 Dan Peña: I’m so **** happy to think I never have to look at you ****, you sorry **** again. And nobody in the industry is doing what I’m gonna announce tonight. And it’ll be an exclusive for the London **** Realers.
1:12:50 Dan Peña: What? If you take action, no, it won’t. But it’ll allow you, no, I don’t wanna steal my own thunder, but it’s just like I gave everything away because I was tired of hearing the excuse that my **** cost too much money. Like my book used to be 500 bucks, I guess it was, 497. And I don’t sell the book anymore, although people write me, Dan, can I have a clean copy of the book?
1:13:20 Dan Peña: I don’t want the Torrent copy because, I didn’t even know what Torrent was a few years ago, but anyway, and so we still, you know, if you want a clean copy, please, don’t write me, use the Torrent. But we do have clean copies that we send the books out from time to time. But people used to complain because I mean the deal and acquisition course, as you would call it, was 200 bucks. The Financing Your Dream was 300 bucks.
1:13:53 Dan Peña: So they weren’t cheap. And I didn’t give a **** that they came in DVDs and it only cost me a nickel to make them, I didn’t give a ****. You don’t like it, don’t buy it, asshole. But they complain and plus you have to do customer service, you got to take your **** phone calls by a **** **** moaning ****, **** you. So we just give it to you. We take that excuse away. But now the thing I’m about to do is even one step beyond. I’m not paying you to take the **** from me.
1:14:27 Dan Peña: Yeah, so don’t get crazy on me. Yeah, I’m not paying you. But it’s the next best thing. But I’d be sitting there and I’d get an email from one of my assistants, I have three assistants, and they said this guy says that the, back in the old days tapes did wear out. I mean, tapes did wear out. But DVDs and CDs, they can’t wear out. And they’d say that, so we used to replace the tapes for free.
1:15:00 Dan Peña: And then when we say, okay, you want a tape? I mean, just pay for the shipping. And it’s not like an internet deal where the shipping only cost me a nickel and I’m charging you $8. I mean, all we do, no, no, you should pay for the shipping. And then I put my book in Romanian on my site because I have a lot of Romanians, a lot of gypsies follow my ****. And so I put the Romanian, translated on my dime, the book into Romanian, you can get it in Romanian. So then the guy said, well, why don’t you put it in English on your site so we can get that?
1:15:33 Dan Peña: So then we don’t have to have a Torrent copy. And I said, no, I won’t do that. I did it for the gypsies because the gypsies were nice to me, the Romanians. Huh? Yeah, and, but see, I could take you and hold your **** hand through the deal and it won’t make any difference. No, no, but I can take you and I can walk you through and stand by your side to every step of the deal.
1:16:08 Dan Peña: And that’s not gonna make you a high performance person. It’ll get you one deal done. And I have, you know, and I learned the hard way. I’ve learned the hard way, you know, because I’ve walked hundreds of them over 22 years. And unless you do it yourself, you know, instead of looking at me every time a question comes up, unless you do it yourself, it doesn’t have any lasting effect because you’re building self-esteem as you go through it.
1:16:38 Dan Peña: You’re believing in yourself. And Dan holding your hand, getting the **** deal done isn’t increasing your self-esteem any. Yeah, some bragging rights and, you know, the $50 billion man did this, that, and the other thing. But it doesn’t get you, it doesn’t help you in the long term. And I want to assist you and force you by putting you in a corner to perform. Because I know what you’re capable of. Because I’ve seen it, I’ve seen some real, and it’s not all money.
1:17:11 Dan Peña: I had a woman who were here recently who ran a 50 mile marathon. Short, fat, pudgy, you know, varicose veins, cellulite, flabby **** ass. And she did it in a decent time. She did it in like 11, 12 hours. You know, I ran 50 miles in seven hours and 45 minutes, but, but I mean, for an old tub of ****, house, 50 year old housewife, that’s pretty **** good. That’s a lot faster than most people in this **** room.
1:17:43 Dan Peña: And like I was telling somebody earlier, people now run marathons, this slays me. Oh, I did my, what was your time in the marathon? Oh, five hours and six minutes. That’s walking. What was the time, oh, four hours and 38 minutes. Why even do it? First marathon I ran was three hours and five minutes. Second was 2:58.
1:18:13 Dan Peña: I went to, and I got no athletic ability whatsoever. I got no slow twitch or fast twitch muscles. I go to Boston, Shorter, Rodgers and me in the front line. I said I was gonna run 2:30 or die. Well, I didn’t run 2:30 and they pulled me off at Heartbreak Hill, collapsed. They say I was in the medical tent between 13 and 17 minutes.
1:18:46 Dan Peña: They don’t know for sure, they lost track. I wake up, am I dead? I get up, I get back on the track, the doctors are trying to hold me back. I finish three hours and 17 minutes because I was gonna be damned if I didn’t finish the **** race. I went out at 5:30 pace with the leaders. I was in great shape, so I thought. I was the only 200 pound marathoner in the group.
1:19:19 Dan Peña: I weighed 200 pounds. I slimmed down to 200. They weighed 130. Someone, you mean he has done the calculations, the difference in calories I’m burning? There was no way. They were surprised I got to 17 miles.
1:19:40 Dan Peña: No risk, no glory. At my 70th birthday, we’re gonna skydive. Now, I’ve skydived before, and but you’d think of as many people are coming to my birthday, I’d have a longer list of skydivers. I don’t have a real big list. Right now the list is, well, Brian. Okay, right now the list is five or six. And so, and we’re gonna do some other crazy **** at my 70th, but there was an old lady, a 100 year old lady who just turned 100 and she skydived, if you saw it on the news.
1:20:25 Dan Peña: I think she’s in Australia. And I told my wife, I said, well, the old **** ought to **** swim with the sharks. The next week, the old **** swimming with the sharks. I said, that’s filthy ****. I mean, and her great grandchildren, everybody’s all worried. I’ve swum with the sharks before. I wanna do it again, I wanna do it again. I jumped on a great white with a baseball bat and a **** 45 automatic.
1:20:56 Dan Peña: This is God’s truth. Drunk on my ass. I actually fell off, I didn’t do it on purpose. I fell off the ****, this is the days I had a yacht. And I fell off, you ****, bam, bam, bam, dang, dang, dang, dang. By the grace of God, I didn’t get killed. But you can’t kill me. You can’t. I’ve done a lot of crazy ****, you can’t kill me. And that’s why I know I’m gonna, my biggest fear is I’m gonna outlive my children.
1:21:26 Dan Peña: That’s my biggest fear, because I don’t wanna do that, nobody should do that. Outlive me, but that’s my biggest fear. Because I got another good 50 years in me, easy. Easy. And so, my greatest regret, and then we’re gonna break for lunch, right? I’m a combat-trained military officer that never saw combat. That’s my biggest regret. I think of it every **** day. I never got to pull the trigger with all my training.
1:22:06 Dan Peña: Okay, let’s break for lunch.
