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Dan Peña - The Brutal Truth About Wealth, Power & Weak Men

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December 6, 2025

Executive High Performance Success Coach & Founder of QLA

“The person who gets laser beam focus first, and stays laser beam focused longest, wins most.”

In short: Dan Peña is the business coach behind the Quantum Leap Advantage (QLA) methodology, which he teaches at his home, Guthrie Castle in Scotland. In this conversation, published in December 2025, Dan returned to London Real for the first time in six years, eleven years after his first interview with Brian Rose was released at Easter 2014.

Over three hours, Dan gave Brian his view of the business mood in the United States, why he believes the people coming through his seminars are weaker but getting faster results, how seller finance has become central to QLA, and why he thinks every business now needs to take AI seriously. He also talked about his plan to help fix the finances of the Catholic Church, his move into podcasting, Bitcoin, Dubai, and what he sees as the next big resource play.

The conversation was also personal. Dan pushed Brian on why he does not take more risk, and the two talked about fear, boxing, fathers and self-esteem.

Key takeaways

Focus wins. Dan told Brian that after 50 years in business and 33 years of coaching, the person who gets laser-focused first and stays focused longest wins most.
Accountability is the answer. He said most of the problems Brian raised come back to accountability, which is what he still tries to give the people he mentors.
Seller finance first. Dan said QLA now pushes students to forget the banks for their first deals and use seller finance: “you name the price, I name the terms”.
Every business needs AI. In his view a large share of jobs will be replaced by AI over the next 10 to 20 years, and any business not using it should think again.
Ask whether this is really for you. Dan said the most important question anyone studying QLA can ask is whether it is really for them, because if you only try, you will fail.
You are the average of the people around you. He argued that most people’s advisers are family and neighbours who know nothing about building high performers, which is why a mentor matters.
Learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable. He told Brian that 95% of the things we worry about never happen, and that his own lack of risk-taking was rooted in self-esteem.

Six years on: focus, accountability and the mood in America

Brian opened by recalling their history: the first interview at Easter 2014, his time at Dan’s castle seminar later that year, London Real’s documentary The $50 Billion Man and live events at the Ritz. Dan explained that he now teaches only at Guthrie Castle, still speaks pro bono at universities, and is directly involved in 26 companies.

Asked about the state of the world, Dan said the answer to most of it is accountability and focus. He gave his view that it had become acceptable again in the United States to be bold and to talk openly about making money, and said this had extended his own runway as a coach.

He said the people arriving at his seminars were weaker than ever, but that results were better because QLA now uses live testimonials, webinars and a heavy emphasis on seller finance. He described students closing deals within months rather than years, and a growing number who want to exit young.

Weak men, college and the future of work

Dan told Brian he believes the West is getting weaker because of poor role models, and talked about the hard upbringing he had from his own father. He said communication skills had suffered as young people spent years online, and that, if he had the choice again, he probably would not send his children to college, arguing that degrees count for little without the hustle.

On AI, Dan said 40 to 60% of jobs could be replaced within 10 to 20 years, and described robots already being used at the castle. He talked about Elon Musk’s idea of a future without jobs or money, and about chairing an AI-in-finance company led by a 33-year-old founder.

The Church, charity and a life of deals

Dan explained his plan to help the Catholic Church in the United States run its parishes, hospitals and schools as businesses, starting diocese by diocese, and said it would take at least half his time. He also described more than 20 years of supporting missions run by the Missionaries of Charity in several countries, and watching abandoned children grow up, go to school and find work.

He looked back on his career: arriving in London in 1981, his oil years at Great Western, the TV series Landman as a reminder of how that business worked, and the risks he took to raise money from governments and investors. He said he does not worry about money because he has lost and made back hundreds of millions in his life.

Fear, boxing and Brian’s next step

Brian described his own boxing matches and said he now tries to engineer fear into his life, something he learned from Dan and QLA. Dan said he had boxed at his seminars in the 1990s, and that getting into the ring makes cold calling look easy. He then told Brian he still has a riskless model and should be doing more with the audience he has built.

The two talked about Brian’s relationship with his father, and Dan said the root of a lack of risk-taking is low self-esteem, which he believes is set in the first seven or eight years of life. He said you need a mentor to show you what you are not doing, and that in sales it often takes 17 noes before a yes.

Bitcoin, water, Dubai and where to start

On Bitcoin, Dan said that as an old trader he would sell a third on big spikes and keep two-thirds, and warned that holding most of your assets in it means a very volatile life. He gave his view that water rights will be the next big resource play, and that Dubai is where business is happening, provided you work with established law firms and expect extra fees at closings.

For anyone who feels weak and wants to change, Dan suggested starting with his free guide QLA for Dummies and his book Your First Hundred Million, both available on his website. He closed with news of a podcast of his own and more seminars at the castle.

Who is Dan Peña?

Dan Peña was born in 1945 in Jacksonville, Florida, and graduated in business administration from San Fernando Valley State College, now California State University, Northridge. He became president of Great Western Resources, a Houston-based oil company listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, and the same year bought Guthrie Castle in Angus, Scotland.

He is the creator of the Quantum Leap Advantage methodology and runs his QLA Castle Seminar and Hardcore Seminar at Guthrie Castle. His book Your First Hundred Million and his other material are available through his website. Dan has appeared on London Real many times since 2014 and was the subject of the London Real documentary The $50 Billion Man.

Frequently asked questions

When did Dan Peña appear on London Real?

Dan first appeared on London Real in an interview released at Easter 2014. This conversation, his return after six years, was published in December 2025.

What is QLA?

QLA, or Quantum Leap Advantage, is Dan Peña’s method for building wealth by acquiring businesses, often using seller finance, and holding people strictly accountable.

What does Dan Peña think about AI?

He told Brian Rose that 40 to 60% of jobs could be replaced by AI within 10 to 20 years, and that every business should be using it.

Does Dan Peña think college is worth it?

He said he probably would not send his children to college today, arguing that degrees count for little without hustle and that many graduates are left with debt.

Where should someone start with Dan Peña’s material?

Dan recommended starting with his free guide QLA for Dummies, then his book Your First Hundred Million, which he makes available on his website.

What is The $50 Billion Man?

The $50 Billion Man is London Real’s feature-length documentary about Dan Peña, mentioned by Brian Rose in the introduction to this episode.

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Full transcript: Dan Pena on London Real

2:24 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dan Pena, the high performance business coach, founder of the Quantum Leap Advantage, and one of the most uncompromising voices on finance, discipline, and personal accountability. For more than three decades, you have taught people how to build generational wealth from nothing, how to construct businesses that actually scale, and how to remove the emotional weakness that stops most people before they ever start.

2:50 Thousands have trained with you in person. Millions have done so virtually, and the impact can be measured in the trillions of dollars. You are a defining force in the history of London Real. From our groundbreaking first interview released Easter of 2014 to my time at your castle seminar later that year, to our feature-length documentary film The $50 Billion Man, to our live events at the Ritz and beyond, and through many multi-hour conversations that have reached tens of millions of people around the world.

3:18 Today, I want to get your thoughts on the global wealth reshuffle, the geopolitical tensions pushing the West towards instability, the rise of AI and automation, the disruption of money through crypto, and what people must do now to stay competitive in a world that no longer tolerates hesitation and emotional softness. Dan, welcome back to London Real.

3:38 Dan Peña: Thank you very much.

3:38 Brian Rose: It’s been six years.

3:39 Dan Peña: Yeah, six years. It’s been 11 years since the start.

3:43 Brian Rose: I know. Where you been for six years? Were you boycotting me?

3:46 Dan Peña: No. No. I mean, the, um, as you know, I mean, the seminar I give now, I only give at my home, Guthrie Castle, and I still speak pro bono at universities and I’m not going to stop that. I’ve got a couple new leafs to extend my table or my runway, so to speak. And the, and I’m still busy.

4:09 I’m involved directly in 26 companies, indirectly in about a hundred and the, and I keep the kids, which, you know, I call everybody a kid because I’m either old enough to be your grandfather or your father. I keep the kids on their toes and I do my best, which is better than 99.9% of anybody else, to keep them accountable because almost all the things you just mentioned. Okay. The answer is accountability. There was a, oh, not a book, I think maybe Mrs.

4:42 Gates, Bill’s mother, wrote a book about when she had Warren Buffett over for dinner, you know, 40 years ago, and they were sitting around the table and Warren’s there, Bill Gates Senior, his dad, the lawyer, and Bill. And so there was a lull in the conversation, and his mom said, “Uh, what would you,” and she didn’t point the question either at Bill or at Warren, “what would you say is the single one single thing, using one word, for your success?” They both said at the same time, “Focus.”

5:13 And what I’ve said for 50 years of my career and 33 years of coaching, the guy or gal or it now that gets laser beam focus first, stays laser beam focused longest, wins most. And it’s about focus. And focus is the answer to almost all those comments that you made. The president is focused. He’s not just focused on getting even with the people that f***ed him around.

5:37 Nobody has won an office in politics around the world, I believe, that didn’t get as much s*** as he got. Okay. And he’s still there. And I wouldn’t bet against him being a president again in ’29.

5:48 Correct.

5:48 Brian Rose: You’re predicting Trump will still be in that Oval Office.

5:51 Dan Peña: Just as I predicted one negative oil in 2020, just I predicted he was going to bomb Iran, and he just, he bombed Iran. To say he thinks outside the box is an understatement of biblical proportion. He doesn’t even have a box. He thinks out of the stratosphere. And so whatever you think absolutely he cannot do, he will do.

6:12 Now I’m told, I have no absolute proof about this, but he’s got people that are backing him. Haven’t told him they’re working on changing the Constitution with their money, not his money, not the government money, with their money. So, um, he can run again. So we’ll see. I told you just before we went on air, my career has been lengthened, my runway has been lengthened due to President Trump because 75% of the things I agree with, 25% of the things he does I wouldn’t do the way he does them, but he’s president, I’m not, okay?

6:49 So, and he can get away with, I want to say murder, but he can get away with anything because he’s the most powerful guy on the planet. So, um

6:57 Brian Rose: How has he extended your runway? Because he’s going to lower rates because he’s pumping in

7:01 Dan Peña: Because it makes it cool to be brave again correct. I haven’t seen the buzz that’s in New York City since the ’80s.

7:10 Walking around there.

7:10 Well, I mean, people are walking like on skateboards, you know, from Back to the Future. People are, you know, you’re not ashamed to make, well, when I was there, if you made two or three million dollars, you got your balls busted. You’re not ashamed to make 20, 30 million bucks now a year. And some of the guys, we had a hedge fund guy that came to the seminar in November. He was deciding whether he was going to make 21 or $31 million a quarter.

7:34 Okay. And whether he was going to push it into the next year, this that

7:38 Brian Rose: People were afraid to say that, right? A year ago, you couldn’t say that.

7:41 Correct.

7:41 But now you can again, correct?

7:43 Dan Peña: Because it’s cool now to be bold, brave, and boisterous.

7:47 Yeah.

7:47 Right.

7:48 Yeah. And it’s not unheard of now to have other people other than myself have their alligator mouth overload their hummingbird ass. I mean, I f***ed up. I made a mistake. It cost $6 million.

8:00 So what? I made you $80 million last quarter. They used to see that in the ’80s, smaller numbers, but now you can see it again in 2024, 2025, and going into 2026 for sure.

8:10 Brian Rose: Isn’t that incredible that one guy can change the whole vibe of the world in 10, 12 months.

8:16 Dan Peña: But what the opposite side of the coin, they’re saying, so did Hitler and so did Mussolini, so did Ma Tong, so did Stalin. And obviously there’s some truth to that.

8:29 Brian Rose: How do you rate his first 12 months?

8:30 Dan Peña: I think he’s done. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that he would do a little more. But he’s got, he’s got a balancing act. We have a balancing act.

8:42 It’s our emotional bank account and our financial bank account. His balancing act is different. I know he wants to get even, okay? In some cases, I don’t blame him, but he’s got to run the f***ing country, right? And he’s responsible for a lot of the things, i.e.

8:56 NATO, etc. So he’s got a balancing act. And most of these guys he thinks are wusses that are running these countries, and they are, you know, the same thing. It’s like I attended a Ford Foundation board meeting decades ago with Governor Hugh Carey, former governor of New York, who was on the board, and we sat down and we had been tuned up drinking too much at lunch, and so they were, there was something that came up about child education. They were going to table it to the next meeting.

9:24 15 months later, I’m at this board meeting again with Governor Carey, tuned up. The same f***ing thing comes up and they’re going to table it again. That’s how the corporate world is. Was then, is now, and probably forever will be because nobody wants to be on the hook. Nobody wants to be able to say Brian Rose did this or Brian Rose approved this or Dan Pena approved that or the investment committee that Brian Rose and Dan Pena are on approved this.

9:53 Nobody wants to take that heat now. But it’s been like that for decades in corporate world. And one of the reasons that he’s got so much done in Manhattan when he was in the business, whether he started with 4 million or 400 million, depending on which story you want to believe, is that he went down there. He’d go down there and have people sit in the, in the, in the counselors or in the county offices and push the s*** through. Did he buy them lunches?

10:17 Did he take them on golfing retreats? Maybe. Okay. But up until 2006, those kind of bribes were legal in the European Union. It’s only since 2007, they’re now called illegal and bribes.

10:29 You can’t do it anymore. But if you’ve got a sales staff, um, IBM has been working at 20 years that have been taking people for ski weekends at Zermatt for 25 years and all of a sudden you can’t do it or you can’t write it off. Is that going to change anybody’s habits? Probably not. So, I mean, and he’s dealing with a lot of that and he’s dealing pretty well.

10:48 I wish some of the cabinet members were a little tougher. I’m told that the guy which is his, that is negotiating with the Middle Eastern guys, f*** is his favorite word.

10:58 Brian Rose: Witkoff.

10:59 Dan Peña: Witkoff. That guy. He was a very successful billionaire developer.

11:03 And apparently Kushner, although he’s supposedly a devout Jew, likes to say f*** f*** too.

11:13 Well, [clears throat] you didn’t go to Harvard. You went to MIT. A study came out beginning of 2024. Harvard spent $10 million on this study. The people that use swear words are more effective.

11:26 10 million f***ing dollars.

11:30 That’s a joke.

11:30 Brian Rose: You’ve always said that.

11:31 Dan Peña: Oh, I’ve always said that. Yeah.

11:33 Brian Rose: What do you think Trump, you said he could have done more. What more could he have done?

11:37 Dan Peña: Just pushed harder. Cabinet members that push harder, cuz man, he’s working hard.

11:40 He’s been soft on Putin.

11:42 Okay.

11:42 He likes Putin, right? And he thinks, up until just recently, that Putin likes him.

11:46 Brian Rose: Putin doesn’t like anybody.

11:49 Dan Peña: Right. He’s just playing him.

11:50 Exactly.

11:50 Right.

11:50 I would have pushed hard on Putin [clears throat] or the people that were pushing on the people that push on Putin. We had a son of an oligarch come to the seminar last year or this year now. This year, remember, I trained six of the nine oligarchs in the early ’90s. Okay. Well, one of their sons is coming back to seminar now.

12:11 And he says, “Thank you for not used.” Nobody knows his dad’s name. So, thank you for not telling anybody who I am. And he said that the, um, the people that are under Putin that could take over if something happened to him are worse than him. That’s what I hear.

12:28 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. He’s the good one.

12:30 Yeah.

12:30 Yeah. Well, I hope this gets settled. It looks like Trump’s trying to push it through, but I guess we’ll have to see what happens. You just had a seminar and I asked you how was the caliber of the kids and then you kind of told me and then you said we’re f***ed.

12:45 Dan Peña: The kids are worse but the results are better.

12:47 Brian Rose: Okay.

12:48 Dan Peña: Okay. And the results are better cuz you know even Father Time here moves with, moves with change. And so starting about three or four years ago we started experimenting, testing, blind testing, all using those fancy words. And what, what we got the best effects with. Before I’d wait 3, 4, 5 years to see how you did.

13:11 Now I wait three or four, five months. Okay. And you questioned me when I came in. You had one live guy there. No, I had two live guys.

13:19 I actually had three. I had one on webinar, live on the webinar, and we had two that were live in person there and they just suck it up.

13:28 Brian Rose: Right. That makes the difference.

13:29 Dan Peña: Oh yeah. And we use webinars a lot more than we did before.

13:34 Yeah. And they, you know, they like to see a guy that looks like them. One of the favorite webinars is a guy, Belgium waffle one, we call him. He looks like a librarian. Okay.

13:46 But he’s a librarian that’s got about 50, 60 million euros now after four years. And he wouldn’t say, to look at him, if you were a terrorist on a bus, he’s the last guy you worry about striking back, and he has, he’s done terrific and the hardcore are very successful because we have a lot of successful people there and we happen to have at the hardcore that he went to, we had a guy who’s just about to sell his business for 500 million Swiss francs. Okay, he’s been doing this five years.

14:20 He’s turning 30 years old. And but what we’re seeing more of that we didn’t see before is people want to exit earlier. They want to exit. They want to be able to have a few years. 30 is nothing.

14:31 We both know that. Okay. Okay. But they talk like it’s the end of the world.

14:34 Brian Rose: Used to call me a kid at 42, 43.

14:37 Dan Peña: Exactly. And so the kids having more interface with past successes has really not turned, turned the corner, but has shown people in this market post-COVID because everybody was scared to death about Corona, which I call, I call COVID Corona, and we’re doing better and the real thing, one of the things in conjunction with the two things I just mentioned is the fact now we really pound seller finance

15:05 Right we just did a, forget the banks for your first couple deals. Just sell our

15:09 Fans. There’s a, not a webinar, but a testimonial that’s going around is an Aussie ex-con convict. He watched five videos, five videos. He went out and did a $2.4 million deal. And he came to the last hardcore and he says, and he’s uneducated and he sounds uneducated.

15:29 He’s not pretending to sound that way. He is that way. And he says, “If I can do that after five videos,” and right now I’m here to tell you, he should have closed today a $20 million mining deal. He offered him 30 million seller finance for a $20 million deal.

15:46 Remember, you name the price, I name the terms, right?” Okay?

15:50 And contrary to what you think, seller finance 100%. So, he’s buying the guy’s business with his own goddamn money, and he’s doing 10 million more than he was asking because he’s going to refinance it in 2, 3, 4 years, and he’s going to pull the purchase price out and put it in his pocket.

16:12 Brian Rose: That’s QLA.

16:12 Dan Peña: Yep. That’s it.

16:13 Brian Rose: But you said long-term we’re f***ed. Why do you say that?

16:18 Dan Peña: I’ve been, I’m at this 50 years and I watched the kids for 33 years and the quality of people that we have coming through the seminar are weak. They’re just weak. They have no gumption.

16:33 You know the test. If somebody came up and slapped your, or spit in your wife’s face, what would you do? There’s three alternatives. One, A is I’d ask him if he was having a bad day. B, C.

16:47 The only answer is you hit a brick and you beat these f***ing brains out. Failure rate is up to 98.6%. I thought it when it was 92% when the test first came out. Can’t get any worse. Failure rate is up to 98.6.

17:01 98.6 of blue-blooded Americans, Brits, Aussies, etc. would rather switch than fight.

17:10 Brian Rose: Why is that happening? Like you really had to think about it.

17:14 Dan Peña: Poor role models. Okay.

17:15 We don’t do what our parents tell us to do. We do what we see our parents do. Now, I had a assassin say killing monster for a father. Yes, you did.

17:24 Okay. So, you can’t really put me in that pool. But, um, the, who I believe with all my heart invented tough love.

17:33 Okay. When I did something wrong and when he did come back into town, my mother had a thing on the refrigerator with a refrigerator magnet. The nuns would have beaten me. The priest probably would have beaten me. My mother would have tried to beat me, but she wasn’t very successful.

17:47 She little teeny thing. And then when my dad came home, God forbid. I mean, even if it happened nine weeks before or three months before, my dad beat the s*** out of me. And so I never did drugs. Nobody believes it, but it’s the truth.

18:02 I never did drugs because I was afraid my dad would kill me. I mean, literally kill me. Not just, yeah, pretend to kill me. And the guys that came to my 80th birthday, there were four or five guys that have known me since I’m 10, 12, 15 years old. And they all said the same story.

18:17 We didn’t do drugs because we were afraid Mr. Pena would kill us, too. Because if Danny did drugs, that means he got him from us. And their fathers each were happy with that. Fine.

18:29 Mr. Pena can do the heavy lifting. He can beat the s*** out of Howard. He can beat the s*** out of Bud. He can beat the s*** out of Walt.

18:36 And my dad did.

18:37 Brian Rose: So he scared the whole neighborhood. Correct. Straight. Okay. All right.

18:39 Dan Peña: All right. So, we’re just continuing to degrade and the kids are coming in and when you can’t think it get any worse, it’s actually worse.

18:47 Brian Rose: And communication stills not probably getting worse.

18:49 Dan Peña: Their communication skills are piss poor.

18:52 Brian Rose: They say at Harvard the students don’t even turn up to class anymore. They don’t engage in debate. And these are Harvard kids.

18:59 Yeah.

18:59 You know, and they don’t even want to talk to other people.

19:01 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, I believe that. And because of Corona, they’ve lived on the internet four or five years. Yeah.

19:07 And they don’t have the communication skills at the level they should have if they had been going to class, they had been interacting with other people. And, um, but all the schools are the same. You know, occasionally we get, you know, a bright tool. But all the tools that they have are dull. It’s like a carpenter.

19:29 Nothing’s sharp. And it just and they have other desires. You know, right now information is almost instantaneous worldwide. You can find out stuff that you really don’t need to know, but you can find it out. And the kids today start from, you know, they know how to work a handheld machine since they’re 3, 4, 5 years old.

19:50 Okay? And they have, haven’t interacted and a lot of the stuff or that are on these apps is not good for them. It just isn’t good for them. The, um, the you in the Investment Club.

20:59 Education, the, when I graduated from high school in 1963, supposedly education topped out ’63. Okay. Now high school degree from then is like two and a half years of college now. Okay. And it’s hard for me to believe.

21:16 I graduated with a 2.55 average in, out of high school. I only went to college because a couple of the other guys were going to college and the only college I could get in was school you got to explain about. Okay. Which Melinda Gates just gave $248 million to

21:31 Brian Rose: You? To the, to where you graduated, Northridge.

21:34 Really?

21:34 Did she go there?

21:35 Yeah.

21:35 Okay.

21:35 Dan Peña: Because it was in the top five woke schools in America.

21:39 Brian Rose: Oh my gosh.

21:40 Dan Peña: And I was negotiating with them to change the name of something for me, 10 million. They stopped talking to me. Okay. Well, we don’t need your money now. You know, we’ve got plenty of money.

21:50 Okay.

21:50 They’re going to stay woke.

21:51 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they are certainly woke.

21:53 If you had it to do over again, would you send your kids to college in this day and age?

21:58 Dan Peña: No. I probably wouldn’t.

21:59 Brian Rose: Really?

21:59 Dan Peña: No.

22:00 Not worth it. No. Because you get the mind programming and the education doesn’t teach you anything.

22:07 And in the case of my daughter, I paid for all of it. In the case of our youngest son, he paid himself. That was important to him. Okay. But most kids have debt, student debt.

22:16 And when you come to me at age 41, you still got student debt. I mean,

22:21 Brian Rose: And you see that with your kids.

22:22 Dan Peña: Damn. And it’s big.

22:24 Brian Rose: I mean, you know, BU is not cheap.

22:28 Dan Peña: No.

22:28 They’re rackets. These universities are rackets, right? They’re woke factories that charge hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to give people a degree that’s basically useless.

22:38 And then they stay. And the kids today aren’t aggressive. I didn’t, when my kids got out of undergrad, I didn’t make a phone call to get them a job. Took Kelly seven months to get her first job. Took our son Derek nine months, but they got a job.

22:51 Okay.

22:52 And then she went to New York and started selling real estate and started making 20, 30 grand a month. And I thought, well, she’s never going to go to grad school. But she had promised me. So, she did go to grad school and she got in Northwestern. And our son took a couple years off before he went back to grad school.

23:08 But they will both tell you their graduate degrees mean nothing. Now our daughter’s case, the big, big boss in the division she works in went through Northwestern, the Medill Communication School, whatever it is. And so that’s helped her some. Okay. But unless by serendipity you happen to have gone to the same school and the big boss, you’re close enough to the big boss that he actually recognizes you, I mean, it’s a waste of time.

23:36 Now, there’s, I interviewed a Kennedy not long ago. Looked like Robert Kennedy. He’s from that string. I mean, I said, “His name’s Kennedy.” And I said, “Uh, how many times have you been told?”

23:50 And then he finished the sentence that I look like my great-great-grandfather, Robert. More than I can count. And has it done you any good? I went to great grammar schools, great junior high schools, great high schools, private. It got me into Harvard.

24:06 I’m not sure they looked at my forms, you know. But other than that, I’m still unemployed.

24:11 Brian Rose: Okay. So, the degree doesn’t count for much these days without the hustle.

24:14 Dan Peña: Now, if I wanted to, Kennedy is probably a name I’d pick or Rockefeller or somebody.

24:19 Yeah.

24:19 Rothschild in Europe is different. If you’re a Rothschild,

24:23 Your life’s made.

24:24 You get what you want.

24:25 Yeah. Exactly.

24:25 Brian Rose: Okay. How much longer are you going to teach seminars?

24:29 Dan Peña: Well, for sure as long as Trump’s in the White House.

24:31 Brian Rose: Okay. So, it could be till ’33.

24:34 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, for sure. I, you know, I’d be crazy.

24:39 And some of the big things that he’s going to do. He hasn’t announced yet. The, um, I’m not surprised that he picked, um, he says, to be, they don’t call minister of war, right? Yeah. War.

24:57 I think that’s, you know, it’s a little bit of a stretch. Now, I hope that he didn’t say, like right now it’s going viral. The last two guys that were on the ship. Yeah. They were alive still apparently.

25:08 And the admiral says they were getting ready to be combative. They’re on fire.

25:13 And Hegseth said, “Kill them all.” Now, I hope they don’t have that on tape, but you know, they asked Trump about it today and he said, “Well, it is, we are at war.” You say something like that. So,

25:26 Brian Rose: All right. So Trump has more stuff planned, but as long as he’s in office, it’s good for business.

25:30 It’s good for you because you’re the personality type that QLA promotes is the one that Trump now says is the right one.

25:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. But I mean, you don’t have to be an alpha male. 98% of the high performance people on the planet are, you know, not alpha males. You know, they’re, you know, they’re regular people.

25:47 Brian Rose: You always say that to us, but it’s hard for us to hear that because we see you. We see you.

25:53 Dan Peña: Well, in the first years that I was selling the seminar, which I thought that, you know, it was an easy sell, but we can’t be you. And the guy, the few guys that have tried to be mini me got in trouble. Okay.

26:05 We’ve had a couple of kids arrested for stalking because they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

26:10 Brian Rose: They show up at the bank.

26:11 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, and Carl Icahn allegedly, you know, got a guy at Bank of America fired because he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Okay. And me not taking no for an answer is different than some little librarian from Kansas. Okay.

26:26 Brian Rose: So they try to be you and then correct, realize they’re not.

26:29 Dan Peña: But I wish I had made a deal in the beginning for two or three tailor three-piece suits, roses, Rolex watches and a few other things. Because you know, you only have two times to make a first impression. First when I look at you, second when you open your mouth. And even the guys that dress nice like you, when they open their mouth, they put their foot in it. Okay.

26:51 And even though they have the scripts and all the things which, you know, saying, stuttering, I mean, doesn’t do you much good. And at my 80th birthday we had the first and only student that I gave an A when I taught. Okay. John MSAS, he was a stutterer. He doesn’t stutter now.

27:10 He’s a psychotherapist now. The first multi-millionaire, teenage multi-millionaire, Matt Posius. He was the first internet guys, you know, rode around in Lamborghinis with girls with big tits, you know, okay, he was there with his wife, and the first guy that I helped on Wall Street who’s a big partner now with JP Morgan. So those first, and but even when I wasn’t coaching I was always making people accountable, you know, and Wall Street day ended when we were on the West Coast, ends at 3, 2, whatever it ends, we’re there eight at night.

27:48 I mean, doing the work because we couldn’t depend on the research that was coming out of at that time. Now some places had great research. We were not one of those places, right?

27:59 We weren’t. Okay. And we were just fooling ourselves to say that we were, um

28:05 But I mean this is our, it’s our market. I keep saying on the seminars, this is our time. You know what are you going to tell, and you’ve heard me say this, your grandchildren 25, 30 years from now, what did you do during the greatest transformation of wealth in the history of the planet? So with your thumb up your ass. Now the grandkids won’t say that, okay?

28:26 Well, what are you going to tell them? And it reminds me, you know, this is an awful thing I say about my family, my family has mortgage burning parties. You pay off your mortgage after 30, 40 years, you have a block party and a 55-gallon, gallon barrel drum. You barbecue and you’re burning the mortgage on it. And I first saw that when I was 12, 13, 14.

28:49 And I asked my dad, “What the f***? Why are they, that’s what proof do they have that they own the f***ing house?” Okay, but they were doing it in defiance. You know, f*** you. I’m burning my mortgage.

29:01 Brian Rose: I’m sure there’s still some people that have that mentality, but that was their great accomplishment, to pay off a 30-year mortgage, right? And not to dream

29:09 Dan Peña: Just because I was the first kid on my mother’s family. That’s the only reason I went back to college to graduate from college. Nobody had ever graduated. So when I came back, cuz I needed to go back to school like I needed AIDS. I mean

29:22 Didn’t do me any good.

29:23 Brian Rose: Well, I dress this way because of you. That’s the truth. As much as I might

29:28 John Kent’s retired, I hear.

29:29 Dan Peña: Yes, Kent is, John is not around as much, but Terry’s there in great form. And they’re doing big business. They’re doing a lot of business in the States now. Really?

29:38 They’re going to New York and Miami and just lots of client business. So, they’re hot again. I think you probably made them hot. They get a lot of business from you, from me. I’m happy for them.

29:46 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s very good. What’s hot right now? Cuz I know you’ve been big on cyber security the last 5 years, but now you were talking AI is what you’re into now.

29:54 Dan Peña: If you’re not, well, if you’re not an AI, go home. I mean, every business. Okay. I don’t care if you’re a plumber in your website, put AI at the end, you know? I mean, you might as well go home.

30:10 It’s the future.

30:10 It has.

30:11 And I said 40 to 60% 10 to 20 years from now, 40 to 60% of all jobs. I used to say entry level jobs. I don’t do that anymore. It’s all jobs are going to be replaced by AI. So, what does that mean?

30:24 We have, we have robots at the castle.

30:26 Brian Rose: You do?

30:27 Dan Peña: You know, we have Gordon One and Gordon 2 serving drinks.

30:28 Huh? No. No, no, no. They’re doing the yard work and stuff and my staff is crazy with insecurity.

30:36 Brian Rose: Really?

30:36 Dan Peña: We haven’t laid anybody off.

30:37 Okay.

30:37 But we’re getting four more robots.

30:38 Brian Rose: Gardener robots.

30:39 Dan Peña: No. No. In the house robots. Really? Agentic.

30:47 Correct.

30:48 Brian Rose: Wait till Elon starts cranking down.

30:50 Dan Peña: Yeah. And they don’t take time off. They’re never f***ing sick. They don’t eat

30:55 Until one day you wake up in the castle and they’re standing over you. Well, now you probably heard this story going to MIT. There was a, about 10, 11 years ago there had the Grand Masters, might be Caltech, your dad’s alma mater, but one of those two schools had a big chess tournament and it had the four or five grand masters that were around at that time against the newest IBM computer. It was a three-day tournament, blah blah blah. And at the end, the humans won by this much.

31:23 And so the guy, the moderator, a Caltech professor, probably had hair like this, said something to the effect, well, can we learn anything over and above what happened at the recent tournament that you lost to these guys and don’t trust us. Don’t trust us. They’re going to eat our lunch.

31:48 Brian Rose: Is this how the world’s going to end?

31:50 Dan Peña: I think so.

31:50 Brian Rose: You think they’re going to end us? Yeah. The ultimate exterminating factor. And that happens.

31:54 I love watching those movies.

31:56 Dan Peña: Like what?

31:56 Brian Rose: I, Robot. I, Robot with Will Smith.

31:58 Odd robot. Yeah. You think it’s going to happen in 50 years, 100 years?

32:03 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, you’re going to die before me. So, you’ll already be dead. Okay. I plan on, I still have to go into space,

32:11 Right?

32:11 One of my goals, and have sex with Sally, right? I did. I heard this recently. I

32:15 Okay. Yeah. Well, and we already, Sally already put our down payment. You can pay 20 million to the Ruskies tonight

32:21 Brian Rose: And go.

32:22 Dan Peña: No training, no nothing. They’ll come and pick you up right here outside the building,

32:26 Brian Rose: Right?

32:26 Dan Peña: And you’re on the space station in three days.

32:28 Ruski craft in the ’80s.

32:30 Yeah.

32:30 Brian Rose: Is it safe?

32:30 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, it’s as safe as you’re going to get anybody to take you. All right.

32:35 If you do a NASA, 5 years before you can go.

32:38 No, the training.

32:39 Oh, the training. Oh, right. The Ruskies don’t care.

32:41 Yeah. F***

32:42 And you don’t want to do one of these chicken s*** ones where you go Yeah. No, no, no. Right.

32:47 I felt sorry for the Star Trek guy, 91, when he went up, he just went up for 8 seconds, 2 minutes, he came back, he looked like he was dead with Bezos. Yeah. Yeah. I was hanging out with him a couple years ago at a crypto conference. Yeah, nice guy.

33:03 Brian Rose: Legendary guy. So you’re going to go up for real with Sally. That’s on the goal list.

33:07 What else?

33:08 Dan Peña: Sex in space.

33:09 Brian Rose: Sex in space.

33:09 Dan Peña: And even if I burn up on re-entry, that’s fine. I don’t give a f***

33:14 Brian Rose: All right. And Sally’s okay with you saying that.

33:15 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Sally says we got to somehow get shields or block.

33:19 You know, she’s not against the sex in space part, but she doesn’t want it to be so you can look at it on your cell phone down here.

33:27 Brian Rose: Somebody will be watching.

33:28 Dan Peña: Well, I’m sure someone’s going to be watching.

33:29 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. So, that’s on the bucket list. What else?

33:33 Dan Peña: The newly appointed apostle of finance for the Catholic Church.

33:36 Brian Rose: I heard about this.

33:37 Dan Peña: How did you hear about it? I didn’t tell anybody.

33:40 Lord, help us.

33:41 Brian Rose: Well, you were, the Lord is helping us now. After a few drinks. You were talking about it in your post-conference stories. You kind of mentioned

33:48 Dan Peña: Oh, yeah. Yeah. The guy asked me.

33:50 Yeah.

33:50 Because now I take calls now. I never took calls before.

33:54 Brian Rose: It’s the Vatican.

33:54 Okay. All right. Now, let’s talk about this. First of all, you were just knighted by the

34:00 Pope. Looks like you. It’s a regular guy.

34:01 Dan Peña: A regular guy, you know.

34:03 Brian Rose: I mean, I’m not just a regular guy.

34:04 Dan Peña: No, I’m smart.

34:08 Brian Rose: Well, great broadcaster.

34:09 Dan Peña: Well, he’s not a broadcaster. Somebody asked him when we were there about podcasts. He didn’t know what we were talking about

34:15 Brian Rose: Really. He’s a different kind of pope, right? Correct. And he’s

34:19 From Chicago.

34:20 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. He’s a group of numbers too. He ran the books for a while and they said, and that’s why you’re involved.

34:27 Correct. Because he was going to sort the books out. Part of the reason I heard, now correct me if I’m wrong, that because he was out of the blue got elected, but people were saying the whispers at the time were, it’s all flashing to me now, is that he maybe was the only guy that could sort out the books and the books were a mess.

34:42 Dan Peña: Well, he doesn’t think he can sort it out, but he thinks he can oversee the sorting out.

34:46 Brian Rose: Right. Okay. Now you have a long

34:48 Dan Peña: It’s a 10-year project.

34:49 Brian Rose: Okay.

34:50 Dan Peña: I said I can do it in seven.

34:51 Brian Rose: Were you recently knighted by the Vatican as well?

34:54 Dan Peña: Um two knights.

34:56 Brian Rose: Two knights. Which ones?

34:59 Dan Peña: Wait, I two knighthoods, a Commander of the Cross, um, Knight Templar, one other one, five.

35:11 Brian Rose: Why won’t you accept a British knighthood?

35:14 Dan Peña: Well, I haven’t been offered and we’re working on that. I want to sit in the House of Lords.

35:20 Brian Rose: You do?

35:21 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah.

35:21 Brian Rose: Oh my god. You can sit next to Lord Bailey, the guy that ran against me for mayor. Jesus, there’s some dummies in there. Yeah,

35:29 Dan Peña: I don’t know. But well, not my friend, but Lord Lily, who used to be on my board.

35:33 Brian Rose: You used to call them all Lord shitbags.

35:35 Dan Peña: Correct. I did

35:35 Because But I am one now, so it’s all right.

35:38 Brian Rose: All right. So, that’s still on the cards.

35:39 Dan Peña: Oh, absolutely.

35:39 Brian Rose: Okay. I thought you’d been offered before, but you turned down.

35:42 Dan Peña: No, no, no, no.

35:43 Okay.

35:43 Brian Rose: All right. So, you got these different knighthoods. Well, the Queen, the cross is from the Queen, right? Okay. And then the Vatican knighthood and then maybe the British knighthood.

35:53 You would accept it if offered?

35:54 Dan Peña: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

35:54 Brian Rose: Okay. We need a probably somebody besides Labour in to get you that one. Right. Probably. Okay.

36:00 Let’s talk about the Vatican because famous quote when you were with Freshfields, right? We do business with the Bank of England, the Church of England, the Queen of England

36:10 Dan Peña: And Dan Pena.

36:10 Brian Rose: And Dan Pena. But you were doing business with the Vatican back then or you knew about

36:16 Dan Peña: No, no, no. I

36:17 Brian Rose: We shared a law firm.

36:20 Dan Peña: Well, partly. But in 1982, um

36:23 Brian Rose: I know way too much about you, Dan.

36:25 Dan Peña: Okay. In 1982 when the Vatican Bank, explosion of corruption with the mafia and the Archbishop Marcinkus, who was the guy, and I kissed his ring, I don’t know how many times, was found to be laundering money. But he just died recently in Arizona at the retirement home for his order of priests. So, in those days, you didn’t put people in jail. You just shipped them off someplace.

36:53 Brian Rose: Okay.

36:54 Dan Peña: And the, um, the then Secretary of State was involved and I was involved. And the deal blew up and a lot of guys went to jail. A few got killed. The Carlo Revo, who was called the, the mafia banker who was in the Vatican Bank, allegedly hung himself from a London Bridge

37:16 Brian Rose: Right here. Okay. And

37:18 Dan Peña: Blackfriars Bridge.

37:18 Oh, Blackfriars with his hands behind tie behind his back.

37:22 Brian Rose: That was in the ’80s, right? I remember hearing that story.

37:24 Dan Peña: ’83. Yeah. Yeah.

37:26 Brian Rose: Something that normally doesn’t happen in London.

37:27 Dan Peña: No, it doesn’t.

37:28 Brian Rose: Right. Something that

37:29 Okay. Wrong.

37:29 Dan Peña: So then in the ’90s, I came back again. 15 years had passed. I didn’t get in trouble. I was a co-conspirator, unindicted co-conspirator. I was at the low end.

37:41 So they didn’t, they thought then and probably now that I wasn’t high up enough to do anything harmful.

37:48 Brian Rose: Okay. High up in W or which organization?

37:51 Dan Peña: In the bank. I was at that time with Onass group.

37:54 Right.

37:54 Okay. Okay.

37:55 And so then in the ’90s I decided, you know, we should resurrect this cuz I volunteered because the church was almost bankrupt in the early ’80s.

38:04 Okay.

38:04 Okay. Okay. We’re closer to bankruptcy today because of all the billions they paid out for the abuse rulings against them. Rightfully so that they did all this bad stuff to the little kids. Okay.

38:15 So then I went back in the early ’90s and I said, “Let’s get this f***ing thing going again.”

38:19 Brian Rose: All right. And the only reason we’re talking about the church is cuz they brainwashed you as an altar boy.

38:23 Dan Peña: Correct. I was first to admit that I was a wannabe altar boy. I never got to be an altar boy.

38:27 Brian Rose: That’s why this is the hole in your heart. Your

38:30 Dan Peña: Family, my family couldn’t afford the $8 for the little uniform.

38:34 Okay.

38:34 Brian Rose: Okay. So you say I have trauma issues, you have trauma issues.

38:36 Dan Peña: Well, yeah. Well, mine are with God. Yours aren’t with God. Yours are with your father.

38:41 Brian Rose: Oh, really?

38:41 Dan Peña: Yes. Yes.

38:42 Brian Rose: That’s why you’re here.

38:43 Dan Peña: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I’m here to save your soul.

38:46 Okay.

38:46 See, I was going to wait till the end now, but I say it now.

38:49 Brian Rose: Yeah.

38:49 Dan Peña: Okay. Is it working? So, I went back in the ’90s and I said, I want to resurrect this. And so, everybody was still almost broke. And so, at that time, a Carmelite priest who I’ve known all my life, he was kind of like our family priest.

39:01 I said, John, I want somebody to hear my confession. Well, John said, “Well, Dan, I’ve known you all your life. I’ll hear your confession.” No, I want a senior guy. So, they found me this war correspondent slash priest named Monscior Peracina.

39:15 So, I prepared for about a month. And I had all, I had a yellow tab, legal tab this long, every line on both sides of the paper with thousands and thousands and thousands of sins. So, I went there for to hear him, to hear my confession. We’re sitting in his drawing room and I said, “Bless me, Father. I’ve sinned.

39:36 It has been such and such years.” Now they call it reconciliation. And so I get about to the third page. So he says, “Excuse me, Mr. Pena.”

39:42 We’re sitting just like this. And he takes it from me and he flips through it and he says, “Sodom and Gomorrah have got nothing on you. You maimed, murdered, killed. Correct.” So he takes it.

39:54 He goes over to the fireplace. He throws it in the fireplace. I go over there, try to get it. Why are you doing that, Mont Sior? Nobody should see that.

40:02 So, we’re sitting back having our coffee and I said, “What’s my penance?” He says, “Go home and hug your wife and say you love your wife and your kids.” What kind of goddamn penance is that? Anyway, the next morning, my priest buddy calls me, says, “Dan, you’re sitting down.” Manior Percina died last night after you saw her.

40:23 Peter Thiel took a half a million dollars and turned it into have to have the financial education and the deal flow. That’s it. So I decided to put back on the

41:25 Brian Rose: The evil rubbed off on him.

41:28 Dan Peña: Nobody wants me to fix anything.

41:30 Okay.

41:32 Okay.

41:32 Brian Rose: Because you were going to help at that point.

41:33 Dan Peña: Correct.

41:33 All right.

41:34 And they know I know how to do it.

41:36 Okay.

41:36 Okay. Fast forward.

41:37 Brian Rose: Is the divine stopping you or is it somebody behind the scenes pushing buttons?

41:41 Dan Peña: They say the devil.

41:42 Okay.

41:42 Yeah. But there’s a lot of things happening behind the scenes there.

41:45 Yeah. Okay. So, fast forward 25 years. I decided it’s time to do it again, like in the last few years,

41:51 Brian Rose: Right?

41:52 Dan Peña: I’m, you know, getting these awards from the church, blah blah blah. I got to see the Pope eight weeks ago, who’s a nice guy, regular guy. Um

42:01 Brian Rose: That’s not easy to do, is not easy.

42:03 No, it right.

42:03 Dan Peña: But if you need something done, Brian, there’s only one guy, you know, no matter what, they can get it done. That’s me. No matter what. And so anyway, so I come back and I start enlisting my little staff. And the day before yesterday, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, Gomez, was contacted by one of my mentees.

42:29 And we are pushing it forward. They’re sitting on between three and seven trillion dollars in revenue. They’re not collecting. Three and seven

42:42 Brian Rose: Revenue.

42:43 Dan Peña: Revenue.

42:43 Okay.

42:43 So, let’s just say it’s three.

42:46 Brian Rose: These are contributions from other churches.

42:47 Dan Peña: No. No.

42:49 5 years ago, if you were a parish priest, you collected like between 7 and $12,000 a week in the basket.

42:56 Brian Rose: Yeah.

42:56 Dan Peña: Now you get 50 bucks, 100, 300.

42:57 Brian Rose: Oh, right. Okay.

42:58 Dan Peña: They haven’t paid their light bills and those kind of bills for eons.

43:03 Brian Rose: Okay.

43:03 Dan Peña: And the only reason they haven’t been evicted is because it’s the Catholic Church.

43:06 Okay.

43:06 Okay. Okay. So, I’ve been working on this for two or three years. And Sally and I have built, and I hooked up with St. Teresa and I put my money on her before she was a saint, one of the Teresa because she was a had a cutthroat business attitude.

43:21 She would do anything, lie, cheat, steal, and in the name of the kids. Okay, which I won’t lie, but I certainly have stolen. And so the and we’ve built missions in Sri Lanka, China, the Philippines, Japan, the United States for the last 20 years for the Missionaries of Charity, which is St. Teresa, now Saint

43:47 Brian Rose: [snorts] um you’re quite involved in that.

43:49 Dan Peña: Oh yeah, very involved. And you know, not just with money.

43:52 Brian Rose: You go visit too. You see the kids?

43:54 Dan Peña: Yeah, I see all the kids. And I’ve actually taken a kid that is put in the tray at one of St. Teresa’s missions with a umbilical cord cut.

44:04 They put the kid in the tray and so the nuns on the other side of the wall pull the kid out and then I’ve seen that kid raised through grammar school, junior high school, college, in some cases get married, in some cases get a job. I because I’ve been doing it over 20 years. So I’ve seen the cycle. I can see with these eyes, you know, that’s actually happened.

44:25 Brian Rose: Why is he in a tray?

44:26 Dan Peña: Because he’s being given up.

44:27 He’s being, he’s being abandoned because out of wedlock or just like you.

44:31 Brian Rose: Okay.

44:31 Abandoned in a different way.

44:32 Like all your kids. Okay.

44:35 Like all your devotees.

44:36 Dan Peña: Yeah. Exactly. Seriously, all my devotees have been abandoned in one or another.

44:41 I know. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so, but I’ve seen that with my own eyes.

44:47 Brian Rose: And so, that must be a trip.

44:50 Dan Peña: Oh. Oh, yeah. And the first one about two or three years ago had a kid. She went out and got married and she married some guy in the army. I hope she doesn’t watch this.

45:01 You could have done a lot better. But anyway, they get a paycheck every two weeks. So that’s better than most of the people that work in the Philippines.

45:08 Okay.

45:08 Brian Rose: Um are the kids better off going to the nuns than their parents, do you think?

45:12 Dan Peña: Yeah, absolutely.

45:14 Okay. But then after the parents find out they’re getting three square meals a day, then they try to hit on the kids when they’re in junior high school and high school for money.

45:23 Brian Rose: Really?

45:23 Dan Peña: And I’ve had, I’ve advised the nuns, you can’t give it to them. What about charity? I don’t give a, you know, I’m always saying, “God damn, you can’t do that, sister or mother superior.” You know, you’re just feeding their habit and they come with almost needles hanging from their arm. Okay.

45:40 Brian Rose: Trying to squeeze the kids for some extra cash.

45:42 Dan Peña: Exactly. After they abandoned 12 years.

45:44 Yeah. 15 or 18 years earlier. And sometimes we’ve check the DNA. I don’t believe it’s a mother.

45:51 And five times out of 10 I’m right. It’s just somebody cuz you can rent kids in the Philippines and in China for like a hundred rupees a day, which is like 8 cents. So you can go beg on the street

46:04 Brian Rose: Renting kids to beg. Okay. Okay.

46:06 Dan Peña: Just imagine if you had been rented out. [snorts]

46:08 Brian Rose: I could have made more money than Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe so.

46:11 All right. So, you’re going to fix a Catholic church. It’s a 10-year project. You’re excited about it.

46:16 Dan Peña: Seven to 10. Are they No. Oh, well, we’re gonna attack the US first.

46:22 Okay.

46:22 Okay. And the biggest parish in the US that’s in trouble is paid out 1.56 billion in reparations to the kids is LA. That’s run by a guy named Gomez, who happens to be from Mexico, right where my mother’s from.

46:36 Okay.

46:36 Okay. Right where my mother’s from. And 25 parishes in the United States, but they’re all run like FFTs. Each cardinal or archbishop runs it like a business and they don’t know. One of the bishops I met with on my last trip happened to be a successful businessman before he went over to God.

46:57 He was a PhD in electrical engineering. I mean, he was a smart guy. He is a smart guy. He may actually, I watch this, I sent him an email. Watch this bishop in the, um, so we’re going to attack it diocese by diocese, okay, and then when we’re successful in the US, and 60% of my personal portfolio is healthcare, their biggest assets are hospitals.

47:19 They have 3,100 hospitals in the United States okay okay, they have 2,600 schools okay is the most obvious one, okay, that all lose their ass right, so they run terrible businesses correct and you can change that, of course, change, and not overnight, right? But they need the income because they’re not getting anywhere else.

47:38 No. Well, there’s some people that are struck off. In other words, for example, Goldman Sachs can’t do business with them because they try to, I don’t know all the details, but they may have tried to twist the facts so they could get a loan 15, 20 years ago and so they’re out the door.

47:55 Brian Rose: Can you change that?

47:55 Dan Peña: No. Why? Well, those guys were forced to retire, I’m told. And the interesting thing about it, there’s a lot of closet Catholics. Okay.

48:04 Brian Rose: Okay. I had no idea how many closet Catholics I know.

48:07 There’s a lot of closet religious people coming out of the closet thanks to Trump. I mean, you know, you see it all the time now. It’s like everyone now is talking about Christianity at least, and it’s now become in vogue

48:19 Dan Peña: Quite a bit. Um, I don’t know if that’ll last.

48:21 Well, enrollment in education in the Catholic schools is down 60%.

48:27 Brian Rose: Really?

48:27 Okay.

48:27 Dan Peña: Okay. All right. And the enrollment or not enrollment, the attendance in Sunday Mass etc. is down 85%.

48:36 Okay.

48:36 Okay. And they have no money and they can’t sell any assets. They’re sitting on eight or 10 trillion in assets, art, gold from World War II, diamonds, etc.

48:47 Brian Rose: They’re not allowed to sell it.

48:48 Dan Peña: No, it’s it’s, you know, either St. Paul said or somebody said it.

48:52 Okay. Okay.

48:52 Brian Rose: Will you try to change that or not?

48:54 Dan Peña: Well, no. No. We can turn as soon as we turn around this first dishes.

48:59 Brian Rose: You have a case study.

49:00 Dan Peña: Well, case study where as soon as we get some positive results, we’re going to start working on two or three others at the same time.

49:07 Brian Rose: And the um it’s How hard is this going to be to do?

49:12 Dan Peña: At least 50% of my time.

49:13 Brian Rose: Okay. And it’s probably one of the hardest things you’ve ever had to pull off because it’s a massive bureaucracy.

49:19 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. But I did it in Siemens.

49:21 Brian Rose: Yeah, true. Which one’s harder with Siemens?

49:23 Yeah. Okay. [clears throat]

49:24 Dan Peña: The Germans, there’s a right way, a wrong way, and a Siemens way.

49:28 I know how to do this, you know. I know how to do it.

49:31 Brian Rose: 50% of your time on that. The other 50 split between you being chairman of 26 companies

49:37 And then teaching and giving Sally some attention.

49:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, I have to

49:41 Brian Rose: But Sally does everything with you.

49:43 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. But I have to have my attention with Sally. I mean, the, she’s put 30 good years in, but I was teasing her this morning. If I was an unkind person, honey, I’d say you look older.

49:58 And she’s sitting with curlers and s*** on her head, you know. And she says, “Well, that’s a kind thing to say.” And I said, “But I wouldn’t say something like that cuz when I get done with Brian Rose, you’re going to look all glamorous.” I was thinking about when I was driving over here in my Phantom. This is, do you, can you walk around here at night?

50:17 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah, you can.

50:18 Dan Peña: Audience, that’s a lie. But anyway, if you invite you over, I have a bodyguard with me. So,

50:23 Can you walk around Mayfair at night these days? Not with a watch, not with a PC on.

50:28 Brian Rose: No. Oh,

50:28 Dan Peña: That’s your London. Yeah. What happened?

50:30 Brian Rose: We’ll get into that.

50:31 Dan Peña: Exactly what I told you about the kids.

50:34 So, since I met you, what’s happened to my life? Let’s see. I bought Sally a 16, 18, and 22 karat diamond rings. Okay. I’m a NetJets owner.

50:46 And I told you you can’t afford, you can’t make a good enough reason to get a plane. Remember my speech, not well at 80, I can make an excuse for anything.

50:57 Brian Rose: All right. So you NetJet [clears throat] it unless you’re going in

51:00 Dan Peña: Tomorrow we’re commercial. But I mean less than 2,000 miles is a NetJet. We have NetJets in America and we have NetJets here in Europe. And that’s been a good move, right? Because you you don’t like airports,

51:13 But we don’t use NetJet. Like there should be six or eight people on the plane with us, but there’s only two, S and I.

51:19 Brian Rose: Okay. Nice.

51:19 Dan Peña: And occasionally a flight attendant, but Okay. Um, you’re very lucky.

51:23 Brian Rose: That’s not the econ, the right way to use NetJet, right?

51:25 Dan Peña: Is you know when you have six or eight in the plane.

51:28 Brian Rose: Oh, okay. But you guys don’t.

51:29 Okay. Um, you are very lucky to have Sally. She’s an angel.

51:33 Dan Peña: Sure. Absolutely.

51:33 Brian Rose: Amen to that. And that was a great, great call.

51:36 Dan Peña: As is your wife.

51:38 Brian Rose: Yes. You know, we’re both lucky, right?

51:40 Dan Peña: How old are your boys now?

51:41 Brian Rose: Eight and nine. And I told them you were coming today and they were like, “Who’s this trillion dollar guy? Who’s this guy?” So, I showed them, you know, pictures of us in the castle. And they were asking me questions about the trillion.

51:53 The trillion got their attention. And I said, “Gabby had been up to your castle for the 70th.” And she gave a speech at your 70th birthday party. And they were

52:01 Dan Peña: Very articulate for 12. Actually, very articulate for anybody, not just 10 or 12, but

52:05 Brian Rose: You’re right. She was 12 then. Yeah. She kind of shocked the audience. I think you guys just grabbed her and said, “Do you want to say something?”

52:10 And she improvised it.

52:11 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah.

52:11 Better than your father.

52:13 Brian Rose: Yeah. Probably. Right. Probably better than

52:15 Dan Peña: Exactly what I said.

52:15 Brian Rose: Than I, yeah. Yeah. Better than I could have done, especially then. [clears throat] Um, but yeah, who knows? Maybe the boys will come up and see you at some point. You have 14-year-olds as the youngest you did.

52:24 Dan Peña: 14.

52:24 Brian Rose: Okay. And you kind of

52:25 Dan Peña: You’d have to come back with them.

52:27 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah. Okay.

52:28 Yeah. Gosh.

52:28 Dan Peña: In fact, um, we just had the Carlines. Well, now he’s 18. He came when he was 15. I’m educating second generation of these kids.

52:42 And I told you the son of one of the oligarchs came at the last seminar. And the Russian mentality about taking action and, you know, being harsh and selfish and etc. You don’t have to teach them that,

52:58 Brian Rose: Right?

52:58 Dan Peña: I mean it’s just in culture.

52:59 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we we didn’t almost have a fight, but we had two Russians and two Ukrainians at the last seminar also.

53:10 Brian Rose: And they don’t like each other for real.

53:11 Dan Peña: For real. Real.

53:12 Brian Rose: Okay. For real.

53:13 Dan Peña: And the they pretend they boxed. And when they boxed,

53:18 Oh, coincidentally, one Russian and one Ukrainian boxed, and coincidentally and one could had infinitely more skills than the other. So, it wasn’t, I couldn’t really tell. Okay.

53:31 Brian Rose: Cuz when you’re on your back all the time, I mean, not much. You fight back. But,

53:36 Dan Peña: You’re [clears throat] still boxing.

53:38 Brian Rose: I had my second boxing match.

53:40 Dan Peña: I saw it.

53:42 Brian Rose: You did. Thank you for watching.

53:42 Dan Peña: The 19-year-old skinny kid.

53:44 Brian Rose: God, he was 6’3″. I mean, Jesus. And he had that young kid nervous energy. I never been hit that hard in my head that first round. But by the third round, he didn’t want any more.

53:57 Look, it was

53:58 Dan Peña: Why don’t you go five rounds then?

53:59 Brian Rose: I would have loved to. My David Haye was training me, world class boxer, British champion, and he called, first of all, he said, “You won that fight.” I was like, “Okay.” But he said, “If that gone five rounds, you easily would have won it cuz my cardio is my strength.”

54:10 Dan Peña: You agree?

54:11 Brian Rose: I agree that if it went couple, [clears throat] but I got so tired of the announcer saying, “How fabulous you look for 54.”

54:18 Dan Peña: I said, “Yeah, but I wanted to say his heart’s only that big.” Okay.

54:21 Brian Rose: That big.

54:21 Dan Peña: A small. No, no, I’m not talking about the heart to fight, but I mean the heart to take emotional risk.

54:28 Brian Rose: Okay.

54:28 Dan Peña: It’s only that big.

54:29 Brian Rose: That’s all.

54:30 Dan Peña: Well, maybe it’s grown since I knew you better.

54:32 Brian Rose: Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with me now?

54:35 Dan Peña: No, I don’t want to embarrass you. You know, I want you to buy more Kent suits and, um, at some point you got to

54:42 So, when do you close this thing down?

54:43 Brian Rose: So, look, I’m spending a lot of time in Dubai. Have been for a while. I like it out there. There’s a lot of business out there. A lot of blockchain business.

54:51 And also, you know what London’s like. Um, you know what Britain’s like. It’s

54:55 Dan Peña: I know what the British are like.

54:56 Brian Rose: You know what the British are like. I mean, you’re still here.

54:59 Dan Peña: No, but I’m a British citizen now.

55:00 Brian Rose: As am I. And I came here. I mean, I look, I fell in love with this place. Maybe the way you did. And when I first got here, maybe I felt the same way you did.

55:09 As in, I looked around and I thought, I can beat these guys at what they do. That’s the first feeling I got. And my first 10, 15 years here in the city, I had a lot of success. But now I don’t know. Is it just wearing a little thin?

55:24 I don’t know. I just feel like the country is on the decline. I just don’t feel like the opportunities are here. And I just feel like there’s just a little bit of a grind here. Whereas when I’m in Dubai, it feels like the sky’s the limit and I’m around.

55:36 Dan Peña: Well, Dubai is you Las Vegas without slot machines.

55:40 Brian Rose: Okay. What does that mean?

55:43 Dan Peña: That mean when I came here in 1981,

55:46 Brian Rose: Right?

55:46 Dan Peña: Um, with what I knew, it was like taking candy from a baby, okay? And the stories of me choking investment bankers or doing that kind of s***, I will need they’re confirmed to deny, but some of them are true.

56:01 Brian Rose: Nobody was as aggressive as you.

56:02 Dan Peña: Nobody. No. I ate these guys for lunch.

56:04 Brian Rose: And they didn’t work anywhere near as hard as you did. No.

56:07 And they didn’t think the way you did, out of the box. Correct.

56:10 And you didn’t have that we can do it. We’re going to do it no matter what I say. Correct. Because that’s the opposite of everything British. Correct.

56:14 Dan Peña: Especially back then.

56:15 Oh, yeah.

56:16 Okay.

56:16 So, they’ve caught up a little, right? But now they act like they wrote the book, which No, they’re still reading somebody else’s book,

56:25 Brian Rose: Right?

56:25 Okay. And Dubai is where I

56:27 Dan Peña: But I mean, I’ve got, Sally and I were there five months ago for two closings for two of my kids. One, Nelly, and this is public information, so I’m not doing anything bad. $100 million closing. At the close, the government took 20 million of his money so he only got 80 million.

56:46 Okay.

56:46 Happens all the time. Okay. Yesterday 50 grand at the close taken an extra fee that came up.

56:54 Brian Rose: Where was this?

56:54 Dan Peña: Dubai. Okay. And then the Carlings who just are from Dundee sold their company to a Japanese company and the close wasn’t in Dubai but they were there so we celebrated their deal. Okay. And they sold for a few hundred million bucks their maintenance company which is all over the UK.

57:15 But Dubai is where it’s happening. But I mean you’ve got to know who you’re in business with. And there’s two or three non-Dubai based law firms, in other words, American or English-based law firms that have run the test of time there. And if you don’t have one of those guys and or a Dubai partner that is born and bred and carries a Dubai passport, you can get f***ed very easily.

57:44 Brian Rose: Okay. Very easy.

57:44 Dan Peña: It’s better than it used to be, but it’s still it’s still, you used to. A few years ago, you had to have an Emirati on your board or in your company. I mean, that’s changed, but still you got to watch it.

57:56 You have to watch it.

57:57 Brian Rose: What’s Haggnelli buying there?

57:58 Dan Peña: Huh? No. No. Well, he

57:59 Brian Rose: He’s the South African conglomerate. I’m wondering what he’s doing. He closed the fund to buy part of De Beers.

58:07 Dan Peña: Okay. And they there were, there’s their money. Oh, the money was there.

58:11 And he’s paying I think 2 and 12% interest.

58:15 And lump sum 25 years.

58:20 Okay.

58:20 No payment, nothing. Okay.

58:21 Interest or principal for 25 years.

58:23 Brian Rose: Okay. He got that financing in

58:26 Dan Peña: Yeah. You can’t find that

58:28 Brian Rose: Any place legit anywhere else. Okay. of all that of the area, Dan, and I know you know the area, if you look at Saudi, Qatar, Emirates, and again in my seminar we had a Qatari guy there so I know you know all those guys, I know you’ve been doing business in Kuwait and everywhere since the beginning, which if you had to go to one of those places now at say you were 30 years old, which one would you go to?

58:50 Dan Peña: The same one I went to, Kuwait really but I mean I was dealing with the top dog okay Al-Sabah okay okay

58:57 Brian Rose: what if you weren’t in the oil business and you were just going today. But Pena as a young man,

59:04 I know you would have said somebody 10 years ago, but Dubai and then do business in the area.

59:08 Dan Peña: Now, I’m not as familiar with Abu Dhabi. The, um

59:12 Brian Rose: It’s quieter where all the money is.

59:14 Dan Peña: Yeah, that’s what everyone says and where the oil is.

59:18 But I mean oil, it costs about two bucks to get the oil from discovery to extraction. In America, it’s 52 bucks. Oh, really? It’s two bucks.

59:30 Brian Rose: There’s no, there’s no comparison.

59:30 Okay. It’s two bucks out there. It’s

59:32 Dan Peña: Two, actually less than two.

59:33 It just flows right to the I mean, you can almost dig it with your hand.

59:37 Okay. Everywhere out there. Yeah.

59:39 Brian Rose: So, it’s just Okay. So, there’s really money just flows from the earth.

59:44 Dan Peña: Correct. Okay.

59:44 I mean, literally, and there’s a thing in the Quran, I forget where I’ve read it, about goodness flowing from the earth. And that’s, you know, the oil. Did he know? But did Muhammad know?

59:56 No, he didn’t. But J. Paul Getty who discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in 1926 or whenever it was was we’re looking for water.

1:00:04 Okay.

1:00:04 Okay. Cuz if they didn’t get water there, they’d be dead now. There’d be no Middle East.

1:00:10 Okay.

1:00:10 Brian Rose: Okay. So, serendipity and Allah’s will, water.

1:00:13 So, Getty found the oil.

1:00:14 Dan Peña: Yeah. Correct.

1:00:14 Brian Rose: Wow.

1:00:14 And he owned it for a while and then he had to give it back.

1:00:18 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, no, he didn’t give back. He sold it back. Okay. For a lot more than you know, it only cost in those days it cost 800 bucks to drill a well, he was charging then 80,000, so he and he drilled 6, 8, 900 wells what the London Real Investment Club actually does for you it gives you So, we made a bunch of money there.

1:01:33 But the problem when Getty died, he did everything in the foundation, never paid a dollar tax. He’s famous for having a pay phone in his house. You know, and

1:01:41 Brian Rose: For not paying ransom to his grandkid.

1:01:43 Dan Peña: Exactly. And he, oh God, I met the kid without a missing ear. He’s dead now. Really? I mean, you talk about f***ed up, you know.

1:01:51 He said, “I have 12 more grandchildren.” According to Getty’s legend, would you hear their names and their addresses?

1:01:58 Brian Rose: Go grab him.

1:01:58 Yeah.

1:01:58 And they got the kid back eventually.

1:02:02 Dan Peña: It’s the only time the Italian secret police, Secret Service did something. And the joke is they bumped into him by accident.

1:02:10 Brian Rose: Okay. Do you watch that show called Landman?

1:02:11 Dan Peña: Yo, I love it. That’s what I used to do. That’s what I’m kind of when I’m watching it. I’m wondering what is man. So you used to do that.

1:02:19 Exactly.

1:02:20 Really?

1:02:20 Multiples.

1:02:21 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:02:21 But he went and got money, if you’re up to date with it, from the Mexican drug cartel.

1:02:27 Yeah.

1:02:27 By accident.

1:02:28 Yeah.

1:02:28 Dan Peña: But I was getting money. I got money. No, I got money from the Japanese government. I got money from the British government. I got money from different governments.

1:02:39 And I convinced the Kuwaitis to give me money to build an oil company. They need another oil company. Like they need AIDS. Yeah.

1:02:46 But I sold them on the idea. But one of the big also correct.

1:03:01 Okay.

1:03:01 I mean for one of the because there’s 15 or 1800 Al-Sabah princes in Kuwait. There’s only six that make any difference.

1:03:10 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:03:10 Dan Peña: He’s one of those six.

1:03:11 Ah, and he converted.

1:03:13 Converted.

1:03:14 Brian Rose: YouTube generation.

1:03:15 Yeah.

1:03:16 That wouldn’t have happened back in the day.

1:03:17 Dan Peña: No, no, no. They would have never let him out in the public. They would have chopped his head off.

1:03:21 Brian Rose: Okay. So, Landman is you. Yeah.

1:03:23 I was wondering what you were doing at Great Western. So, it was a version of that.

1:03:26 Dan Peña: Correct.

1:03:26 Shucking and jiving, buying rights, buying low, selling high, trying not to go bankrupt, trying to make a deal when nobody can see the deal, speculating.

1:03:35 Okay.

1:03:35 Yeah.

1:03:36 Brian Rose: Okay. Is it? And it’s that crazy.

1:03:37 Dan Peña: Yeah, it is crazy.

1:03:38 Brian Rose: You once I remember you saying talk is cheap, but it costs money to buy whiskey in West Texas.

1:03:45 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah.

1:03:46 And that’s West Texas. No BS.

1:03:48 Yeah.

1:03:48 Brian Rose: God-forbidden place.

1:03:49 Dan Peña: It still is to this day.

1:03:51 Brian Rose: It looks like on the show.

1:03:53 Dan Peña: It’s just they used to say when you get in a jet, the first one of my buddies who was a billionaire, he had a G2 at the time. You got to stand up and this sounds awful. Stand up like a real man. He was referring to the Middle Eastern guys are short. Okay.

1:04:09 You can stand up like a real man, Danny. You got to have a goddamn jet. You can stand up like a real man. You use my plane until you can afford to get one.

1:04:16 Brian Rose: Right. So, you don’t have one of those tiny jets.

1:04:18 Dan Peña: Exactly.

1:04:18 Brian Rose: You have the big jet. Correct.

1:04:19 Dan Peña: Stand up like a real man.

1:04:20 Yeah. Yeah.

1:04:21 Brian Rose: Okay. And that’s what you have.

1:04:22 Dan Peña: On that jet, you can stand up.

1:04:23 Brian Rose: You can like a real man. Okay. And at Great, at Great Western, you had a real man jet.

1:04:28 Okay. All right. All right. So, the next 5 years, if Trump stays longer, you’re doing QLA, you’re fixing the Catholic Church, and you’re enjoying your life a little bit more, [clears throat] going to space and these kinds of things like that. Y

1:04:40 Okay. And the world under Trump, we’re going to be okay, but otherwise long term, we’re kind of f***ed. You mentioned AI, 20 to 60% of the jobs lost.

1:04:49 Does that end in chaos everywhere?

1:04:51 Can everybody be on a universal basic income?

1:04:53 Dan Peña: No.

1:04:54 Brian Rose: Are there going to be new jobs? Elon, who I have, Elon is, 100 years from now they’re going to say he was the our current Michelangelo.

1:05:02 Okay.

1:05:02 Dan Peña: Okay. But he said something yesterday or the day before which took me back. He said that the, we’re going to be in a no money, no job economy. Now he wasn’t talking 20, 40 years from now, but he says the ultimate, no job, no money, and like social, to me that sounds like socialism. I, if there’s another word for it, I don’t know what it is.

1:05:26 And he says the things that people [expletive] about. Now, he’s talking about woke. Well, nobody will care because they’re going to be taken care of now. He called it universal wealth.

1:05:37 Yes.

1:05:37 Brian Rose: Smart how he did that.

1:05:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, yeah. He’s a smart guy. He’s a super smart guy.

1:05:43 Brian Rose: You’re a fan.

1:05:44 Dan Peña: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’m a big fan. And the, I I know some of the guys that, not advise him, but he works with an ex JP Morgan guy who lives actually in Los Angeles, pays a lot of money to solve problems. But he’s a, you know, he does sleep on the floor of the plants and he does all that stuff and the, and now when you suggest that we had a deadline here a year, a year and a half ago, one of the companies and I don’t care if anybody ever goes home.

1:06:20 It was over Easter, I guess. I don’t give a f***, I don’t care if your f***ing wife’s having a baby. If this s*** is not, I’m going to close it down and I’m going to make sure, I’m allegedly said this, make sure that the pension plan goes bankrupt. It got done. Now, that’s, you shouldn’t have to do that,

1:06:39 Brian Rose: Right? But these

1:06:39 Dan Peña: It’s a shitty way to run a railroad.

1:06:42 Brian Rose: Okay. But you have to.

1:06:43 Dan Peña: Yeah. I mean, fear still works,

1:06:44 Brian Rose: Right?

1:06:45 Dan Peña: And when I come to these sites, the banks don’t want to meet with me. We had a banking meeting about 10 months ago because Sally and I formed a big foundation and we put a bunch of money in it, blah blah blah, and they said for the signing and I wanted to go and get my, just like you took my picture, and Mr. Pena’s busy, we can send a courier up for him to sign it there cuz I’ll have the chairman of the, what about this? What about that? You know, um

1:07:12 Brian Rose: They don’t want to deal with you.

1:07:14 Dan Peña: No. Uh-huh.

1:07:14 Brian Rose: That’s been going on for decades though.

1:07:15 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of. If you f*** something up.

1:07:19 I used to have a um [clears throat] um, oh, I just celebrated 50 years a few years ago. American Express, I’ve had my black card or whatever it’s called. I didn’t get a letter. I didn’t kiss my ass. Go f*** yourself.

1:07:34 So, I called, started making calls and apparently I have a committee of six that are supposed to manage me. I never heard from these guys. And then, you know, I started bitching. Now I was, when I was in, at the Vatican there was a senior guy was part of my group of eight guys and he made the same mistake when his 50 years came up. He called and he said I got a committee of five.

1:07:58 I never heard of these guys. Maybe on a chart or on a spreadsheet we’ve got people, you know, that have been there 50 years etc. I did the same thing with Rolls-Royce. Owned for Rolls-Royce for 50 years. I actually got a blurb in the Rolls-Royce newsletter that I’ve had Rolls-Royces since I’m 26 years old.

1:08:20 But, service is service if it’s convenient. And in most places, the pubs here used to be on Friday afternoon from 3, 3:30, you couldn’t get a beer because they were so overflowed. Yeah. Okay.

1:08:39 Yeah. or they’re on the highways to go home or the tubes you couldn’t get even standing in a tube. But I want to get back and answer your question why I know it’s f***ed up. Now you’re old enough to remember this didn’t happen so much. Two years ago on about 118th Street taking the subway towards Harlem.

1:09:00 Okay. For 43-year-old woman was gang raped by three black guys. There was 42 witnesses. 42 that signed as witnesses. Not one of them dialed 9991 or is it 91, whatever it is there.

1:09:17 Okay.

1:09:18 One of them took a picture and the 40 people watched that old lady get beat and raped again and again and again. That’s where we are. That’s beyond my comprehension.

1:09:30 Brian Rose: And that’s why we’re f***ed is what you’re saying.

1:09:34 Dan Peña: We’re f***ed. We’re in moral demise. Some people started with home. Maybe home and church. Maybe we’re f***ed.

1:09:42 Brian Rose: Isn’t Trump turning it around?

1:09:43 Dan Peña: He’s he’s one guy.

1:09:45 Brian Rose: I know.

1:09:45 Dan Peña: If he becomes king like, um, Putin Putin then I’m then I’m praying for his health to be better. And his hand to puff up,

1:09:54 I’m his age.

1:09:56 I know exactly what the f*** that is. You know what? And when your ankles puff up,

1:09:59 It’s worse.

1:10:00 It’s, so that’s just something that happens.

1:10:03 It happens as you get older.

1:10:04 Okay. Right. Yeah. He look, he’s some days he looks tired but he’s going 100 miles.

1:10:09 Brian Rose: He fell asleep in a cabinet meeting yesterday.

1:10:12 Dan Peña: Did he actually fall asleep?

1:10:13 Brian Rose: Yeah, he was asleep and whoever’s sitting to his right.

1:10:16 Rubio.

1:10:16 Rubio I think gave him a kick.

1:10:19 Dan Peña: Yeah. Now whatever you do.

1:10:20 Brian Rose: Yeah. I mean he works a lot. He’s on camera four times a day.

1:10:24 Yeah.

1:10:24 He’s the greatest show on earth.

1:10:25 Dan Peña: Yeah. I need more sleep than he does.

1:10:28 Brian Rose: Okay. Yeah. He does four or five hours or something.

1:10:30 Dan Peña: Yeah. I can’t do that. The pace when I was your age I could do it

1:10:33 Right. Oh, my last trip to Europe, um, I decided, can I still do like I used to? So, the first day I had eight meetings. The second day I had eight meetings. The third day I had nine meetings.

1:10:44 The fourth day I had 12 meetings. I can’t do it anymore.

1:10:48 Really? I come home to the hotel. What’s wrong with you? I don’t feel like dinner tonight. And so, Sally dancing around and trying to make me happy.

1:10:59 Maybe a drink. Maybe a drink will make you feel better. because I’d have a couple drinks and made me feel not that much better, but rather than disappoint Sally, we went out to dinner and so I used to do those s*** back to back, jump on a plane, you know, because we were public in Amsterdam

1:11:16 Brian Rose: And London, back and forth, right?

1:11:17 Dan Peña: But I can’t do that anymore.

1:11:19 Brian Rose: Okay. Is jet lag still in your mind?

1:11:21 Dan Peña: Well, no. Jet lag’s not

1:11:21 For 80-year- olds. It’s real.

1:11:24 Brian Rose: Okay. For everybody else, it’s in their mind.

1:11:25 You’re a [expletive] Okay. Is London going to get better? Is the UK have any chance of turning it around? I always say there’s no Trump.

1:11:32 Dan Peña: Not under current government. And the things I ran, I only got 700 votes. 73 votes.

1:11:36 Brian Rose: Yes. Politics. So you ran

1:11:38 Dan Peña: The same things I said this government, whoever gets in is going to do, they’ve done, right?

1:11:43 And up in Scotland, they said, “You’re crazy. You’re just a lying American.” And now they’ve done all these things. And whether the black hole was 6 million or 30 million, nobody’s managed finance here, right? Since the Korean War, NHS has been f***ed up.

1:12:00 Wilson, the former prime minister in 1964 said on its 25th anniversary and its 20th anniversary, the day we signed the papers in 1947 to 48, NHS was f***ed up. And now in 1964 at their 20th reunion or whatever it is, it’s still f***ed up really. And I have the CEO, former CEO of NHS on one of my boards. He says, “If you knew, if the public knew what I know, they’d be afraid to go to NHS.”

1:12:29 Brian Rose: That bad? Big surprise. Are they going to break it up at some point? Because I know you are waiting. They’re waiting with baited breath.

1:12:38 Yeah.

1:12:38 Dan Peña: If they break that up, you’ll stay another 5 years. I’ll be the, I’ll be the first trillionaire because they, if they do break it up, there are multiple trillions to be made and they should break it up, right? They should, it should not be a public vehicle, right? I believe in universal health for old gits. And now that I am an old git, you know, when I go to the NHS, I went to get a booster or some f***ing shot.

1:13:09 Well, two, oh, the other thing. Two years ago, I almost died from blood poisoning.

1:13:14 I went in for a minor procedure. And came home and I want blood poisoning. And so I almost died at nine whales and the, but they came together somehow as disorganized as they look. They had five junior doctors there that didn’t know how to spell doctor, but they figured it out. Oh, yeah.

1:13:39 Off. Yeah, but I didn’t die.

1:13:40 Brian Rose: They seem to pull it off at the last minute.

1:13:42 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah, but [expletive]

1:13:42 Yeah.

1:13:43 Brian Rose: How many people do they lose?

1:13:45 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah.

1:13:46 I don’t want to be the one that they lost.

1:13:48 Brian Rose: Okay. Now, they still say there’s good AI talent and there’s still smart people coming from the UK. Correct.

1:13:55 And I don’t know, I never know if it’s lip service. Like when Jensen from Nvidia comes over here, he said, “Oh, the UK has so much potential because of the universities.” I can’t ever tell if they’re just lip service or is that actually true?

1:14:10 Dan Peña: Well, part of it lip service, but man, man’s greatest burden is unfulfilled potential. I mean, that’s easy to say, but smart guys, but the smartest, let’s see, Gates, Jobs, Jack Welch amongst others said the smartest people on the planet today all come from southern India.

1:14:27 And if you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies in America, okay, 75% are Indian. They’re just naturally smart and they have a gift. Their synapses fire vis-a-vis tech, especially AI. But AI is, is 75% of the AI startups are going to fail, maybe 95, just like all the other failures. But there’s a lot of money to be made.

1:15:00 Brian Rose: Are you impressed when you see the tech? It’s something special and something different.

1:15:04 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, I’m involved. I just took over as chairman seven or eight months ago for something that I didn’t start. I rarely do that. But the kid came up.

1:15:11 He’s 33. And he’s, you know, how the guy that Zuckerberg’s people offered $125 million and Zuckerberg made it $ 250 million.

1:15:23 Brian Rose: Yeah. Was it the acqui-hire for that kid? The young kid.

1:15:26 Dan Peña: Yeah.

1:15:26 Yeah. Okay. He’s that kind of kid.

1:15:29 Okay.

1:15:29 Okay. And he’s just he’s too gifted for his own good and the, he’s come up with a, and it’s AI in finance and

1:15:43 Okay.

1:15:43 Brian Rose: And it’s so you’re deep into it as chairman.

1:15:44 Dan Peña: I have rarely do I bring Sally into meetings with me, but she’s attended almost all the meetings because there’s some of the concepts I’m too far behind to catch up. Okay.

1:15:56 Okay. And I know when I’m too far behind to catch up, you know,

1:15:58 But there’s money there. Oh, a lot of, a gazillion, preliminary evaluation 800 million. That’s pre-money, pre anything. It’s crazy. Crazy.

1:16:12 Brian Rose: It’s where all the venture capital is going now in AI, right? The last two years. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nobody would have ever thought that possible.

1:16:23 Dan Peña: But the numbers, you know, when I was doing this in the ’70s and ’80s, if you made four, five, $8 million, you made a lot of money. Now, I mean, they got assistants making that kind of money.

1:16:34 Brian Rose: Yeah. The whole thing’s crazy. Yeah.

1:16:35 I mean, back when I was on Wall Street, those were the only guys making that kind of money. And now you could be a YouTuber making that kind of money. Like, you know, and you could be 15 making that kind of money, but back in the day wasn’t happening. Politics, are you done? What was the experience like?

1:16:50 You know, you saw me, you saw me run for mayor in ’21. I don’t think you thought it was a good idea. You told me later you thought it was

1:16:57 Dan Peña: Well, knowing you, how I know you, it was something you needed to do.

1:17:01 Brian Rose: I had to get out of my system just like you had to.

1:17:04 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, no, I did it for a different reason. I offered first of the president of the, not NHS, but the Liberal Party, SNP.

1:17:14 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah.

1:17:15 Dan Peña: For one pound. I said, “I’ll do it for a pound and until I turn it around, if I don’t turn it around, I’ll work there for a pound for the rest of my life.” Okay. I got a nice letter. I was on the short list.

1:17:26 The next week, Sweeney, they put Sweeney in. I’m told whether it’s true or not. The only reason Sweeney took the job because it’s a thankless job, it’s not curable. After they lost 126 seats, they only had six left. The one that I lost to was one of the ones guy kept the seat.

1:17:44 He seems like a good guy, but the um is the top of his pension because if you’re head of, if you’re prime minister one day you get a pension as prime minister and so that’s whether that’s true or not I have no idea. But politics is still the clans. It’s like the clans are still up there in Scotland.

1:18:04 Brian Rose: Exactly. Exactly.

1:18:05 What do you make of the whole process? I mean it’s

1:18:07 Dan Peña: Well, the process is archaic.

1:18:09 Yeah.

1:18:09 I mean it’s at least one or 200 years behind the times.

1:18:11 Brian Rose: Do you even want to be a politician?

1:18:14 Dan Peña: No, but I do know I got almost a thousand requests. Can you guarantee me this? You know how they do prime minister’s questions. And I could not have done it full time with keeping my other business interests.

1:18:28 So if I had been elected, I would had to get rid of everything else if I was going to do a good job. Yeah. So in that regard, you know, it worked out for the best for me. But I mean I talk to politicians and they talk. Everybody’s got two agendas.

1:18:44 And the third agenda is how do I turn this experience when they throw me out into money?

1:18:50 Brian Rose: Yeah. Liz Truss just started a podcast.

1:18:53 Dan Peña: Oh, really?

1:18:53 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. 49 days in office. Now she has her own podcast.

1:18:57 Dan Peña: By the way, I’m starting next month a podcast.

1:19:00 Brian Rose: Really?

1:19:00 Dan Peña: First time.

1:19:00 Brian Rose: Oh my gosh. Wait. What’s it called?

1:19:03 Um Oh, yeah. You’re interviewing people and you got them lined up, right? Everyone wants to be on your show.

1:19:09 Dan Peña: No, not everybody. But I mean the

1:19:11 Brian Rose: Uh And why are you doing this?

1:19:15 Dan Peña: Because I still want to drag as many across the goal line as I can before I’m dead.

1:19:21 Brian Rose: Okay. This is the best way to do it.

1:19:22 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s an additional way, additional tool for me to reach more people. The, when I go back, when I go to Tampa tomorrow, in between my board meetings I have four podcasts with a guy named Ben David or Bit David or he’s a

1:19:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. Patrick Bet-David.

1:19:45 Dan Peña: Yeah. And some other guys which I’m not familiar with because I don’t follow that stuff. And everybody so far has made their time available because I have a tight schedule. and the, and I appreciate that the um

1:20:03 Investment club today I consider it the best investment that I’ve without question. And, um, I’m gonna have one TV interview down there, Florida TV. And so, and the guy that’s the head of the the program is a Navy Seal. He’s one of the only, not exaggeration, one of the only ones that I try to get to do my boots of suits, but I still remember when I called Jocko Willink. I mean, he matter-of-factly, he says, “It took you 17 to figure this out, Mr.

1:21:20 Pena.” And I said, I kept saying, thinking I’m doing something wrong. All came back with the same answer. [expletive] You know,

1:21:29 Brian Rose: Just not ready for that idea.

1:21:30 Dan Peña: No. Well, not, I guess not, but absolutely not.

1:21:35 Brian Rose: But now you’re embracing social media. Now you’re a social media star.

1:21:37 Dan Peña: Well, you turned me on to social media and I’m going to hell for it.

1:21:41 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. You probably will go to hell for it. As long as I don’t go to hell, that’s fine. Um, the

1:21:47 Yeah, that was 11 years ago.

1:21:48 Dan Peña: Correct. 11 years ago. And the, I still remember you walked me to the cab outside.

1:21:56 Brian Rose: Yeah. And you stood outside. It was at night and you said, “Brian, can you see a green glow around me?” And I thought, “What the hell is that talking about?”

1:22:03 I looked, I couldn’t see it. You said, “Some people say

1:22:04 Dan Peña: A lot of people, a lot of people I believe.” I didn’t believe this, but 20 one years ago now passed away, Sister Superior, in the, in the St. Teresa Missionaries of Charity. You’re on a rocket ship to heaven, Mr. Pena, and we just want to hang along on the tail.

1:22:31 Brian Rose: That’s what she said.

1:22:31 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:22:32 Brian Rose: I think you also said that night you said, “Brian, I change people’s lives and I’m going to change your life.” Do

1:22:38 Dan Peña: I still do?

1:22:39 Yeah, I still do.

1:22:40 Brian Rose: You still enjoy it?

1:22:41 Dan Peña: Yeah.

1:22:41 Brian Rose: You still get a kick out of it?

1:22:43 Dan Peña: I get a kick out of it. And when I’m proven wrong, when the guy showed up that I said wasn’t going to make it.

1:22:50 Brian Rose: You like that?

1:22:51 Dan Peña: Yeah, I like that being proven wrong.

1:22:52 Well, yeah, but I’m not that often proven wrong. But I like that. And that was his driving force, though. I’m not saying that’s bad, but that was his driving force. I

1:23:02 Told him he’s not going to make it.

1:23:03 Brian Rose: Yeah. He do that more.

1:23:04 Dan Peña: I said, “You’re never going to be another Josh Kim. Okay.

1:23:08 Brian Rose: Yeah.

1:23:08 Dan Peña: And but we’ve got a guy who stopped at 56 billion. He stopped, went to sleep, and he could have done 500 billion. And I kept after him and after him and then after two or three years, I said, “Well, that’s it for him.”

1:23:29 Brian Rose: He had enough.

1:23:29 Dan Peña: He had enough.

1:23:30 Brian Rose: Okay. Well people say well 56 billion then you know when’s enough enough.

1:23:38 What’s your number right now? Because it’s a lot more than a trillion, isn’t it?

1:23:42 Dan Peña: Oh yeah.

1:23:43 Brian Rose: Because when I met you it was the $50 billion man. That was

1:23:46 Dan Peña: And we kept it that way cuz I had one guy I could contact would stand up and say 50 billion so I didn’t have to go search for people that were endorsing me.

1:23:55 Brian Rose: Right. You could quantify it. Right.

1:23:56 Thank you. And then by 2020 COVID time, you had the sign behind you and you were now the trillion dollar man. And then the last time I heard there’s like 8 trillion.

1:24:08 Dan Peña: 8.6.

1:24:08 Brian Rose: That’s a lot of money, Dan.

1:24:12 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:24:12 Brian Rose: And it’s going to keep going up.

1:24:14 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:24:16 Brian Rose: What do you think it’ll be in 10 years?

1:24:19 Dan Peña: Well, I had a short-term goal of 10 trillion. If Trump stays in, when Trump stays in office, the sky’s the limit. But I can’t quantify it.

1:24:30 Brian Rose: Do you think the stock market is just going to go up and up and up for the next few years right now? Okay.

1:24:34 Yeah.

1:24:35 Dan Peña: I came prepared. Um, and I had interesting, I had a hedge fund guy, pretty successful guy, at the last seminar and the I was talking, I used to be a Dow theorist back in the day, a chartist and all that stuff.

1:24:47 Brian Rose: Really? Yeah. Bear.

1:24:49 Yeah. Okay.

1:24:49 Yeah. Yeah.

1:24:49 Okay.

1:24:50 Dan Peña: Yeah. When they say that I was an analyst, it’s true. I was

1:24:53 Brian Rose: Really, I didn’t know that.

1:24:54 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. And then you were a salesman.

1:24:55 Yeah. But I like selling and I could sell anything to anybody. I used to turn the charts upside down,

1:25:03 Brian Rose: Right?

1:25:04 It’s easier to sell when you have a chart.

1:25:05 Dan Peña: Yeah. But I mean it doesn’t matter what the chart said. And so the, um, I enjoy not being right so much. Sally says this is [expletive] but I enjoy taking a guy who, one of my mentees just died. He called himself the Hungarian Forrest Gump.

1:25:28 He used to make 30,000 euros a year. And to have enough money to give his kids Christmas presents, he’d sell cookies at the malls during Christmas. Peter Harassi, he’s dead now. Wow. Left his wife 600 million.

1:25:56 Brian Rose: How old was he?

1:25:57 Dan Peña: 41.

1:25:58 Brian Rose: Was this the guy rolling up the hospitals and stuff in Hungary?

1:26:00 Dan Peña: Yes.

1:26:02 Brian Rose: Really?

1:26:02 Dan Peña: He had, there were 17, I’m glad you remembered. Okay.

1:26:08 Absolutely. There were 17 potential candidates he could roll up. He eventually rolled them all up.

1:26:15 Brian Rose: Wow. Went from 30,000 euros a year to hundreds of billions

1:26:21 Dan Peña: And he was just about to close his billion euro fund but he died.

1:26:26 Brian Rose: What happened?

1:26:27 Dan Peña: He had a heart attack while pedaling his bicycle cuz he was working too hard for QLA.

1:26:34 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well,

1:26:35 Is that true or not?

1:26:36 Well, a lot of guys die on your watch. And his wife would say that. And his wife was supposedly barren,

1:26:44 Right, until he started QLA.

1:26:45 Dan Peña: She’s got four kids. And the story, she’s never told me this. I’ve never talked to her about this. How would you like it? 51.

1:26:53 Brian Rose: Little gorilla chewing on your nipple.

1:26:56 Breastfeed. She wasn’t happy with you about the kids. She had 50.

1:27:00 Dan Peña: 51. The last one.

1:27:03 Brian Rose: Okay. Did QLA have something to do with his demise? Honestly,

1:27:06 Dan Peña: He may have got sloppy. Well, he’s not the only guy.

1:27:10 Brian Rose: He’s 41. That’s young.

1:27:11 Yeah. Yeah.

1:27:13 Dan Peña: But was he working hard? Of course he was.

1:27:15 Brian Rose: Yeah. Like a dog.

1:27:16 All right. But and he still was, even though he’d already made it.

1:27:20 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:27:20 Okay.

1:27:21 They just moved into their 24,000 foot house on the lake on 50 acres. He’s playing tennis with the president of Hungary. Well, he was the guy.

1:27:38 Brian Rose: He basically privatized their healthcare system.

1:27:40 Dan Peña: Yeah. No, that he didn’t, he didn’t own all the government stuff.

1:27:44 Okay.

1:27:44 That was his next, oh, his next move.

1:27:46 He was going to bid for the government stuff.

1:27:47 Brian Rose: How do you feel when a guy like that dies?

1:27:50 Dan Peña: I get emotional about it.

1:27:51 Yeah.

1:27:52 Brian Rose: But like you’re not the guy that gets emotional.

1:27:54 Dan Peña: No, I get emotional. I get emotional about stuff that I was close to him. He’d come back to the seminar three times for nothing to try to, you know, and he’d say, and I’m just a Hungarian Forrest Gump. I made 30 grand. And somebody in the audience says, “That’s not even minimum wage.”

1:28:11 I don’t know if that is or [clears throat] true or not, but [expletive] Probably not.

1:28:14 Hardworking little [expletive]. And when he would [snorts] he would, you know, email me or email Kim, I need to talk to Dan. I’m not sure what to do now. And I talked to him and I said, “He’s jerking you around. He’s probably already sold it to somebody else.”

1:28:31 And when we did the research, he already sold the f***ing company 18 months before and he’s jerking poor Peter around for 18 months before he did his first deal.

1:28:39 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. So, you were helping him.

1:28:41 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:28:41 Brian Rose: And then boom, he was the star.

1:28:43 Dan Peña: Yeah. And then he’s dead.

1:28:44 Brian Rose: Now he’s dead. And the wife blames you. Who knows?

1:28:47 Well, a lot of guys die around you. Wouldn’t your Great Western, the guy that took over as president, didn’t he die? And he was like

1:28:53 Charlie Holiday marathon run, resting heart rate 40 or something crazy, and he died on the sofa in your house I think.

1:28:59 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Correct.

1:29:01 Brian Rose: It’s all very suspect.

1:29:02 Dan Peña: He’s a boxer.

1:29:03 Brian Rose: Was he like me?

1:29:04 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But he was a real athlete and an all-American football player.

1:29:09 Brian Rose: Yeah. I’m not.

1:29:10 Dan Peña: I know.

1:29:10 Brian Rose: And I still went in there.

1:29:12 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, you know, more power to you.

1:29:15 Brian Rose: It was much scarier than doing an Ironman race, let me tell you. Going to the boxing ring.

1:29:21 Dan Peña: Yeah. Now remember, I started boxing at the seminars. The original idea was I was fighting everybody,

1:29:29 Brian Rose: Me, right?

1:29:30 Dan Peña: Okay. It only lasted a couple times cuz my insurance wouldn’t cover me.

1:29:33 Brian Rose: You did this in the ’90s or this came when you were doing

1:29:35 Dan Peña: No, no, in the ’90s the first time.

1:29:37 Brian Rose: And okay. So, you had done it way before?

1:29:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. And, you know, and the guys, you know, they say you were lucky just cuz you knocked all these guys out. No, maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I was also 25 years younger and I could hit like a f***ing train.

1:29:49 Brian Rose: So, you used to fight everybody? Yeah.

1:29:50 Okay. I didn’t know that. And then you opted it

1:29:53 And then when you were there they said remember that somebody wanted you to fight me and then you said the comment was have you and I was taking a look at his shoulders. Look at how thick he is. You said something like that. Yeah. And but these guys, um

1:30:08 Dan Peña: Occasionally we got a guy that knows what he’s doing. I mean really knows what he’s doing. But that’s so rare.

1:30:13 Brian Rose: Yeah. Guys train just to come to the seminar.

1:30:15 Dan Peña: This is the first time we haven’t had somebody seriously hurt.

1:30:18 Brian Rose: This last one.

1:30:18 Dan Peña: Yeah. We cut that part out. That doesn’t go on YouTube. But we had some, we had some

1:30:25 Um we had the best fight we ever had were two women. I didn’t know one was a AAU and one was something else, um, fought that Oklahoma or something. Okay.

1:30:35 And they really could fight.

1:30:37 They went at it.

1:30:37 Yeah.

1:30:38 Okay.

1:30:38 Yeah.

1:30:39 I think it’s a big part and they recognized each other from the Golden Gloves days.

1:30:42 Brian Rose: No way. Yeah. And they still went at it.

1:30:46 [sighs] The box scene’s good. You know, I did it with you. I was scared. Nobody wanted to fight because it was the hardcore. So, I thought everyone’s going to fight.

1:30:54 I thought the Goomba Brothers were going to fight. And I was like, “All right, guys. We’re all going to fight.” And they were like, “No, no, we did it when we were at the regular seminar.” And so, it was like four of us that fought that night.

1:31:03 And then I had some dude that was 8 kilos heavier than me. I’m walking back to the castle to get changed. And I said, “You ever do any boxing before?” And he’s like, “No, never. Just Thai boxing.”

1:31:14 I was like, “Oh, fuck.”

1:31:15 Dan Peña: Yeah, I remember that.

1:31:16 Brian Rose: [expletive] And then I went in there and he was trying to take my head off. But that planted the seed in me. And then when I got the chance a few years later, I decided I needed to do it.

1:31:24 Dan Peña: So, who are you fighting next?

1:31:26 Brian Rose: Look, I’ve had two fights. Every time I say, “Can you get someone my age with no experience?” They always come back and say, “I got to get this 27 with fights.” Or this f***ing South African kid, 19, 6’3″. Oh, yeah.

1:31:38 It’s supposedly no experience. I was like, “Yeah, right.” But look, I’m glad he was game. I didn’t want somebody I could just take out and he pushed me. He hit me hard and I had to find out if I was going to be there and so

1:31:50 Dan Peña: It was good. You did well.

1:31:51 Brian Rose: It was, I’m glad.

1:31:52 Dan Peña: I agree. If the fight had gone longer,

1:31:54 Brian Rose: I would have had it. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.

1:31:56 Dan Peña: I thought that was going to be a draw.

1:31:57 Brian Rose: That one. The thing is that I slipped and went down on a knee and then Singapore, you know, they only employ Singaporeans. So, you had this old lady was who was the ref. Like I don’t even know she’s been in a boxing match before and she’s counting an eight count on me. I don’t know what the f*** was going on because the guy had hit me like eight times in the head and apparently I supposed to protest it and be like no I’m fine because I didn’t actually

1:32:18 Dan Peña: Well, actually your manager or your coach is supposed to protest it. So I should

1:32:22 So you pick somebody off the street to be your second, right?

1:32:25 Brian Rose: Chris is my good. He’s been training me for 20 years. But like we both realized later we should have said something. Now it might not have made a difference. But that loses me a point right there.

1:32:33 But you know professional boxer every point counts and every point. But professional boxer David Haye said I won the next two rounds. So I should have won. But it’s okay. I’m still glad I did it.

1:32:42 Look, the problem is, Dan, is a month before the fight, you wake up at two in the morning, all you’re thinking about is this f***ing kid. He’s gonna f***ing kill me or I’m gonna kill him. And it takes a lot of mental bandwidth. Some of my other mentees are boxing each other. Real estate guy from down south,

1:32:58 Dan Peña: Okay, named Reed boxed another one of my mentees. They put each 100 grand up.

1:33:04 Brian Rose: Okay. Nice.

1:33:04 Dan Peña: Okay. And the kid beat the older guy and then he just sent me another one where he fought, and it was a split decision this time, and so there are people, not everybody loves each other, they do these podcasts and if you say something bad about somebody and then their cousin or their wife or somebody

1:33:27 And then they want to box it’s a good experience.

1:33:29 Brian Rose: I’m glad you’re doing it at the castle cuz what you tell the kids, if you can get in the ring it makes cold calling look like a joke.

1:33:35 Dan Peña: And you’re right.

1:33:35 I agree 100%.

1:33:36 Brian Rose: And you’re right. Once you go through that then you ask yourself, I’ll be honest, and look you taught me a lot about fear, Dan. And look, I wouldn’t have been in the ring without you. Let’s be honest. I wouldn’t run for mayor without you.

1:33:46 I wouldn’t have done the Ironman race without you. I wouldn’t have done a lot of things without you because I now look at fear as something I need to engineer into my life. That’s QLA.

1:33:54 Dan Peña: Well, you already engineer too much.

1:33:56 Brian Rose: Yes.

1:33:56 Okay. But at least I try to engineer fear or risk into my life.

1:34:01 Whereas before I was a way of mitigating risk, right? But I’m trying to put myself in things that have a lot of upside and downside

1:34:11 Because like you always said, everyone, nobody remembers your failures. They always remember your wins.

1:34:15 Dan Peña: Correct.

1:34:16 Brian Rose: Same with me.

1:34:18 So that’s what I learned from you and QLA. I didn’t roll up companies, but I learned to try to embrace risk. I’m sure I need to do more.

1:34:26 Dan Peña: Yeah. I need to do more. Right.

1:34:28 Brian Rose: And the [clears throat] older you are, the harder it is to Yes.

1:34:30 To start.

1:34:32 Dan Peña: And when we tell the old gets, you know, um, it’s when you’re 20 years old, doesn’t mean s***, you know.

1:34:38 Yeah.

1:34:38 Brian Rose: But I had my first boxing match at 53. The kid was 27. I was 54. The kid was 19. All right.

1:34:46 Dan Peña: So there you go. So

1:34:47 But everybody, all they look, what great shape he’s in.

1:34:51 Brian Rose: Did you pay him to say that?

1:34:52 Dan Peña: No, but I’ll take it. The, um, but on the opposite side of that I think I might have mentioned it. We have guys that come to the seminar just to work up the courage to take somebody out for a coffee, you know, after three years. And then she says, “No, right.” And I can’t believe that, you know, I was going to go to 24-hour fitness at 3:30 in the morning.

1:35:16 Next time I’m in New York, I’m going to meet this [expletive], you know, the one that said no.

1:35:21 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, that’s way beyond my comprehension.

1:35:25 But you’re teaching these kids.

1:35:26 Dan Peña: Yeah. Absolutely. And I still enjoy that. But I [clears throat] when they, I teach them and as a direct result of those teachings they carry it across the goal line, that’s when I feel the best, when you know, because now I’ve taught them something you know that they can use in their future life. And it affects all, as you well know, it affects all your life, not just, you know, your personal life, the, but I mean self-esteem is a [expletive] if it’s not built in the first seven or eight years.

1:35:59 The Catholic Church used to say in their homily, pre-Vatican council 1965, you give us, our in Latin, you give us your children the first seven or eight years and we will own them for life. They’ve taken that out now, you know. But that’s what they used to say because that’s when self-esteem’s built. The Spartans, same thing. First seven or eight years.

1:36:20 But most of the kids that are walking the streets here and that are listening to this would have been thrown in the pitch. They would have got to be a Spartan because you know, you know what, what good reason. And everybody’s got rights now. Even the kids,

1:36:36 Brian Rose: Especially the kids. So how do we turn this around? Or if you’re somebody listening and you’re about to have kids, how do you parent in a way where your kids don’t become

1:36:44 Well, there’s a book by, the, um, famous book written by Spock that your mom had.

1:36:49 Dan Peña: Yeah. My mom got by serendipity when she’s walking through the line. She got the Reader’s Digest version and she happened to get it and she used that like the Bible, and the, but it didn’t teach aggression, that book. It taught even-handed and looking at the other person’s position. In the hood where I grew up, you weren’t interested in the other gang’s position.

1:37:14 You know, your position was the holy grail.

1:37:17 Okay.

1:37:17 And so, um but your mom my mom saw through that, saw through that and it was almost impossible cell for my dad because he was the antithesis of that [snorts] until the day he died. My dad when he was 86 or 87 tried to kill his doctor in I mean so

1:37:38 Brian Rose: So your mom was the yang to his yin.

1:37:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. Correct.

1:37:40 Brian Rose: And that’s why you are who you are today.

1:37:42 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:37:42 Brian Rose: Cuz mom was listening to Dr. Spock.

1:37:44 Yeah.

1:37:44 Okay.

1:37:45 Yeah.

1:37:45 All right. So try, try to raise your kids stronger.

1:37:49 Dan Peña: Well in today’s world it’s even more important because now you have a million choices. I mean information is almost instantaneous or it is instantaneous really. In a lot of the information, if not most of the information, depending on your political persuasion, is horseshit. I mean, it’s not teaching you any good values. They’re going to institute the draft in Germany again.

1:38:13 Brian Rose: I just heard this morning.

1:38:15 Dan Peña: Jesus Christ. You would have thought that Hitler came back.

1:38:20 Brian Rose: Germany’s more woke than London, than New York. I could be, right? That’s what I hear. That I got people moving to Dubai from Germany and they pull me aside and they say it’s so bad there. Yeah, he wouldn’t recognize it.

1:38:31 Dan Peña: He’s right. He’s right. The, um, and they’re not the most woke. There’s other places that are worse. In the United States, the belt of support for Donald Trump are the least woke.

1:38:45 You know, Central [clears throat] America, not Central America, Central United States.

1:38:50 Brian Rose: Yeah.

1:38:51 Dan Peña: But the, um, I mean there’s some, a communist is now mayor of New York. Yeah, I saw that.

1:38:58 Which is I don’t know if it should be hard to believe, but it happened.

1:39:05 Brian Rose: Yeah, probably a Muslim. Well, he doesn’t call himself a communist. He calls himself something else.

1:39:10 Dan Peña: Social democrat.

1:39:10 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean,

1:39:12 Dan Peña: We’ll see if he actually does that stuff.

1:39:15 Brian Rose: Yeah.

1:39:15 Dan Peña: But yeah, got him elected, right?

1:39:16 Brian Rose: Yeah. And the city’s upset, but there’s a lot of people upset in the United States.

1:39:23 What’s it like when you go there? Well, you said that New York feels like animals and vibrant again.

1:39:27 Dan Peña: Oh god.

1:39:28 And it’s like they unlock the cages at the zoo.

1:39:31 Brian Rose: Okay. And is that the US in general? Is there a little bit more of an

1:39:34 Dan Peña: Well, I mean certain pockets.

1:39:36 Okay.

1:39:36 Um, the Eastern Seaboard is very business-oriented from Washington DC, actually from not Maine but Washington DC to the Keys. Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas in that area, New Mexico. California is woke all the way up to Seattle, Washington. And then there’s a swath that comes down from the Great Lakes through the central United States that is really business-oriented. Hey, I know investing in crypto is scary.

1:40:12 It takes a real leap of faith because there are so many this.

1:41:02 But um healthcare, when I told Rick Scott, who was my lawyer when he left me, I said, “You got to go where, where should I go, Dan?” I said healthcare or I said telco, which was internet at the time, and healthcare was growing at 3% a year in ’85, ’86, it’s now going to 30% a year

1:41:21 30, with no sign of it slowing down. People are living longer, they want to live longer, and contrary to what the social media and the news say, which obviously has a liberal tint, you know, they can afford, they can afford it to grow older. When I was born the average age of a male was like 54, 55. Now it’s 87 or 86, something like that. And in my family, men lived to the early 90s to mid 90s.

1:41:53 And women lived from late 90s to early hundreds without doing a push-up. My dad smoked five to six packs of cigarettes a day till he was 88. He lived in ’91. And he drank at least a fifth of alcohol, spirits, a day from the time he was 18 to 88 and never did a push-up. Lived to 91.

1:42:16 So if I don’t live to 100, 120, I mean it’s cuz somebody shot me. I mean there’s no f***ing way.

1:42:21 Brian Rose: Otherwise you’re in good health.

1:42:22 Dan Peña: Yeah, I’m in good health.

1:42:23 Besides the bad blood, blood, whatever, a couple years ago you’re good. Well, it just shows it goes to show you though when I got blood poisoning, um, plane can go down,

1:42:34 Brian Rose: Right? Something stupid can happen.

1:42:35 Yeah.

1:42:36 Dan Peña: Black swan. I always tell the net [expletive] NetJet guys, Mr. Pena, where your pilots, I still like to give you money. You know,

1:42:47 Brian Rose: You give a little cash.

1:42:48 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Always.

1:42:48 Brian Rose: Just in case.

1:42:49 Dan Peña: Yeah. Before we take off.

1:42:50 Okay.

1:42:50 Yeah. Just to make sure that you’re thinking about me and Sally in the back.

1:42:55 Brian Rose: Smart. Smart. You said you think I should be taking more risk.

1:42:59 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:42:59 Brian Rose: You always tell me that.

1:43:01 Dan Peña: Well, I do because I mean you have more or less a riskless model.

1:43:05 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:43:05 Dan Peña: And I know more or less what you do. And the um there are ways of taking risk in what you do and you know them better than I and you’re not doing that. Okay. You more or less, and I may be mincing words here, you have a quasi subscription model. Okay.

1:43:27 If it was your various schools, etc., etc., and that’s not, that’s, you know, there’s little or no risk for you other than they, you have to sell them to the re-up or take another class or an expanded class, and you know how long it’s like when Bitcoin got up to 117,000 four years ago, I said, I’m not for it, but as a trader, an old trader, I would sell a third, keep two-thirds. When Bitcoin got up to 125 or 130 just here recently, I said, sell a third, keep two-thirds. And one other time, I said when it had a big spike, and if you do the maths, as they say here instead of math, which I don’t understand why they say math, I mean, you’d still have, you know, about 40% of your Bitcoin that you started with.

1:44:20 Okay? And I have five or six Bitcoin billionaires. Not because of me. They got in Bitcoin. We got two Romanian brothers from Chicago.

1:44:28 They got in Bitcoin at 50 bucks, 80 bucks. Okay. And they went on dips. They’ve just continued to buy. They’ve continued to buy.

1:44:36 I haven’t talked to him in a year or two. But I’d rather be lucky than smart. But Jamie Dimon more or less has my attitude. Which is kind of a cross between his attitude and Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. If my clients, even if they’re idiots, and they want it, I’ll make a market.

1:44:55 And so, Wall Street, when PayPal said you could buy it with Bitcoin and then when you could buy fractional Bitcoin, it’s here to stay until some catastrophic black swan thing happens.

1:45:08 Trump’s all in. The Trump family’s all in, and the kids are all in

1:45:12 And he’s pushing it. And now it’s become a mainstream thing. They got the ETF, and all the banks want to get into blockchain, and

1:45:20 Yeah. Well, it’s mainstream when, um, the Fed does it,

1:45:25 Brian Rose: Right? And that hasn’t happened yet.

1:45:28 Dan Peña: No, I don’t believe it is going to happen.

1:45:30 Brian Rose: You okay? Or it goes on the US balance sheet, you mean of strategic reserve,

1:45:34 Dan Peña: Correct?

1:45:34 Brian Rose: Yeah, that hasn’t happened yet.

1:45:37 Dan Peña: Oh, maybe it will.

1:45:37 And it’s volatile as hell, you know, and most people can’t handle it, that volatility.

1:45:42 Yeah. A third of the people who were at the seminar in November, and I wasn’t even following it, paid to come to the seminar with Bitcoin.

1:45:50 Brian Rose: A third.

1:45:50 Dan Peña: A third.

1:45:51 Okay.

1:45:52 And it went from when it crashed to a hundred. Yeah. The seminar was on in November, late November. And you could see in the audience, I mean, it looked like they were sitting on eggs, you know, and the but kids load up, you know, if you got 2% or 5% of your assets, that’s one thing. But if you got a majority of your assets in it,

1:46:16 Brian Rose: Yeah.

1:46:16 Dan Peña: You’re going to live a very volatile life.

1:46:18 Brian Rose: Yeah. And you don’t recommend that. But the kids do that, right?

1:46:21 Dan Peña: Absolutely. Because they feel entitled. They should be able to make money faster. And one of the things that somebody told me here recently, people complain about the property ladder. They had to explain what that meant to me.

1:46:33 Brian Rose: I don’t, you mean you can’t afford to put a down payment on a house, right?

1:46:37 Dan Peña: Yeah. And then you can’t buy the next house because you don’t have the first house. And

1:46:40 Brian Rose: Okay. Well, that was the same with me when I bought my first house. I just went out and worked harder and increased my revenue so I could buy the first house. That’s what Cardone said to me two days ago. He said, “All these people [expletive] and moan.”

1:46:55 He said, “It’s easier. I want a house today that it wasn’t 58 cuz you can go get the money.

1:46:59 Dan Peña: Yeah, that’s what he said. But everyone just says they can’t afford it cuz it’s so much higher than it used to be.

1:47:04 Brian Rose: They’re right about that.

1:47:05 Dan Peña: Okay. Yeah. I mean, if I had kept the our two penthouses and my estate in Southern California, that’s easily 100 million in today’s market value just sitting on that real estate.

1:47:23 Yeah. And but I sold them off. I’m not concerned about that because I’ve made it up in other ways. The, um, and so but I don’t worry as Sally was telling me last night at dinner. You don’t worry about the stuff that most of us worry about.

1:47:39 And I said, S, I don’t worry about anything cuz I know like I took a s*** this morning. I can always make more money. Okay? I had the gift of gab. I should have been Irish since I’m seven, eight years old.

1:47:53 So, as long as they don’t cut my f***ing tongue out, I’m not worried about making more money. I’ve lost, we were trying to add, if I’ve lost a billion dollars. I’ve lost 800 plus million dollars in my life.

1:48:07 Brian Rose: Lost.

1:48:07 Dan Peña: Lost.

1:48:08 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:48:08 Dan Peña: Off the balance sheet and I made it back. And so, but most people are worried that they can’t make it back.

1:48:15 And that’s never been my

1:48:17 Brian Rose: So, what do you worry about?

1:48:20 Dan Peña: I worry about now I’ve got a real project that warrants my being serious, keeping, the Catholic Church is one recession away from bankruptcy. Muslims, not Christianity in general is not okay. Seventh Day Adventist

1:48:38 Scientology is not yeah no they all are flushed with cash but they didn’t lose seven or eight billion that they had to pay in reparations for all the bad things they did. And in Los Angeles, the 1.56 billion they paid was dating back to 1930. So the guys from 1930 to 1995-ish, 2000, you know, like Pontius Pilate, watch, it wasn’t us. It wasn’t us, but almost every single pope, not almost every single pope that was involved knew about that. They just knew.

1:49:13 Brian Rose: So that motivates you.

1:49:14 Dan Peña: Yeah.

1:49:14 Okay. Because I know I can do it,

1:49:16 Brian Rose: Right? Okay. So, you want

1:49:18 A wannabe altar boy who never got to be an altar boy.

1:49:20 I mean, how’d you screw that one up, Dan?

1:49:23 Dan Peña: Well, my parents didn’t have the $8 to buy me a little uniform.

1:49:26 Brian Rose: Okay. Gotcha. Okay. All right. What else do you worry about?

1:49:29 You worry about your reputation. Yeah,

1:49:30 That’s important to you.

1:49:31 Dan Peña: Brand.

1:49:32 Brian Rose: Your brand. You worry about how you’re going to be remembered.

1:49:33 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:49:35 Okay.

1:49:35 Yep.

1:49:36 Brian Rose: How are you going to be remembered?

1:49:37 Dan Peña: Well, the, I won’t get credit for, you know, the 25 million jobs I’ve created, etc., etc. I’ll be gone. I have to be gone. But the deal I’m making with the church, I’m going to do this. Listen, here we go.

1:49:51 Is upon my death, okay?

1:49:52 I’m going to be canonized.

1:49:54 Brian Rose: Canonized is the process of recommending you to be a saint.

1:49:57 Dan Peña: No, no, no. I’m already in that process.

1:49:59 Brian Rose: Oh, really? Yeah. Before you’re dead.

1:50:00 Dan Peña: Yep.

1:50:03 Brian Rose: How did you pull that off? I mean, St. Theresa was, you know, she was helping people.

1:50:06 Dan Peña: I can sell anything to anybody.

1:50:08 Brian Rose: Okay. So, one day you’re going to be a saint.

1:50:10 Dan Peña: Correct.

1:50:10 Brian Rose: What are they going to call you? St. Pena.

1:50:12 Dan Peña: Well, I haven’t picked a name yet.

1:50:14 Brian Rose: You could pick a name.

1:50:15 Dan Peña: Yeah, like a I like St. Daniel.

1:50:17 Brian Rose: Oh, so you can choose one of your names or anybody’s name.

1:50:20 You could my name, St. London Real.

1:50:23 Yeah.

1:50:23 Dan Peña: St. Daniel maybe. Okay. Not St. Pena.

1:50:27 Yeah.

1:50:28 Brian Rose: There’s no, there’s no other St. Pena, is there? No.

1:50:31 Mother Teresa. That’s her first name. So, she’s, is she a saint now?

1:50:34 Dan Peña: Oh, yeah.

1:50:35 She’s St. Teresa.

1:50:35 Yeah. It only took 25 years after she died.

1:50:37 Brian Rose: That’s a fast track.

1:50:39 Dan Peña: Yeah. But they just made a kid 16 years old a saint. St. Carlo, he was 16 years old when he died. He’s only been dead two or three years.

1:50:47 They made him a saint about a month ago.

1:50:49 Brian Rose: How’s that work?

1:50:50 Dan Peña: Internet blockchain.

1:50:51 Brian Rose: [expletive] Blockchain. You got voted, right? Okay.

1:50:54 All right. So, you’re going to get canonized and you want to become a saint.

1:50:59 Dan Peña: Correct.

1:50:59 Brian Rose: Okay. You want to be remembered. You’re going to, the digital footprint is going to be how you’re remembered. Is there going to be a, are you going to leave us with an AI version of you?

1:51:07 Dan Peña: It’s going to be a hologram.

1:51:08 Okay. When I die, all my stuff, including the stuff that’s 98% of everything I do is already online, right? It’s the 2%, the nuances, that’s not.

1:51:19 Brian Rose: That’s the good stuff, too.

1:51:20 Dan Peña: Yeah. It’s a lot of the good stuff and it’s a lot of the webinars. It’s a lot of the in-person talks that the guys give. Um

1:51:26 Brian Rose: What about your all your email inbox?

1:51:29 Like, what if you could get that into an AI? You know, all your private conversations.

1:51:34 Dan Peña: Well, you can, right?

1:51:35 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s you can.

1:51:36 Dan Peña: That’s super juicy. I will put it open source. Is that the right word? Open source.

1:51:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think so. So,

1:51:44 Dan Peña: Open source everything, free to everybody, and with a hologram. In fact, as I don’t think I’m ever going to be so ill I can’t give the seminar, but if that were to happen, we’re already working on a hologram that’s going to sit in my chair in front of the trillion dollar man thing.

1:51:59 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:51:59 Dan Peña: And give it to you and answer the questions. While you ask the question, the AI is figuring out what the answer is. Um,

1:52:08 Brian Rose: And then can you dial it up to like super nasty grumpy Dan or Dan after two martinis Dan?

1:52:14 Dan Peña: We haven’t worked on that many details yet cuz that would be good cuz some guys, I mean you got guys that beat themselves, right? The QLA bot. So they could turn it up if they need a little bit and if it’s just too much Dan, they could turn it down a little bit, you know.

1:52:27 Brian Rose: Yeah. But I would rather turn it up, not turn it down.

1:52:30 Somebody heard you were coming back and they’re like, um, how’s it going to be with Dan? And I said, I said Dan in private is much worse than Dan on the shows. Yeah. Especially when you haven’t seen me for a while and you see me at least the first hour. You’re brutal to me.

1:52:48 Like you lay into me. I remember that.

1:52:50 Dan Peña: Well, I, you can’t use this as an example.

1:52:54 I didn’t say anything brutal.

1:52:55 Brian Rose: No, no, not here. But I mean privately you do.

1:52:58 Dan Peña: Oh, yeah.

1:52:58 Yeah. Publicly. I mean, well, you know,

1:52:59 Brian Rose: You should have. You could have. You’re you’re just like, “What the hell are you doing?” Brian, what are you doing with this? What are you doing with this?

1:53:05 Dan Peña: What? Whether it’s at the castle

1:53:06 And if you should live to be 80, which is doubtful.

1:53:08 Brian Rose: Easy.

1:53:10 Dan Peña: No. No.

1:53:10 Brian Rose: Did you see how good a shape they said I was in?

1:53:13 Dan Peña: I should have been in the ring with you.

1:53:15 Brian Rose: That could be a range.

1:53:16 Dan Peña: 54 and 80.

1:53:17 Brian Rose: Okay. You saying I mean,

1:53:18 Dan Peña: You saying you want some of this or No, no. I said I should have been the 500 lasted as long as it did. Believe me.

1:53:25 Brian Rose: So, you’re saying you could beat me categorically?

1:53:27 Dan Peña: We should put this, okay. There’s no question in my military civilian mind. I could snap your neck from here,

1:53:33 Brian Rose: Right? Would Sally let you fight?

1:53:34 Dan Peña: I wouldn’t tell her.

1:53:38 Yeah.

1:53:38 Okay. [snorts] You were saying, “Oh, I’m not going to live to 80,” is where you Yeah. But if you should live to 80, you’re going to look back. What should I have done?”

1:53:48 Brian Rose: Okay.

1:53:48 And I can already give you a list of 40, 50 things that I should have done already.

1:53:53 Dan Peña: Already. And you’re only 54 or 55.

1:53:54 Okay. Okay.

1:53:57 Your birthday’s May 31. May 17th.

1:53:59 Brian Rose: May 7th.

1:54:00 Dan Peña: Oh, the day after my mom. May 16. That’s right. The, um

1:54:05 Brian Rose: So, it’s the same message. Take more risk, do more, stop screwing around.

1:54:09 Dan Peña: Yeah. I mean, you have a following and whether you, it doesn’t matter whether you deserve the following. It’s the fact is you have it. Same thing I told you years ago. Yeah.

1:54:20 And what are you going to do with it?

1:54:22 You know, another dissimilar talk I had with Grant Cardone. I don’t get any credit for creating those billions. But the interview I had with him that he took off the air

1:54:31 Brian Rose: Is why he’s rich, right? Well, you told him to

1:54:34 Dan Peña: Exactly. Social, and he did it.

1:54:37 Brian Rose: Yeah.

1:54:38 Dan Peña: I don’t know which of the stories is true. One is that

1:54:44 When I left a day later he fired a bunch of people and he started over again. I don’t know if that’s true or he took four or five months to, you know, see who could adapt and who couldn’t adapt. But he was sitting on, I told him, billions in assets that you could take a 2% management fee off the top and get yourself that 650 which I think he’s got now.

1:55:09 Brian Rose: Oh, in man in assets.

1:55:11 Dan Peña: No, no, the plane.

1:55:12 Brian Rose: The plane. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now he’s got a 650. He was

1:55:14 Dan Peña: Talking and he put a million dollars extra in air. No.

1:55:19 Yeah.

1:55:19 Brian Rose: What do you call avionics?

1:55:19 Dan Peña: Avionics. That’s the word, I’m okay.

1:55:21 Brian Rose: Okay. So you’re saying do the same thing. Take my audience, whether you agree I should have or not.

1:55:28 Dan Peña: Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

1:55:29 Oh, by the way, you used to call them a bunch of losers, but you know, they’re older now and they have Okay. So, but it doesn’t make them, doesn’t make them that they’re not losers.

1:55:36 Brian Rose: All right. But still, and you’re saying do something bigger with it is what you’re saying. Okay.

1:55:42 Dan Peña: Not many people are gifted a base in their lifetimes.

1:55:44 Brian Rose: True. True. We started earlier than most and then we did stay focused longer than most. Maybe sometimes to my detriment. You know, we kept doing the thing back in the day.

1:55:55 Yeah. And then that built the audience over time and then we didn’t really know it was there until one day it said geometric progression and then in year nine it was like, “Oh, there are a lot of people watching, but there’s more you can do with it.” Look, in the last few years, you know, we did something with it in the financial space. You know, we built a venture firm and we’ve done bigger things than we ever did in the past. A little bit like Grant Cardone.

1:56:17 I was explaining the model to him and he was like, “Oh, interesting. But there’s more we could do.”

1:56:23 Dan Peña: Absolutely. But see the, not the flip side in conjunction with that, you can always do more.

1:56:28 Yes.

1:56:29 Very few models you can’t do more.

1:56:31 Brian Rose: Very few.

1:56:32 Yeah.

1:56:32 Okay. And

1:56:33 But how do you teach someone to see that they’re not doing more when they think they’re telling themselves every day I have to do more?

1:56:42 Dan Peña: Great difficulty. I mean you need a mentor. That’s why you know the guy who’s done 56 billion is stopped.

1:56:50 Right. He was, I mean he just got the front wheels off the runway. That’s enough for me. I remember I almost choked. I was at an airport.

1:57:03 Brian Rose: Cuz that’s your number.

1:57:04 Yeah.

1:57:04 But he had enough for whatever reason.

1:57:06 Dan Peña: For whatever reason.

1:57:07 Brian Rose: And you’ve seen that a lot. You said that before.

1:57:10 Dan Peña: Countless times.

1:57:10 Brian Rose: A lot of guys quit earlier.

1:57:11 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. I want to be billionaire. They make $80 million. I never hear from him again.

1:57:16 Brian Rose: Right. Cuz they don’t want the hardship, the pressure. They say that’s what happened to Conor McGregor. He got too much money and then is a point where you don’t want to get up. You don’t want to get punched in the face anymore and you don’t want to.

1:57:25 Dan Peña: Is he ever going to fight again?

1:57:27 Brian Rose: The White House fight has gotten a lot of guys excited that we’re in retirement. So Conor says he wants to fight at the White House because you know for these guys they have to get up for something. You know, just another fight’s not interesting for him. Another 10 million bucks isn’t interesting for him. But the White House I think he’s trying to book that.

1:57:44 Dan Peña: But that’s You mean the fight in the White House?

1:57:46 Brian Rose: Yeah. For the 250th anniversary of America. Oh,

1:57:49 Trump is holding a UFC at the White House on July 4th next year.

1:57:53 The kid, the fighters are going to walk through the Oval Office. Only Trump could do that

1:57:58 Dan Peña: And his buddy Dana.

1:57:58 Yeah. So, get a mentor that can tell you you’re not doing enough or be in a system where you can do that.

1:58:10 Brian Rose: Well, it’s easy if you have the mentor to How do you do it?

1:58:14 Dan Peña: Well, I don’t have anybody to tell me anything. No, but how you

1:58:16 Brian Rose: Well, no, it’s because the you don’t need to anymore.

1:58:19 Dan Peña: No, I, every day from brush, from when I take my first pee to when I go to sleep, it’s I think QLA, I mean, um, and to a certain extent the 20 plus companies I’m involved with are already every day each one of them pushes one of the buttons that they made a mistake on. Okay. And so that keeps it fresh. The fact that I speak and I do these podcasts, some are challenging, most aren’t. Speaking at the universities I like better because the kids, because when you’re at Oxford or you’re at the Wharton or you’re University of Toronto and you come to my talk, it’s because you’re not part of the norm.

1:59:06 Brian Rose: Okay. Right.

1:59:07 Dan Peña: You’re different. And so they ask different kind of questions. Um, the real question that should be asked by everybody that listens to me or comes to the seminar or listens to any of my stuff online is, is this really for me? All the other questions are [expletive] perfunctory [expletive]. And the, but if you answer that one of two ways, if it is, you really think it is, or because if you’re going to only try, you’re going to fail.

1:59:39 Okay? And if you say no, you save yourself a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of seminars, a lot of podcasts, a lot of books, etc., etc. And for most people, it’s not for them. It just isn’t. You know, I sat for 10, for 9 years, [snorts] 11 months, 3 weeks, I devoted to 120 hours a week to QLA.

2:00:02 Brian Rose: How do you get out of a rat race? How do you create wealth

2:00:59 Dan Peña: See you in the Investment Club. At the expense of my, my, my God, my family, my kids, everybody. Okay? And that last week to make 10 years, I looked at the phone and this is before all the internet s***, I couldn’t do it anymore. I just was spent.

2:01:16 Okay. A good portion of my net worth today is still responsible for those 10 years. Today,

2:01:22 Brian Rose: You doing the model before you started teaching it.

2:01:24 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:01:24 Brian Rose: Right. Okay.

2:01:24 Dan Peña: Okay. And then I found that, you know, I made a half a billion dollars, not overnight, in six, seven years. But I didn’t find it hard. But I can sell anybody anything. I mean, that guy that asked that girl for a coffee and she said no after 3 years, I can’t relate to that.

2:01:44 I just can’t. I’d still be sitting there asking her. It’s 17 nos before you get a yes. That’s

2:01:51 And anybody that knows anything about sales knows that. How many times do they ask? Two, three, four. It’s like the famous question when you were there. You didn’t ask it.

2:02:01 They said, “We’re talking about to talk to a guy at 10 o’clock in the morning and how soon is too soon to get back to him, Mr. Pena?” And I said, “10 in the morning, 10:30 and they’re talking about 3 weeks from now. I never wear a whirl or for a business.”

2:02:17 Brian Rose: No. Well, either one. Okay. You know, I mean, I just

2:02:21 Dan Peña: Get on it.

2:02:22 Yeah. And I have rhino skins. Sally calls me rhino skin to this day. You can’t hurt my feelings. When I came here in ’81, I used to say, “I’m an American.

2:02:33 You can’t hurt my feelings. Just give me the f***ing money.” Just like that. And I got it. I still say the same thing.

2:02:41 The bankers don’t want to talk to me because I mean I will, I mean you [clears throat] got to have a, and I’m very numerate. I can understand this s*** without a calculator or whatever. And I, you know, you got to have a good f***ing reason when they talk about, um, strength tests and all this s***, I was doing that s*** before you were in grammar school, kid. Um, co-negative covenants and all that s***. The key is when you sign up the first agreement.

2:03:09 Nothing’s going to get better than the first agreement. It’s, and that’s on managing people. It’s easy to start tough and loosen. If you start loose, you can never tighten. Same with raising kids.

2:03:23 Now, I overdid it with my kids. I was too strict with my kids. I wish I beat them more, but I didn’t, you know,

2:03:28 Brian Rose: The rules of the castle were too much.

2:03:30 Dan Peña: Yeah. I mean, but for dinner and all that

2:03:33 Brian Rose: And they had tennis pros and golf pros and, you know, they’re not getting any money. Is it true they’re not getting any inheritance?

2:03:41 Dan Peña: None.

2:03:41 Brian Rose: And you said that they say they’re okay with it, but that’s what they say.

2:03:45 Dan Peña: They’re not.

2:03:45 Brian Rose: I know they’re not.

2:03:46 Especially your son.

2:03:46 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:03:46 Okay.

2:03:48 Yeah. He can’t be okay with it.

2:03:51 Brian Rose: And why won’t you? Cuz it’s going to

2:03:52 Dan Peña: They’re already grown. Why would it matter?

2:03:55 Brian Rose: Yeah. Because the

2:03:56 The principle.

2:03:58 Dan Peña: No, it’s not. It has nothing to do with the principal. It has to do with the fact when you earn the money yourself, it’s not the same as when daddy gave it to you. And even though if Trump got 4 million or 400 million, I don’t know which one’s true. I mean, he still in the back of his head knows that he didn’t start from scratch.

2:04:16 Okay. Got it. And that eats at a man and you don’t want them to have that feeling. It’s just the wrong kind of money.

2:04:22 Just like the same reason, one of the reasons you get in the ring.

2:04:25 Brian Rose: Why? Tell me.

2:04:27 Dan Peña: I’ve told you before.

2:04:28 Brian Rose: Okay. Why?

2:04:30 Dan Peña: Your dad’s a better person to answer that question.

2:04:32 Brian Rose: Okay. Well, so I’m going to talk to my dad and then I’m not, I mean people attempt interviewing him once that was

2:04:39 I don’t think my solutions lie in my dad.

2:04:41 Dan Peña: No. No. They emanated from your dad.

2:04:45 Brian Rose: Okay. And

2:04:47 Dan Peña: More so than anyone.

2:04:47 Brian Rose: No, not more so. Maybe more so.

2:04:50 Dan Peña: Really?

2:04:50 Brian Rose: Yeah.

2:04:51 Dan Peña: His Caltech mentality, he couldn’t cope.

2:04:56 Brian Rose: Well, I couldn’t cope with his mentality.

2:04:59 Caltech?

2:04:59 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:05:00 You know exactly what I’m talking about.

2:05:02 Brian Rose: Tell me. So,

2:05:03 Dan Peña: Go back and listen to your interview.

2:05:05 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:05:05 Dan Peña: Seriously.

2:05:06 Brian Rose: Okay. So, he’s a Caltech guy. I know. He doesn’t have a lot of emotions.

2:05:12 Dan Peña: Duh.

2:05:12 Brian Rose: Okay. And that’s what’s stopping. I’ve only developed emotions in the last 10 or 15 years.

2:05:16 Dan Peña: Maybe that’s true.

2:05:19 Not maybe.

2:05:19 Brian Rose: And that’s what’s stopping me, not having my emotions.

2:05:21 Dan Peña: What initiated you not reaching out and taking risks? Cuz you knew what the answer was when you failed. You knew the answer before he even said it.

2:05:34 Brian Rose: Cuz if I failed, he wouldn’t love me. Is that

2:05:38 Dan Peña: Only you know that. I don’t know that.

2:05:40 Brian Rose: Okay. But

2:05:40 Some people’s, some people’s love is not worth it. Okay. But you’re saying that the root of my lack of risk-taking is me not feeling I’ll be loved if I fail.

2:05:51 Dan Peña: No, the root of your lack of risk-taking is low self-esteem.

2:05:55 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:05:55 Dan Peña: And it has, well, worse then.

2:05:57 Better now.

2:05:58 Yeah. A lot better now. You’ve done, you know, and getting in the ring does help.

2:06:04 Brian Rose: Yes, it’s better.

2:06:04 Dan Peña: Now, if you would have got in the ring and both fights got knocked out in the first round, it’s not likely, maybe you wouldn’t have had the second fight, right? If I got knocked out.

2:06:14 Brian Rose: True. Yeah. True.

2:06:15 Okay.

2:06:15 Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about my kids and my mental health.

2:06:19 Dan Peña: We had a guy recently who’s one of my gazillionaires that said that, well, what if he damaged some of my brain cells and I’m not as numerant?

2:06:31 Brian Rose: Yeah.

2:06:31 Dan Peña: And I said, “Well, that’s a hand job. Who’s the f***ing idea?” You know?

2:06:34 Brian Rose: Yeah. It’s all b******t

2:06:34 Dan Peña: Yeah. Exactly.

2:06:35 Brian Rose: But you try to talk yourself out of it. I could see all my brain telling me this. It was like giving me all these worst scenarios, Dan. And I was just like, I don’t even want to go in the f***ing ring. And then I was like, but I have to go to the ring.

2:06:45 And then afterwards, it was like, that’s all b******t

2:06:48 Dan Peña: Correct. 95% of the things we worry about never happen. I was at a board meeting a year ago right now in Toronto and we, and Sally had joined us and our lawyers and accountants and all these people. This is a $500 million company revenue. We decided, it was snowing, and decided to walk back to the hotel for dinner or for drinks.

2:07:07 We had just had dinner. And so one of the guys says, “Well, well, there’s a shortcut here.” through some alleys and some s***. So the mentee in the deal, sturdy fit, good-looking black guy like a black James Bond. Okay. And so we walk through and then there’s the the other board members are lagging behind and three black guys step out in the alley.

2:07:30 Big guys and I’m thinking I’m wearing $100,000 top coat. I was going to get f***ed up and ripped up. And so the kid and me, the kid stayed by my side. We walked up and I said, “Okay, [expletive]. Are we going to fight or dance?

2:07:47 We’re just, we’re stuck on you, Mr. Pena. We want your autograph. The rest of the board members disappeared into the night. Hey, [expletive], are we going to fight or dance?”

2:08:04 So that’s the state of the world today. Bunch of [expletive]

2:08:08 Brian Rose: Well, not too many people that would say fight or dance.

2:08:10 Dan Peña: No, not many. They all scattered, but you were there.

2:08:13 No, no, the three. Yeah, the three guys. And then they came back to the bar with us and one of them was starting a vodka company and some [expletive]. And

2:08:22 Brian Rose: But we worry about s*** that doesn’t happen.

2:08:24 Dan Peña: I agree. I agree.

2:08:25 Brian Rose: But I was worried about my $100,000 coat. It all f***ed up. Yeah, but maybe by doing things I become the man I need to be. I mean,

2:08:36 Dan Peña: You’re closer to the man than when I first met you. I said, you already said two or three times during this interview,

2:08:42 You change. I helped change you.

2:08:43 Brian Rose: Yes.

2:08:44 Dan Peña: Okay. But you don’t change unless you’re ready for change.

2:08:47 Brian Rose: True.

2:08:47 Okay.

2:08:47 And it took me too long.

2:08:48 Dan Peña: And some of the things were harder for you to change from.

2:08:52 Brian Rose: Yes.

2:08:52 Dan Peña: And some were hard into. But you didn’t, just like in the ring, you didn’t die from them, did you?

2:08:58 Brian Rose: No. No. And it took me too long. It’s 11 years, Dan. It’s a long time.

2:09:02 Dan Peña: I know you’re like Brian.

2:09:03 You’re an engineer.

2:09:03 Brian Rose: And here’s the crazy thing. In the first few years after we met, I was talking about a fund. I was going to raise a fund. I was doing the tech show at the time. And then 10 years later, I actually did it.

2:09:14 And I’m watching myself do it with the blockchain fund and all these. And I’m like, why the f*** didn’t I do this 10 years ago? And you were telling me to do it, but I couldn’t get my head around it.

2:09:26 Well, but now I can.

2:09:27 Dan Peña: Okay. Um, there’s a famous guy out there that says he’s read 700 books on change and psychology and blah blah blah blah. Okay. And I’m sure there’s at least 700 books on sex. I don’t know.

2:09:41 I’ve never read one, but I could ask the audience that read the 700 books on sex, did they compare to actually having sex? No. You can study, get ready for now spreadsheet. The last spreadsheet I did was, um, before spreadsheet, what was it called?

2:10:03 Brian Rose: Lotus 1-2-3.

2:10:03 Dan Peña: Yeah, Lotus 1-2-3. That’s the last time I did one. Okay. Right.

2:10:07 It’s either hot or it’s not. That’s what I used to sell.

2:10:09 Brian Rose: It’s either hot or not.

2:10:10 Yeah.

2:10:10 Dan Peña: And the, um, but it’s still a tough thing to get through, get through to people. It just is.

2:10:18 Brian Rose: And a lot of your kids take time.

2:10:20 Dan Peña: Well, because they’re afraid of making a mistake. We had an old guy, a retired guy who’s 67 years old. He built two or three companies, sold them off and he was on his third or fourth wife and now he’s got a girlfriend just made his wife who’s 30. Okay. And he says, “I’m here because I thought that I had made enough money to last a fourth wife, but I know now I’m not.

2:10:42 I haven’t. So I got to make another fortune.” And he’s Swiss guy, funny as hell. And then I said when they’re asking questions at that drinks at the end of the seminar and he says, “What we’re really afraid of, Mr. opinion, no matter what we say or what we do that we can’t perform just because you bring a thousand people in front of us and they all did it, the Goomba brothers and this the that, okay, and then we’re the thousand and one and we can’t, and that’s the basic fear and that’s why the longest deals are that we have been able to keep track are 12 and 13 years, it took them 12 and 13 years.

2:11:22 This last group we’re averaging about 3 years. But since you were there, we had a guy doing 26 days.

2:11:30 Brian Rose: Is this the pig [expletive] Pig [expletive] Heard about him.

2:11:32 Dan Peña: 26 days.

2:11:33 Brian Rose: Congratulations.

2:11:33 Dan Peña: And he’s already retired. He’s already retired.

2:11:36 Brian Rose: Really?

2:11:36 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:11:37 He made about 40 million pounds and he’s gone. He got a McLaren and something else. And he’s about 3 feet tall and he’s got real ruddy skin. And he thinks that he’s combing his hair different. And that’s why the girls like him.

2:11:57 Give me a f***ing break. Okay.

2:12:00 Brian Rose: Look at the monsters you create. P.

2:12:01 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s hilarious. But I mean, you can fabricate almost anything to yourself. You can come up with a f***ing reason.

2:12:10 Brian Rose: True.

2:12:10 Dan Peña: But yeah, you got in the ring.

2:12:13 Brian Rose: I think what I need to keep doing is taking more risk and getting more uncomfortable. I don’t think I talk with my daddy.

2:12:19 Dan Peña: You have to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

2:12:22 Brian Rose: Okay. But I don’t think a talk with my dad is gonna get me there.

2:12:24 Dan Peña: Well, I don’t know. Well, I don’t want to know how f***ed up your relationship is with him. But I know a lot of the guys when you hear, you know, cuz I don’t have, I only have dinner with one guy, remember? And I don’t have lunch and I don’t have breakfast. But they were talking about daddy issues.

2:12:44 And so when you’re the second to the last day and you have a guy in the front row up here yelling at a guy in the back row, oh tired of hearing about your f***ing daddy issues, okay? So what you’re talking about, you know, we rarely hear mommy issues, okay? We almost always hear daddy issues. And then when I searched into it, both of them come from really reasonably successful parents. Their fathers, one’s a big mega something or other.

2:13:12 Um, and he, I’m exaggerating, a plumber. Nothing wrong with being a plumber. It’s an honest living, right? But it’s not a Fortune 155 CEO, whatever his dad was. And what does the Fortune 155 CEO think of his son the plumber?

2:13:29 Brian Rose: You know exactly what he thinks.

2:13:30 Not impressed.

2:13:30 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:13:31 Okay. And that’s where it stems from.

2:13:35 Brian Rose: Part of it.

2:13:35 Dan Peña: You’re the king of daddy issues. Damn.

2:13:36 Brian Rose: I know. I it’s, I’ve been successful in everything except math, athletics,

2:13:41 Dan Peña: Right?

2:13:41 Okay. And my dad was all-American, blah blah blah blah blah, and it’s the thing that I picked that I knew he couldn’t come back and compete against me, and like he, when I brought him to the castle the first time and I stood under the Napoleon chandelier there with my arm around him like this and he looks up and he says, “Son, just tell me it’s not drugs.” And I said, “Dad, it’s kind of like drugs. It’s oil and gas. It’s addictive.”

2:14:04 Because he couldn’t relate it how I went from barrio bad boy in jail. The last time I was in jail was attempted assault with a deadly weapon on a policeman. I mean I was only going one way

2:14:17 Brian Rose: but you did this because you couldn’t progress in athletics that would have made your dad proud. So you found another way.

2:14:25 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:14:25 Brian Rose: So all your success comes down to a daddy issue. Yeah. Taken to the extreme.

2:14:29 Dan Peña: One of my dad who never understood what I did.

2:14:31 Brian Rose: Right.

2:14:31 Dan Peña: Although my kid brother lies to me. Vince, I know you’re going to listen to this. Lies to me and says, “Dad knew exactly what you were doing,” but I know he didn’t. Anyway,

2:14:39 Brian Rose: If channeled right, it’s a superpower.

2:14:41 Dan Peña: Absolutely.

2:14:41 Brian Rose: Okay. I just need to channel it better.

2:14:43 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:14:43 Okay.

2:14:43 Not channel in the sense of these hocus pocus guys, you know. Okay.

2:14:49 Not that kind of channel.

2:14:50 Brian Rose: Just channel it into more risk-taking.

2:14:52 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:14:52 Brian Rose: And caring less about thoughts, results, opinions.

2:14:55 Um, which is the same.

2:14:58 Dan Peña: Not caring at all is best.

2:15:00 Brian Rose: Yeah. Okay.

2:15:00 Okay. Okay.

2:15:01 Dan Peña: Not caring at all. I mean, you’ve had, I know that, um, I don’t know if you still do. You used to take negative s*** that was written about you off the YouTube and those comments. Okay. And I teased you about it then.

2:15:13 I don’t want to know what the answer is now, but it wasn’t helpful.

2:15:15 Brian Rose: Okay. Well, we don’t take anything off.

2:15:17 Dan Peña: Yeah, but you don’t let people talk s*** in your seminar either.

2:15:20 Brian Rose: Okay. Well, they can’t.

2:15:20 Dan Peña: Similar thing. No, they can’t. You’ll throw them out.

2:15:23 Brian Rose: No, same thing.

2:15:24 Somebody can put anything on Reddit.

2:15:27 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s fine. I’m over it. Yeah.

2:15:31 Brian Rose: But it’s a bit similar. You wouldn’t allow someone to talk s*** in your seminar. So

2:15:35 Dan Peña: Why would you talk s*** in the seminar?

2:15:36 Brian Rose: Yeah. And you throw them out.

2:15:37 Dan Peña: No, no, no. You’re, they don’t come to the seminar. If you come to the seminar and think for a microsecond that you’re ever going to get out of your mouth even something that’s contrary to what I teach, you’re brain dead.

2:15:53 That doesn’t happen. And in the ’90s, I will neither confirm nor deny, I used to hit people. I mean, we locked up your cell phone. I mean, we drank Bloody Marys from the morning to the evening. I mean, um, but we gave you, there were no handouts, there were no slides, there were no scripts, there was nothing.

2:16:17 And we most of my billionaires are from the ’90s.

2:16:20 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know. There was some tough guys. Of course, that’s when the Russians were coming through. And this is the Russian model without a gun.

2:16:29 You know a lot of people, Dan.

2:16:31 Dan Peña: Yeah, I do.

2:16:32 Brian Rose: You’re very well connected and you rarely mention it.

2:16:34 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:16:35 Brian Rose: Or you’re very vague.

2:16:36 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:16:39 And I got an offer to do a kiss and tell book again and I said, “How much money up front?” You never asked us that before, Mr. Pena. How much? 10 million.

2:16:51 Nah, not enough. Not enough for me to piss off a third of Wall Street. Yeah.

2:16:55 Brian Rose: Is it never going to happen or what?

2:16:57 Dan Peña: No, that’s not my kind of deal. I would rather use it to squeeze them to do a deal.

2:17:05 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:17:05 Dan Peña: Then tell them all the bad things that I know about these guys. I was asked to go to Epstein’s Island three times

2:17:13 Brian Rose: By him or friends of his.

2:17:15 Dan Peña: No, him.

2:17:15 Brian Rose: Him. Okay.

2:17:16 Dan Peña: Actually, Maxwell because I knew her father.

2:17:19 Brian Rose: Okay. Got it. And

2:17:20 Okay.

2:17:22 Did you know?

2:17:22 Dan Peña: Of course I knew. Everybody knew. Everybody knew it was bad news.

2:17:25 And the fact that Bill Gates and these guys Clinton, what a lie. Jesus Christ. Man up.

2:17:30 They just, okay. I did the first TV commercial in 1985 with Maxwell Senior, and at the end at the filming he required £10,000 or I’m not going to do it. And so I said I didn’t know we’re getting paid for this deal. And so they went out and got £10,000 and came back and gave it to them. So we completed the little series of commercials and they even started calling me Little Max.

2:18:03 [expletive] But so yeah, I was on that list. But I mean I won’t say anybody could have been on that list, but there was a lot of people. He was connected to a lot of people raising a lot of money, right? And now it’s out and Trump says it’s a big Democrat fluke thing and it’ll be published now

2:18:20 Brian Rose: And maybe and maybe your girl will get out of prison. Who knows?

2:18:24 Dan Peña: Well, not my girl, but anyway. Yeah,

2:18:26 The fact that she’s in a low security prison now is not an accident. And she was just a, well, she was a kid. No, she’s 60s up, but she was a nice kid and she was nice to me because she knew that I knew her dad and her her dad was an a**hole though. He was a real prick. And but all these guys are selfish.

2:18:48 See, when you’re taught as a kid, don’t be selfish. Let Johnny use your toys. That kind of s***. F*** Johnny. Get new parents.

2:18:59 Get some toys of your own, you little prick. That’s the way my boys behave when no one’s watching. There’s not a lot of charity. Kids are allowed to be themselves, right? Well, I don’t know about if I had any charity.

2:19:14 The nuns and the f***ing priest beat it out of me. And I’m the perfect person to do this project for the church. My mother was an illegal alien. Comes from right near where the current Archbishop Gomez comes from in Mexico. The and I’ll, there’s a lot of people they’re gonna lose 20% of the Vatican Bank when I’m done, at least 20 if not more.

2:19:45 Brian Rose: Lose it how?

2:19:46 Dan Peña: Because they’re they’re doing favors.

2:19:49 Brian Rose: Okay. The staff, the team, the whole thing.

2:19:52 Dan Peña: They only know the Siemens way.

2:19:54 Okay. Okay. see get rid of them and I’ll go in there.

2:20:01 Peter Thiel took a half a million dollars and have to have the financial education and the deal flow. That’s it. And it’s like when I fire the top three of 10 guys when I a big organization sales, maybe they shouldn’t be fired, but there’s a new sheriff in town and the new sheriff in town will tell you there’s collateral damage and everybody’s worried about the collateral damage. I don’t worry about that. But all of a sudden, everybody’s sales just went up 25%.

2:21:22 Brian Rose: You said, “Hire the highest, fire the highest performing sales guy.”

2:21:25 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:21:25 Brian Rose: And take the hit and show everybody.

2:21:28 Dan Peña: Well, now it’s up to the three out of the top five.

2:21:32 And there’s a reason now people look the other way not to fire people because of woke and it’s too much paperwork. I do just the opposite

2:21:40 Brian Rose: Still. Still to this day.

2:21:43 Dan Peña: To this day.

2:21:43 Brian Rose: So 10 more years of QLA if Trump stays in office. Next 10 years you’re going to sort out the Vatican and you’re living to 120 plus is the plan.

2:21:53 Dan Peña: And I hope I die on re-entry after having sex with Sally coming back from the moon. I plan on going to the moon.

2:22:00 Brian Rose: Oh, really? The moon? Yeah. All right. So, that’ll be in.

2:22:02 Dan Peña: And you know the real reason Elon Musk wants to go to the, not the moon, Mars.

2:22:07 Brian Rose: Mars. Why?

2:22:07 Dan Peña: The real reason. Now, as connected as you are with all these

2:22:12 Sycophants that you have on your show. Yeah.

2:22:14 That suck your ass. You don’t know the real reason he wants to go?

2:22:17 Brian Rose: No. Tell me.

2:22:17 Dan Peña: It’s 40% lithium.

2:22:20 Brian Rose: So he wants the batteries.

2:22:21 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:22:22 Brian Rose: For his robots.

2:22:22 Dan Peña: That’s the only reason.

2:22:23 Brian Rose: That’s it.

2:22:23 Dan Peña: It. And he knows we’re through down here.

2:22:28 Brian Rose: Well, he definitely knows that.

2:22:29 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:22:29 He wants a backup plan. And it’s a great dream to sell. It’s better than the green new scam. You sell people on the dream. We’re going to go to Mars.

2:22:37 Brian Rose: Well, the current, it’s green scam now. The current.

2:22:39 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:22:40 Yeah.

2:22:40 Yeah. That’s getting reversed.

2:22:42 Okay. You know, you remember why is Obama’s $50 million estate and Gates’s $300 million estate on the water’s edge and Obama just bought it in the last two or three years if global warming is for real? Why are we building here in Britain a 28 billion pound nuclear plant in Suffolk on the water? Why? It’s a hand job.

2:23:08 Brian Rose: I mean, God.

2:23:10 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah, but it’s an easy sale.

2:23:12 Brian Rose: We released, we re-released your global warming clip of you being interviewed by me at the premiere of your movie, $50 Billion Man, which I had to drag you to, by the way, but that’s a whole another story. And after the movie, you got up on stage. I thought we were going to have a nice fireside chat

2:23:28 And you started firing bombs into the audience. People was going to attack me.

2:23:33 That Australian woman who had drank too much called you out and then there was a bunch of your minions in the front row. They wanted to kick her ass. And when people think I’m telling the the global warming lady questions and I was telling your minion to sit down cuz this girl was going to go punch her in the face. And then you laid it out to her with the core samples and everything. And that piece of video, Dan, six, seven minute piece.

2:23:54 That thing has been watched probably 50 million times cuz on Facebook it was like 10 million views here. And we released it after we were banned from YouTube for two years. I got

2:24:03 Dan Peña: Why did you get banned?

2:24:05 Brian Rose: Because of David Icke and all that stuff.

2:24:07 Yeah. Co. Yeah. Medical misinformation. And then it was the White House that told them to take it down.

2:24:14 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:24:14 And how did you get back?

2:24:16 Brian Rose: Because Trump sued YouTube. They paid him a $25 million lawsuit and then Representative Jim Jordan in the Congress went after Google and forced them. He took him to court and they admitted that they shouldn’t have taken, oh, no. They were pressured by the government to take down accounts because of COVID content.

2:24:36 Okay. And he [snorts] made them promise to put the accounts back if that’s the reason they had been taken down. Now, I saw this and I was like, is this actually going to happen? And nothing happened for about 2 weeks and then we went and went back to YouTube and, to appeal again. We had done it a hundred times.

2:24:55 I was trying, I don’t want to tell you how many times I tried to get that channel back. I tried many ways to get into YouTube and every time I was about to get it back, Dan, like 24 hours, they’re like, “Yeah, it’ll be up tomorrow. No problem. We’re going to do it on a weekend so no one notices.” The next morning I got a call and they say, “Someone hates you inside of YouTube.”

2:25:13 This is a senior C-suite executive that’s got their thumb on your account and it will not be turned on until they sign off. Some VP can’t do it in f***ing Berlin. It’s in the Valley and they’re sticking their thumb on it. So many. So I was f***ed.

2:25:26 So then we came back and the appeal process and it looked different. We did it 5 hours later. Bing, videos started coming up. Videos started coming up. And one of the first things we did is we republish some old content and we republish your global warming thing and it got a million views in 4 days because you broke it down exactly like you said now.

2:25:47 Dan Peña: And there was something about that where they’re like, “This guy knows what he’s f***ing talking about.” And it rings true. You know how many panels and discussions I’ve been cancelled at the last minute of global warming and then they see that and then they call cat, they call Kim. We’ve had a change in agenda. We don’t need Mr.

2:26:06 Pena now. You know

2:26:07 Brian Rose: Because of that clip.

2:26:08 Yeah. Really?

2:26:08 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes I’ve actually flown there, you know, I’m getting ready, you know, brushing my teeth, to have breakfast and I get cancelled

2:26:19 Brian Rose: Cuz they Google your name and they find something you said and they come back and protest because there’s no answers to those questions.

2:26:24 Is that still happening now?

2:26:24 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, I haven’t been asked to be on a panel in a while.

2:26:28 Brian Rose: Are the unis still cancelling you? Yeah. The girls take their clothes off and what was that like?

2:26:32 Dan Peña: Oh, I watched the video.

2:26:34 They were surprised I showed up.

2:26:35 Brian Rose: Okay. Because they thought that, you know, they were worried up for my safety.

2:26:40 This was a university in the north of England.

2:26:42 Dan Peña: Actually south of England.

2:26:43 Brian Rose: South of England. And a bunch of people protested, including girls who wrote some protest stuff on there.

2:26:47 And they took their bodies and they took their tops off. Correct. To protest you. Yeah.

2:26:52 And there was a bunch of feminist dudes in the audience too that were going after you as well.

2:26:57 Dan Peña: All true.

2:26:58 Brian Rose: How was that?

2:26:58 Dan Peña: Well, I first time for everything.

2:27:01 Yeah. The, I told, I told, right. Huh. You kept

2:27:06 Brian Rose: Kept going. Yeah. Yeah.

2:27:07 And they stayed.

2:27:08 Dan Peña: No, they stayed and then finally the police security didn’t know where to touch him to to drag him off and then finally they left. They finally left.

2:27:17 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:27:17 Dan Peña: Um, but that’s happened at a couple places. That happened at University of Florida, which I thought I was safe because of Rick Scott at that time was governor.

2:27:28 Yeah. And the, um, but the woke, I was sitting at a dinner, awards dinner and with a lady who I didn’t recognize, she’s the head of wealth management for JP Morgan, a gal I don’t know, and so I said something about Rick and so she gets Rick on the phone, she, who’s this Rick Scott, Rick, what’s happening, where are you, are in trouble. You need, no, no, no. This lady just dialed you. She’s a big hitter.

2:28:03 She runs wealth management at JP Morgan. Have a good time. Say hello to Sally. Yeah. And so, but it just, why would they do that?

2:28:14 And all the stuff they built in Florida, not all, but almost all that stuff. Why? It’s going to be the biggest next class action lawsuit. You know, all the cities and the counties that have benefited from that new building, those new buildings, right, that go all the way down to the Keys. And but I mean, Los Angeles and Amsterdam and they were fighting, they were pissing around about the Panama Canal a few months ago, are all gone.

2:28:43 If it’s best case scenario, 3 m, worst case scenario, 30 m. 30 m, 2/3 of the world’s gone. Okay? Right.

2:28:51 Brian Rose: Okay. Three meters, a bunch of it’s gone. But they wouldn’t do that. Banks, even though they done stupid things over my lifetime, banks aren’t just writing off, you know, ultimately trillions of dollars to make people happy. Um, but Bill Gates would be the first to move his f***ing house.

2:29:10 Dan Peña: And I didn’t know this. I’ve been saying he’s got 50,000 square feet for years and years and years. I didn’t know he added 10,000 more feet here in the last 5 or 10 years. I was up there many, many years ago. They wouldn’t, they’re too smart for that.

2:29:24 But the next play and I’ve been saying this for a while. What is it?

2:29:29 Brian Rose: Water.

2:29:29 Yes. I’ve heard you say

2:29:30 Dan Peña: The big money is water rights. There’s a reason why Sir Richard Branson, Bill Gates amongst others have are the largest mineral owners in the United States. It’s not the mineral, minerals. The mineral they want is water because that’s the next shortage.

2:29:46 Brian Rose: It is.

2:29:47 Dan Peña: It is. That’s the next shortage. Okay.

2:29:48 And the big money have been buying up water rights for 50, 60, 70 years.

2:29:53 So look out cuz that’s next.

2:29:55 Pretty soon a glass like water that I have here will cost more than a barrel of oil.

2:29:59 Brian Rose: And they can’t purify it, or in the Middle East they purify it from the sea water. Correct. Expensive though, isn’t it?

2:30:05 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. Well, they have the money. They don’t give a f*** Right.

2:30:08 Money’s no object.

2:30:08 And the oil comes seeping out of the ground.

2:30:10 Brian Rose: Yeah. I mean,

2:30:11 Okay. All right. So, we heard it here first. Water.

2:30:13 Dan Peña: And we’re not going to have any electric car s*** until Saudi Arabia runs out of oil. which is in 500 years. They don’t say that. The publish is they’re the second or third largest oil reserves in the world. 500 years is Dan Pena’s estimate.

2:30:31 Used to be 300 years. And I’ll give you an example. Saudi Arabia has [clears throat] been trying to take Aramco public since Christ was around.

2:30:42 Brian Rose: Yeah.

2:30:43 Dan Peña: And they can’t. Okay. And they went to NASDAQ, they went to the New York Stock Exchange, they went to some of the lesser exchanges, Toronto, etc. They went to Hong Kong, they went to Beijing, they went to Singapore. Nobody do it.

2:30:59 Okay? So then they come back because they wanted to take 5% of Aramco public without showing their oil reserves. And the value of Aramco is their oil reserves. Okay? So they take it back to Saudi Arabia.

2:31:14 They take it public there. 5% of Aramco and the valuation for the company was a trillion or a trillion and a half or something. But nobody would buy it on the stock. So they forced all employees either directly or indirectly employed by the government. Every swinging dick employee in Saudi Arabia had to buy Aramco.

2:31:36 Brian Rose: That’s the only way they got the public offering away, right?

2:31:38 Dan Peña: Without an evaluation of their oil reserves. And the reason they don’t want the oil reserves evaluation is going to show maybe a gazillion barrels

2:31:49 Brian Rose: Which kills the price of oil.

2:31:50 Dan Peña: Oil will be a nickel.

2:31:51 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:31:52 Dan Peña: If people knew how much they had.

2:31:54 Correct. So it’s a

2:31:55 And everybody in the oil business, Exxon Mobil, Danny Max and when I started 45 years ago knows this story.

2:32:02 Brian Rose: You know this except you don’t hear Anderson Cooper saying anything, right?

2:32:06 Dan Peña: You don’t see any of these guys saying anything. I thought it was going to come to truth when the chief, first chief of one of the first chiefs of staff for Trump was the former chairman CEO of Exxon Mobil. That guy who I knew when he was a middle manager, by the way, and he quit because it was too much hassle working for him and then Mad Dog Mattis, the Marine guy, came before etc.

2:32:27 We’re not going to have, that’s it’s a hand job. It’s b******t. No way are we ever going to have those kind of flying car s***. And

2:32:37 Because they got to get rid of that oil and they’ll sell it at any price. And that’s the only, that’s the open secret in the oil.

2:32:44 Well, it’s not so I’ll tell you another secret. In 1964, ’65 they were had the American Petroleum Institute which is a bunch of jerk off MIT and Caltech guys sitting up there jerking each other off. They had a convention in Las Vegas.

2:32:58 Brian Rose: Yeah.

2:32:58 Dan Peña: And the head scientist for, this is before Exxon Mobil were merged, and Chevron, the head scientist from Chevron was driving from San Francisco to Las Vegas to make a paper. Okay, this paper, this big discovery he made, he left home in time and then the next day at 10:00 when he was supposed to get up and speak. Now this is legend in oil business, he wasn’t there. Now this guy never missed anything in his life. Anyway, he never showed up.

2:33:26 He never made the paper or discussed the paper. What was the paper? Turn, change two molecules in distilled water and you got petroleum. Two molecules. Now you probably understand it better than I do.

2:33:39 Brian Rose: Only two molecules.

2:33:40 Sounds too good to be true.

2:33:41 Dan Peña: Exactly. Well, that paper is sitting in the vaults of Chevron in San Francisco since the ’60s. Everybody knows it. I mean everybody. The janitor knows it.

2:33:56 Same thing for cure for cancer. And I go down a long, long list. A lot of the stories you hear about pharma are all true.

2:34:06 Brian Rose: Okay? So, it’s all being hidden from us to keep prices up. Keep demand up

2:34:13 So they don’t lose market share.

2:34:14 Okay?

2:34:14 Dan Peña: They don’t say it that boldly to keep market share.

2:34:17 Okay?

2:34:17 And now [snorts] almost everything that goes wrong in business today is supply chain. Before Corona, nobody knew what the f*** supply chain was.

2:34:28 Brian Rose: True.

2:34:29 And now why?

2:34:33 Dan Peña: Because it’s an easy thing to blame.

2:34:35 Brian Rose: Okay. Right. Okay. So, they just throw it that

2:34:38 Dan Peña: And the public is global, they’re morons. That’s why I call them media heads. Supply chain my ass. I mean, you go back and you look at textbooks 10 years ago, 5 years before Corona, you can’t find supply chain. It’s not a definition.

2:35:02 It’s just, it’s all b******t When you watch the news, and I know you watch like four channels every day, correct?

2:35:06 Is it just all b******t and you’re just sorting through or you want to know what is the f*** they’re selling to the meatheads today? Because my kids will come back to me and say, “Well, this happened. You didn’t mention this in the seminar.” Okay.

2:35:20 And so I say, “Well, this is horseshit, right?”

2:35:22 Brian Rose: One of the ones that’s the straight Al Jazeera, which is Middle Eastern owned.

2:35:26 Yeah. Qatar.

2:35:27 Dan Peña: Yeah. They’re pretty straight, but I mean CNN and everybody else. I like Bloomberg. Okay.

2:35:35 Brian Rose: It’s pretty straight.

2:35:35 Okay.

2:35:36 Dan Peña: I listen to their weekend wrap, wrap-up or whatever the summary of the week. Okay. It’s pretty good. The But how did I know we were going to have negative oil?

2:35:46 Brian Rose: Well, you’re an oil guy.

2:35:47 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, none of these pundits had ever been to Cushing in Oklahoma to where they swap wet for dry barrels. Okay. It was built in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, and it’s just recently been computerized and they got old software blah blah blah blah. There’s no f***ing way they could have taken an influx of that much oil.

2:36:10 I didn’t know how much. I guess off the top of my head, I said minus 24. It went minus 37. Now, some of my guys, Wall Street guys, shorted oil, made hundreds of millions. Couple guys allegedly billions cuz no, I mean, you could short that commodity all day long and they who were just taking the tickets.

2:36:36 Brian Rose: Landman. It’s a great series. I love it. And the fact that he used to be married to Angelo

2:36:42 Dan Peña: Angelina Jolie. Yeah.

2:36:43 And then she said on the news, he’s the greatest [expletive] He’s got a [expletive] like a baseball bat. She said that on the news. I still remember that. I love that girl after that.

2:36:54 Brian Rose: They used to wear vials of each other’s blood around their neck.

2:36:57 Yeah.

2:36:58 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. He’s the man. He’s the man.

2:37:00 Brian Rose: Yeah. Dan, if you had to start everything over again in ’93,

2:37:04 Dan Peña: I’d go back and I’d be, I’d be No, I’d be doing, um, what did you do the first job you had? Wall Street.

2:37:11 Brian Rose: Well, Wall Street what? A derivatives trading.

2:37:13 Dan Peña: Yeah. Yeah. I’d be derivatives cuz that’s trading nothing for nothing.

2:37:19 Brian Rose: Do they still have derivatives traders?

2:37:20 Dan Peña: Yeah, derivatives is big business.

2:37:22 Brian Rose: You mean but no, but don’t they have algorithms and to do all that s*** No, you still need the derivatives. You still need the people. Yeah, still big business. So AI is not going to make that disappear.

2:37:33 Dan Peña: Maybe it definitely can take some things out of it. But Wall Street’s strong, right? Goldman’s results are strong. JP Morgan’s building the brand new building in London, brand new building in New York. Business is good for those guys.

2:37:48 Brian Rose: Would you do anything different with QLA? And you had to do QLA. You had to do this. This was your calling.

2:37:55 Dan Peña: Well, I guess you say that, but I tried to do it with a Bear and they told me I had two great ideas while I was at the Bear.

2:38:03 One QLA, I’m searching for, you know, the best bang for my institutional customers’ buck. Okay. And I said it’s it’s a quasi real estate play. We buy companies and I forget either ACE or somebody told me that we wouldn’t do that because there’s no real fees in it, especially if you do seller finance. Okay.

2:38:25 So then I came up with a second deal was the Salawi oil field in, no, WILO oil field in Salawatan, Indonesia. Oil was like, I exaggerate now, six, six inches deep. It was a foot or some s*** It’s a no-brainer. Okay. And the Indonesian government just hadn’t got around to developing it.

2:38:42 And so I somehow got an option just like I took an option public and you don’t have to put up any money.

2:38:48 And I brought it back to the Bear. And we had one oil analyst who was a nice enough guy, an Indian guy. He said, “No, no, oil’s way above the guys here. They’re not interested in that.” I said, “Well, I’m leaving with this one.”

2:39:01 I said, “Is it all right for me to leave?” So, I went to my bosses, one of which was at my 80th birthday, Keith Crutcher. He’s 90 now. And I said, “I’m leaving with this deal.” Everybody says, “Okay.”

2:39:11 And he says, “Well, don’t be surprised if 25 years from now, they come back and ask you for their share.” 10 years ago, I get a letter from Bear Stearns, the cleanup lawyer from the bankruptcy,

2:39:23 Wanted to know what happened to that asset. Really? Yeah. And I made a handshake deal with Suharto, the butcher, murderer, what do you call it? I got paid 25 years, though.

2:39:32 25 years. It wasn’t always on time, but I always got it because he liked me, you know. He liked me. I think more or less his crazy son, Bong Bong, liked me more in a way that’s not healthy. But anyway, I got paid.

2:39:46 And so I left. But then a number of years later, they wanted to know, we don’t see Bear Stearns on the title any place here. And so I showed him a letter. Thank God I kept the letter. This is before emails, you know.

2:39:58 Brian Rose: Yeah.

2:39:58 Dan Peña: And they, their lawyer asks, “How many copies of this letter do you have?”

2:40:04 What the London Real Investment Club actually does for you, it gives you the keys to open that and I said one as I took it back just one this one. Um, but that’s why I left the Bear because of the oil. There’s plenty of places that you can get oil for $2 or $3 a barrel to the surface. But there’s so many other places and that would take billions in infrastructure. Okay, cuz there’s no pipelines there.

2:41:23 It’s too shallow for ships like Onassis had. There’s all kinds of reasons. But someday they’re going to have a secondary, tertiary, and even a fourth method of extraction that’ll be able to take this oil profitably. And there’s no reason to have all this other s***. And the guy, the oil guys know that.

2:41:45 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:41:45 Dan Peña: So they’re still graduating petroleum engineers left, right, and center. Geologists left, right, and center. Um, and so I know that. I’m not the only guy that knows that. And when he says drill baby drill, he means it.

2:42:00 And plus a lot of his backing comes from the oil drilling states, those psychos from Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, you know, drill baby drill.

2:42:11 Brian Rose: His energy secretary is a MIT kid.

2:42:12 Dan Peña: Yeah.

2:42:13 Brian Rose: At my, he was at my fraternity a few years before I got there. So we’re not all bad.

2:42:18 Dan Peña: No, no. I’m not, I know a lot of MIT guys that are smart. I know a couple Caltech guys that are smart too. Okay. But those schools, um, as I tell this when I’m at, I’ve never been there, but at Harvard, excuse me, Oxford, some of these other schools I’ve talked about, it gets you in the door.

2:42:40 Okay. It may get you your first promotion, but after that you’re on your own.

2:42:44 Brian Rose: Yeah. Unless you’re fortunate enough to your boss and boss’s boss went to those schools and then you know Kelly was able to because Northwestern and maybe that’s why she wants to stay in your Chicago. There’s a lot of Northwestern grads there and they’re loyal to each other.

2:42:59 Okay.

2:43:00 Okay.

2:43:00 Yeah.

2:43:00 Um, but she gets paid an inordinate amount of money to do f*** all in your opinion.

2:43:08 Dan Peña: My opinion. Okay.

2:43:09 I forgot more about push and paper management stuffing. I could do that in a coma.

2:43:15 Brian Rose: In a coma.

2:43:17 Dan, what if there’s someone listening and that they would say to themselves, “I’m too weak. I am a [expletive] to say your terms, and I need to change myself if I want to get something out of this life.” How can they do it?

2:43:30 Dan Peña: The first thing is I would, this is all free information, so you take it for what it’s worth. We have a book online.

2:43:37 All my material is free online. You know that, okay? I know. Called QLA for Dummies. It was originally written for kids about 10, 12 years ago, but it is our most read piece by adults.

2:43:52 We wrote it for a 10 to 12 year old, which is more or less the average mentality of unfortunately homo sapien right now. And I’d read QLA for Dummies. And if it makes sense there, then all the rest is laid out on my side for free. I mean, my book, Your First 100 Million, is free. Uh,

2:44:12 Brian Rose: It’s a good book.

2:44:13 Dan Peña: Yeah, it is a good book. And we have we have guys that have made hundreds of millions that I never met.

2:44:20 Now, many of them come back to the seminar just to say thank you, but we’ve got guys in prison that have made a lot of money. But one of my favorite stories, we had a minister from Bumfac, Oklahoma come to seminar about five, six years ago and he was a guitar kind of minister, you know, and so he tells a story and you could tell he’s wearing his cousin’s suit, or I mean he wasn’t clothes that were made for him, and he said that because you go around and say why I’m here, what I do, etc. And he says, “I’m a Baptist minister.”

2:44:54 And, you know, a couple three years ago, my son, I was picking him up from school and he asked me, “Why does Billy and Johnny and Sally live in bigger houses than we have, Daddy?” And before I could answer, he said, “I guess God doesn’t pay that well.” He saved for three years to come to the seminar, lost his kids in a divorce to his wife, okay? But he’s now a big health mogul in Oklahoma. He owns 50, 60 assisted living and he’s worth 20, 30, 40 million bucks.

2:45:28 But his son said is I guess God doesn’t pay that well. Well, God doesn’t pay that well. He’s right about that. But you got to have a driving force. If you don’t have a driving force and if you’re only going to try, you’re going to fail.

2:45:40 But start with QLA for Dummies. And it’s don’t be demeaned by the cartoon s*** on the front. Um, but I mean it’s helped countless people. But you are who you hang around with. You’re the average of the five people.

2:45:54 And I said it earlier, maybe a mom, a part-time dad, an older brother, a sister, maybe a grandparent, and your next door neighbor. And what do they know about building high performance people? Nothing. Nothing. And some cases, you know, I told you I interviewed a Kennedy recently.

2:46:12 He looked, I mean, [expletive] I thought I was You’re real, Kennedy. Yes, sir. I can’t get a job now. I felt [clears throat] good. It’s a shitty thing to say, but I felt good about it.

2:46:28 And he says that, you know, everybody thinks that I’m a shoo-in. Now, maybe 50 years ago, I was a shoo-in, but I was certainly not a shoo-in today. And he went to Harvard and blah blah blah still. And he went to that prep school that they go to before they go to Harvard. Andover.

2:46:42 Brian Rose: Andover. Is it Andover? Only on the East Coast.

2:46:45 Dan Peña: Just like you. Just like you.

2:46:46 Brian Rose: I didn’t go to Andover.

2:46:46 Dan Peña: No.

2:46:48 And um but you still got to take action. Um, but my neighbors here in Scotland, [sighs] they’re on the 8th, 10th, 12th generation. And they go to either Oxford or Cambridge, occasionally University of Edinburgh. They work in the city for three or four years, they want to be a director, a main board director, and they go on the Black Watch, you know, and then they come home and drink themselves to death. They’ve been doing that for 5, 600 years since, Napoleon got beat at Waterloo.

2:47:37 Nothing’s going to change. I mean, why would you change? I went to a cocktail party three or four years ago. They call them drinks parties in Scotland. Interest rates were still at 5,000-year low before they started going up.

2:47:52 They were zero, more or less. Danny, what are you talking about? Zero interest rate. I said, “Yeah, they’re just about zero. They give money away now.”

2:48:04 And they didn’t have a f***ing clue.

2:48:07 Brian Rose: No idea what you’re talking about.

2:48:08 Dan Peña: Nothing.

2:48:08 Brian Rose: Right.

2:48:10 Dan Peña: They thought that I was trying to promote something.

2:48:11 Doesn’t affect their and somebody’s wife asked Sally, “Is your hus said, “What are you talking about?” And then she said, “Interest rates are 5,000-year low.” What interest rate? Now, the guy that runs Saudi, he’s got initials. What do they call him?

2:48:31 Brian Rose: MBS.

2:48:32 Dan Peña: Okay. MBS was sitting at a meeting here recently, and somebody mentioned net zero. He has two interpreters. What do they mean net zero? There is no net zero.

2:48:50 That is a fig newton of their somebody’s imagination. That is never going to happen. Never. And they say net zero or no 30% or whatever they say for UK by 2030 or 2050 or they’re lying.

2:49:06 Brian Rose: I hope not.

2:49:07 Dan Peña: Well, I mean I hope so. Well, [clears throat] net zero for whom?

2:49:13 Brian Rose: It’s already dragged this country down.

2:49:15 Dan Peña: Well, it’s a front page [clears throat] article in the Wall Street Journal the other day talking about how the Green scam drove electricity prices up and supply down over the last 20 years.

2:49:25 I couldn’t believe when I heard the first advert, heat or eat for old people.

2:49:30 Brian Rose: Oh yeah. Here a couple years ago.

2:49:32 Dan Peña: It’s worse in Scotland.

2:49:34 And I said Sally, and they were showing some guy about 75 years old and I was maybe 77 or 78 then. And then we checked around the local reverend and there, oh no no, we and Sally’s checked around just recently if anybody in the village needs anything. Oh, no, no, no. There are people a lot worse off than Guthrie village, you know. And he talked about Glasgow and some of the other parts in Scotland, but not, you know, he or each.

2:50:04 And then they show some old guy his pension is 1,200 lb and his heating bill went from 600 to 1,400. Now, I’m sure maybe there’s one guy, but I mean they make it sound like it’s your next door neighbor, right? So, we actually went around and checked with everybody, make sure everybody had enough money or enough heat or this and that. Um, but advertising, I mean, it is and now it’s easier to tell s*** on the internet. It’s easier to tell s*** unfortunately.

2:50:35 And now the people, the last generation and a half are more gullible. When stuff like that came out when I was, I don’t think I was ever gullible but came out when I was young. I mean and now they have fact checks. Okay. When I was first on Wall Street there’s two or three guys I would call if I wanted to know is this the truth.

2:51:01 No, you know, but they all taught me especially at Bear follow the money. What’s the big money doing? Okay. And big money is hardly ever wrong. They are wrong from time to time, but not too often.

2:51:19 It’s interesting that the guy that owned the Titanic decided not to sail on it. And the guy Abson who owned Twin Towers happened to not go to the office that day. The two largest insurance claims that were paid in the history of the planet. And somehow they were able to escape that tragedy.

2:51:45 So watch the bunny.

2:51:46 Brian Rose: Oh yeah. Big money hardly ever makes a mistake.

2:51:50 So people can download QLA for Dummies. They can go to your website. You’re doing four seminars a year.

2:51:56 Dan Peña: Yeah. The next one’s in February.

2:51:57 Brian Rose: Okay. February. Okay. And then Hardcore New Year’s.

2:52:02 Dan Peña: Well, this year it’s New Year’s. It’ll be in December, January.

2:52:04 Brian Rose: Okay. And you got a podcast coming soon. New January. You’re going to interview people,

2:52:11 Dan Peña: Correct? I got this, I got to watch. Okay.

2:52:14 Brian Rose: That requires empathy, Dan.

2:52:16 Dan Peña: No. Well, no. Well, I mean, they just got was screaming at somebody today. We’re going to ask these people. I says, “No, no, you tell them they’re on the podcast.

2:52:26 I’m not asking anybody. There’s only one answer to this f***ing thing.” And yeah, when he can or she or it can make themselves available and so and so

2:52:37 Brian Rose: I like that.

2:52:37 Dan Peña: Yeah, I ask them.

2:52:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, I like that.

2:52:40 Dan Peña: I made these [expletive] You did.

2:52:42 They owe me.

2:52:43 They’re lucky I’m not collecting in cash.

2:52:50 Brian Rose: I can’t wait. You’re going to shoot it in your bar where you were shooting those pod, the Godfather talks and stuff, or your studio

2:52:56 Dan Peña: Or in front of my trillion dollar man sign.

2:52:58 Brian Rose: Okay. I like that too. Yeah. Okay. Stay tuned for the Vatican getting completely back to normal and then stay tuned for the knight.

2:53:07 There’s going to be some turmoil for the British knighthood. Can I come to that, you know, and just cheer you on?

2:53:11 Dan Peña: Absolutely.

2:53:11 Yeah, absolutely. The, um

2:53:12 Brian Rose: Could I get a guest?

2:53:15 Dan Peña: Well, I don’t know about that, but um, I feel very, you know, I took communion while I was at the Vatican. And so for about 10 or 12 days, I felt different. Sally says I was acting different

2:53:31 And I was trying to watch the how many times I said f*** and stuff like that. Um, and

2:53:37 Brian Rose: It’s like when you meditated in Nepal, you, a few days something happened.

2:53:40 Dan Peña: No, I didn’t meditate. I I just felt different when I left. That’s true. Right.

2:53:44 Brian Rose: I still don’t meditate when you meditated at Dave Asprey’s conference. You felt different for a little bit.

2:53:48 Dan Peña: No no no. A third chakra.

2:53:49 Third. Yeah. Third. See

2:53:51 Brian Rose: Now. Why does everybody say that’s such a big deal?

2:53:53 It’s there inside you, Dan.

2:53:54 Dan Peña: Well, I did it like in about six microseconds.

2:53:57 Okay. I didn’t do it once. I did it three times. And then I got, we went out with some friends of ours, got drunk, and then when we went back to their big mansion in the kitchen, and then one of the wives said do it one more time. So I got in the other room.

2:54:16 I did it again. And then so and I’ve got some mystics that follow me. That’s not possible because I’ve been hearing about the third f***ing chakra for 50, 60 years. And you know, and the Dalai Lama. Okay.

2:54:31 And I’ve got some guys that are right-hand people to the Dalai Lama, right? You haven’t met him?

2:54:36 Brian Rose: No. Never. Never met him. But I have I

2:54:42 You could have gone two ways, Dan. You could have gone the monk way.

2:54:45 Dan Peña: No. No.

2:54:46 Brian Rose: This guy’s making a lot of money.

2:54:46 Dan Peña: No. I wanted to be a priest.

2:54:48 Brian Rose: Oh, yeah. I know.

2:54:49 Dan Peña: Okay. I’d be Pope by now. I’ve already told an archbishop that. And he went, “Mr. Pena, I know that sounds presumptuous, but I’m telling you what the Lord knows, but let’s hope you’re right.

2:55:08 My prayer is with you. I have not got a no yet,

2:55:11 Okay? That you

2:55:12 From any of the high-powered clergy. Not one f***ing no.

2:55:16 Brian Rose: Oh, on the the the thing.

2:55:17 Dan Peña: On the thing. Okay, good. All right. Sally says, “Can we build in a trillion dollar salary or anything?” I don’t think so, Sally.

2:55:26 I’m not doing this for the money. You’re

2:55:28 Brian Rose: Doing this for the rep.

2:55:28 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:55:29 Brian Rose: Okay. All right. Well,

2:55:32 Dan Peña: But there’s a few people like Trump. I’d like a damn.

2:55:36 Brian Rose: A damn.

2:55:36 Dan Peña: No. Damn them.

2:55:37 Brian Rose: Oh, okay. Oh, damn them. Okay. Oh, when you’re up there. I see.

2:55:41 Dan Peña: Not everybody deserves to go to heaven.

2:55:45 If I get to be in charge of that list, you know.

2:55:48 Brian Rose: Oh, who you can damn.

2:55:49 Yeah. Where I can, who goes to hell? Maybe they’ll give you that for a day if you pull it off.

2:55:55 Dan Peña: Not if, when.

2:55:55 Brian Rose: If when. Um, I meet people all the time and they’re fans of yours and I always tell them, “Go to the castle.” And they get this look about them like, “Oh my god, I could never go.” I’m like, “Go, go. I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be doing it.

2:56:06 Go.”

2:56:06 Dan Peña: That’s right. I should probably raise the price. I haven’t raised the price in eight or 10 years.

2:56:11 Brian Rose: Yeah. Raise.

2:56:12 Dan Peña: Somebody reminded me of that.

2:56:13 Brian Rose: Most people are just terrified to go.

2:56:16 Dan Peña: Yeah. But I

2:56:16 Well, I mean, I gave a talk for the Scottish Business Association in Glasgow three weeks ago. Um, and the guy that organizes, a mentee of mine named Paul McFaden, and they had a special dinner that I was there and they were supposed to come up and talk to me, but everybody was afraid to come up and talk to me. Then we had a Q&A of about 100 people. And I didn’t think I was particularly harsh, but apparently I was. And I said, you know, one of the kids, I said, “How old are you?”

2:56:48 And he says, “31, you’ve lived 31 years being this stupid. How’s that possible?” The question, “Did you do any preparation?” And I started going, “Most people that walk the street shouldn’t have been born.” They, like I say, they should have rolled down your fat mama’s leg instead of one of those four or 500 sperm that hit the jackpot.

2:57:15 What good, what benefit the human race have you done? None. And you think you have rights in Spartan time. We would have left you in the f***ing ditch. In fact, I’m willing to put you in the ditch right now.

2:57:33 But I’m not just acting. I believe that with all my heart.

2:57:35 Brian Rose: I know you do.

2:57:36 Dan Peña: How do you produce all this money out of these little [expletive] It’s a f***ing miracle. And that’s what I told the Cardinals, etc. That’s why I’ve got no nose and they’re desperate.

2:57:55 Brian Rose: St. Pena, it’s coming.

2:57:56 St. Dan.

2:57:57 St. Dan. Okay. I wish you all the luck with that.

2:58:00 Dan Peña: Thank you very much.

2:58:00 Brian Rose: I wish you luck with the And I wish you luck in Dubai.

2:58:03 Dan Peña: Thank you. Thank you.

2:58:04 Okay. Watch out. I know you think you’re smart, Brian.

2:58:07 Brian Rose: Watch out.

2:58:07 Dan Peña: But watch out, okay? Cuz there’s a lot they’ve been cheating with camels and camel saddles and flying carpets for thousands of years before MIT was ever invented.

2:58:20 Brian Rose: Okay. Noted. Noted.

2:58:23 Dan Peña: And there’s some smart guys there. And I have a smart law firm. I’m not promoting anybody, but I have a smart English law firm who’s been there since the beginning who I depend on whenever I need something to be looked at.

2:58:35 Brian Rose: Okay.

2:58:35 Dan Peña: And it’s a gal. The law firm is a big law firm. And the, but I mean you got to be sure and I always say only do business where there’s a rule of law. Well, the rule of law is a little shaky in Dubai. It’s not as shaky as it was 25, 30 years ago,

2:58:54 Brian Rose: Right?

2:58:54 Dan Peña: But I mean you need to make sure that whatever you’re doing is rock solid foundation because they’ll look for any excuse and additional fees at the closing are a norm. I gave you one for 50 grand, I gave you one for 20 million. Um, and the 20 million was out of 100 million. So, the guy that got the 80 million, he thought all his birthdays to come at once. But if your term sheet in your mind had spent the whole 100 million, what do you do when you only have 80 million?

2:59:31 Brian Rose: All right, I’ll watch it.

2:59:33 Dan Peña: And deals like that are commonplace. It takes a while and therefore, you know, coffee and all that s*** which I don’t relegate myself to that, you know, the, um, but they like meetings upon meetings upon meetings, but they have the money, so most people put up with it.

2:59:53 Brian Rose: Yeah. Yeah. They like to build the relationship.

2:59:56 Dan Peña: Correct.

2:59:56 Brian Rose: Relationship first, business second. Correct. Is what they do.

2:59:58 At least that’s what they say.

2:59:59 That’s what they say. Yeah. All right. Thank you for the motivation.

3:00:05 Dan Peña: It’s my pleasure.

3:00:06 Brian Rose: And the observations.

3:00:06 Dan Peña: I’ll give my best to your family.

3:00:08 Brian Rose: I will.

3:00:08 Dan Peña: And your daughter.

3:00:10 Brian Rose: Yeah. I’m going to see her soon. She remembers you. And maybe I’ll send the boys up to the castle with me in about 5 years.

3:00:16 Dan Peña: Well, five years. Well, if I’m still there in 5 years. I’ll be there the next year or two for sure. But anyway, you do it at your own pace. That’s fine.

3:00:25 Um, and the kids, I appreciate the opportunity. And so when will you physically be there?

3:00:32 Brian Rose: Oh, Dubai. End of the month. I’ll be there and then I’ll be there for four or five months till summer. I might serve the summer, I might come back here. So yeah, summer’s a beast.

3:00:43 Dan Peña: Yeah, it is. Although more people are staying now, but yeah, gets a little hot. But yeah, it’s getting bigger and bigger. Everyone’s moving there. Everyone’s moving from here there for a lot of reasons.

3:00:56 Do you know where you’re going to have your office?

3:00:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think I got an idea. We had a studio there last year, so we had a whole setup there. So, yeah. Yeah, next time you and Sally are in town, drop by.

3:01:06 Dan Peña: Okay. Well,

3:01:06 The, um, they have asked me countless times to do stuff there, but I won’t do it there. Saudis asked me, you got to come to the castle. Because people winding up like Khashoggi chopped up in embassies is for real. It’s not just, you know, a James Bond movie. So you don’t want to get chopped up?

3:01:27 No. I’m not going to give them the chance to get chopped up.

3:01:30 Brian Rose: Okay.

3:01:30 Dan Peña: Okay. But they’ve asked me many times. The only ones that I would take exception that I would do it is the Kuwaitis, the Al-Sabahs, who I was in business with for 10 years. And I know their family well, okay?

3:01:43 And I know, and I know the guys. Um, and the grandson that was with me 40 years ago is now the head guy because his father and grandfather passed away. Okay. So, so I have more confidence than when he tells me something that’s actually going to get done. And the, and remember there’s a gazillion princes there, Omir, there’s a gazillion of them.

3:02:06 And there’s only a handful that actually that title carries any weight. And so, make sure you do your homework and make sure you’re dealing with somebody that can actually that promises you something that can actually fulfill it because unfulfilled expectations are rampant in that part of the world.

3:02:23 Brian Rose: So, maybe a one day seminar in Dubai for you.

3:02:26 Dan Peña: No, no, no, no, not your London one was a huge hit.

3:02:29 Brian Rose: What?

3:02:29 Your London one was a huge hit.

3:02:30 Dan Peña: Yeah, that was my retirement, which I didn’t wind up retiring. That’s 5 years ago.

3:02:35 Brian Rose: Yeah.

3:02:35 Dan Peña: And it was a big hit. The but you can count on two hands of the thousand people in the room that made it happen for themselves.

3:02:48 Brian Rose: Really?

3:02:48 Dan Peña: Two. So, it’s actually seven.

3:02:51 Brian Rose: Seven guys. Okay. So,

3:02:53 Dan Peña: And one’s a father and son. So, that’s six entities

3:02:55 And the rest it was just a blip energy.

3:02:58 Brian Rose: No, no, it’s something to check.

3:03:00 Dan Peña: So, they have to come to the castle. You got to lay hands on them.

3:03:03 Yeah. Yeah. But I mean the six that you know made quite a bit of money. But see the expectations, if you think a lot of money is 20 million, your body starts to run out at 16 million, 17 million, 18, then you barely fall over the, you know, the goal line at 20 million. If your expectation is 500 million or a larger number, you know your body internalizes that.

3:03:29 You know it’s like the difference between a two, a two round fight and a five round fight. Okay. And so, you know, and you internalize that. Um, and most people are ready for like a one round fight and when it’s a long time. It’s a long time.

3:03:46 But I mean, you’re, um, Ironman and the boxing etc. It all boed well for you and so that’s good. That’s good. And so with the, whether you need any more fights or not, you’ll decide.

3:04:00 Brian Rose: Yeah.

3:04:00 Uh but I need more challenges and more risks.

3:04:03 Dan Peña: Yeah. And with that comes money. Are we winding up, right?

3:04:06 Brian Rose: Yeah, we’re done. Thank you, Pena. Appreciate.

3:04:08 Dan Peña: You’re very welcome. All right. My pleasure.

AI Investment Club: founders pitch LIVE every MondayAI Investment Club · live every Monday

Dan Peña - The Brutal Truth About Wealth, Power & Weak Men

Executive High Performance Success Coach & Founder of QLA

Key takeaways

Six years on: focus, accountability and the mood in America

Weak men, college and the future of work

The Church, charity and a life of deals

Fear, boxing and Brian’s next step

Bitcoin, water, Dubai and where to start

Who is Dan Peña?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Dan Pena on London Real

Latest Episode

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

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Dubai Real - Episode 2: Billionaires’ Row

Dubai Real - Episode 1: Why Dubai Never Stops Building

Dan Peña - The Brutal Truth About Wealth, Power & Weak Men

Executive High Performance Success Coach & Founder of QLA

Key takeaways

Six years on: focus, accountability and the mood in America

Weak men, college and the future of work

The Church, charity and a life of deals

Fear, boxing and Brian’s next step

Bitcoin, water, Dubai and where to start

Who is Dan Peña?

Frequently asked questions

Full transcript: Dan Pena on London Real

Latest Episode

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

More Like This

Dubai Real - Episode 4: The Art Of The Deal

Dubai Real - Episode 3: Inside The Deal

Dubai Real - Episode 2: Billionaires’ Row

Dubai Real - Episode 1: Why Dubai Never Stops Building

Larry Sanger - Wikipedia Is Broken and No One Wants to Admit It

Private call with Brian Rose