Dan Peña - Your First 100 Million

Full transcript: Dan Peña on London Real

9:50 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose.

10:56 My guest today is Mr. Dan Pena, who is an American-born businessman, entrepreneur, and mentor who lives in a castle in Scotland. Dan, you’re like a James Bond villain in that way.

11:15 And, you know, you’re dressed for success. I don’t know many people that can pull off a three-piece suit and a gold chain. Thank you. That’s fantastic. You are the author of the book, Your First 100 Million, which you just gave me a copy.

11:27 Thank you very much. I guess that’s $100 million. Correct. Okay. You’ve had some amazing successes in the past.

11:34 I want to get to those later. I believe you turned $820 into $450 million in the oil business, I believe. Correct. We will get to that. But most importantly, our former guest, Peter Sage, who was here, we had him on the episode called Extreme Entrepreneur.

11:49 It was watched over 30,000 times. I think listened to over 200,000 or 300,000 times around the world. I get emails to this day saying that Peter’s talk with me really inspired him. I don’t know. It was a really serious moment where Peter was inspirational, but he really holds people accountable.

12:04 That might have something to do with you. We’ll talk about that going forward. But I’ve had people call me and say they stopped drinking after that episode and, like, big life changes. So, and at the end of that show, he mentioned you and the book as being his mentor. So, quite frankly, that’s the reason you’re here today.

12:20 Thank you so much for being here, Dan. Welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me. No problem at all.

12:27 I know you’ve just flown in from Asia. I’m glad the coffee’s helping you a bit. You kind of remind me of kind of the George Patton of the business world. You know, you wrote me one of your emails. You’re like, I use harsh and candid language for people that don’t know.

12:41 When Dan sends me an email, it’s in all caps, which, you know, to kids these days on Twitter, you know, it’s, you know, if people think you’re yelling. But on top of all that, it’s all caps and red letters, Dan, when you send me your emails. Big red letters. Big red letters. And the last email Dan sent me, he said, Brian, hope you are ripping the ass out of 2014.

13:01 It doesn’t get much better than that. Dan, what do you tell people that you do when they ask you? What do you say? Well, the last 20 years, I’ve been a coach mentor, high-performance coach, to the select few that really want to be all they can be, as Joe Batten, who came up with a sales phrase for the United States Army about 15, 20 years ago, he said, be all you can be. Coincidentally, Joe Batten and I have been in business together.

13:28 And for the younger audience that don’t realize it, Joe Batten was Ross Perot’s mentor. Ross Perot is a blast from the past, ran for president against, or pretended to run for president against Bush 1 back a long time ago. He got one of the largest independent votes. Correct, yeah. In history, maybe.

13:46 And he kept Bush from being a president the second time. Right, and that’s why Clinton got elected because of Perot. Correct, absolutely. And so I decided to, I was an out-of-work founder and former CEO of a public company, public in the London Stock Exchange, and we were in the energy business. We were international, South America.

14:06 We were in offshore drilling, coal mining, exploration. And we were across the board, except for retail, to gasoline stations. And the shareholders decided that I shouldn’t be there anymore. Our largest shareholder was the Kuwaiti government. And Kuwait had just been invaded by Iraq.

14:24 OK, 1990 or something. Yes, correct. And Kuwait owned 29.9% of our company, the company that I founded. And the stock price went down about 60% because everybody thought the Kuwaitis were going to have to sell assets to pay for the war. No matter how much I ran around the world telling people that I knew better than that, the stock still dropped.

14:47 It was obvious when the U.S. stepped in to help Kuwait beat Iraq, then they said, were they going to need to sell all their assets to rebuild Kuwait? Which I also knew was rubbish. All right, well, we’ll get into the details of that, so you left that company. I left that company, no, they exited me.

15:04 OK, they exited you for that company. Yeah, and then I decided, what am I going to do? And a good friend of mine said, Dan, you’re a great speaker. Why don’t you coach? Why don’t you give back until you decide what you want to do the next round?

15:15 And so I started coaching, and I gave my first Quantum Leap Advantage seminar in May 1993 at the Sheraton Hotel Los Angeles. And then I gave shortly thereafter, I gave my first castle seminar. And I don’t give the outside seminars anymore, but I still give the castle seminars almost 21 years later. That’s when people come up to your castle, and it’s kind of a private seminar. And the whole idea is to be around the ambiance of the rich and the famous, and how it’s a different style of living, how butlers wait on your hand and foot, how we dress, we actually dress for the seminar.

15:51 I’ve seen your guys, they all show up in kilts. Yeah, well, no, that’s the graduation night. OK. Instead of tuxedo, it’s the Scottish tuxedo, a kilt, black jacket. But I mean, for the seminars, and even the people that like to wear t-shirts and jeans, they wear suits to the seminar.

16:10 And even though I know you can make money, especially in the Silicon Valley type places, high tech, not wearing suits, all I know is when I go into a banker, or even some of my technology mentees go into a banker, the banker feels more comfortable when he looks like you. Yeah, and if you’re asking for money, one of my old friends said he always wears a suit. Correct. Yeah, but you’re out dressing me today in a big way. I didn’t mean to.

16:35 I just came from a meeting in the city. One of my old city colleagues, we used to have a casual dress on Friday. And this is from my old company, iCap PLC, you know, FTSE 100. And we’d come in dressed casual, and he would say, casual dress, casual attitude. And he wasn’t impressed with that.

16:50 I couldn’t agree with him more. But that’s not you being a grumpy old man. No, no, it’s not. I was like this 30 years ago. OK.

16:59 Speaking of 30 years ago, excuse me for interrupting, today is the 30th anniversary from April 4, 1984. I came up with the idea, the epiphany, to go public, take something public in London, on the London Stock Exchange. I didn’t have anything to take public, so I took an option out on a bunch of assets and nobody had ever taken an option public before. And that’s really in the rest of its history. And that was on the North Sea drilling, the auction?

17:28 No, no. The option was on all North American drilling. But I was riding on the back of North Sea because they just found it in North Sea. And that was 30 years ago? 30 years ago today.

17:38 And that was one of your biggest business successes? Yeah, it’s one of my biggest. It’s in the top 10 for sure. OK. Now, just to finish off with these seminars, you think it’s the most important to get these people up to your castle.

17:50 They’re small groups, right? 28-some people? Eight to 12. Eight to 12, OK. And so you’re kind of a, what, a mentor to the ultra entrepreneur, the ultra person.

18:00 I guess these are people that already have some type of success or high net worth? No. Not necessarily. The last seminar in January, we’re just about to have one next week, we had an 18-year-old high school student who paid for himself. Really?

18:13 And guess what? How much does it cost? Well, without flights, it’s 15 grand. OK. Dollars.

18:20 Dollars. Actually, with exchange rate, it’s about 16.5 now. OK. He’s coming again in April, this high school kid. And you charge him full price, Dan?

18:27 No. Students. Students get… OK. But you’ve got to prove to me you’re a student.

18:32 OK. I’ve got guys your age trying to prove to me that they’re students, you know, and they send me their Bar Mitzvah picture when they’re 13 years old, then they show up and they’re, you know, 45 years old. No. But he… I won’t tell you what the student rate is, but it’s a lot less.

18:46 OK. But he’s coming for the second time because he’s making money on the Internet. And he makes between $6,000 and $15,000 a month as an 18-year-old high school student, senior. And in fact… But he’s coming again in April, and he’s got a…

19:02 I haven’t seen this on paper, but he’s got a place at Oxford. OK. He’s considering not going. Now, that’s a big heavy weight on me. Bill Gates style, Zuckerberg style.

19:12 Yeah, correct. OK. And he’s that kind of smart. OK. And he thinks that Gates and Zuckerberg got started late in life.

19:19 OK. He’s 18. He’s 18. Let me ask you a question. When it comes to you, you’ve seen all these people that come to you for advice.

19:26 Is it come down to the business or at the end of the day, are you exercising personal demons about themselves? Fear of trusting themselves? Fear about taking risks? You know, are you more a psychologist? You should give the seminar.

19:38 I should. That’s it. You’re more a psychologist than, say, businessmen, right? Because some of these businesses, Internet businesses, you probably don’t understand or don’t need to understand. You do, because you have some businesses like that.

19:47 Yeah, because I’ve been in IT for 17, 18 years. OK. But no, it is. I’m part Freud, part General Patton, and part Jack Welsh. Right.

20:02 OK. The famous CEO of GE for so many years. Am I the first guy to make comparisons between General Patton and you, or has it been done before? No, it’s been done before. OK.

20:11 But I normally, I tell people, there’s two ends of the leadership and continuum. There’s the Henry Kissinger end and there’s General Patton end. OK. Ninety five percent of all people, successful people, fall on the Henry Kissinger end. OK.

20:29 Which is a Compromiser. Compromiser, negotiate, et cetera. The art of war kind of, even though they were warriors, the art of war. So you hold your friends close and your enemies closer. OK.

20:47 I’m at the George Patton end of the continuum. OK. I don’t hold my friends close. I hold them very close, but I don’t hold my enemies closer. But when you, like Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, just gave a speech at Oxford Debate Club, or debate, I can’t remember what the name of it is, and it’s on YouTube.

21:07 It’s a great hour and ten minutes watch. And he comes in, jumping up and down, screaming, clapping his hands. That’s what he does. OK. That’s what I do.

21:17 OK. On stage you get excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Normally on stage after 30, 40 minutes, this suit, or a suit like it, is soaking wet. OK.

21:25 And I’m not having heroin withdrawals. I mean, it’s soaking wet. And he was saying, you know, some of the things that they did at Microsoft, and right now he’s trying to explain why he was only a two-trick company, Microsoft. And to be a truly great company, he said you got to be a three-trick. OK, OK.

21:45 And I agree, but I think two-tricks is enough to be a great company, because I think Microsoft is a great company. So, but they’re loud people, and there’s quiet people, but most people’s disposition are at the Henry Kissinger end. I’m certainly not that bad. And Peter Sage isn’t at that end. Right.

22:02 One of my mentees, he’s at the patent. He’s a little more polite than I am. Right. But he is still on the patent end. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

22:09 He’s in the patent 10, 15 percent. One thing I like about Peter is he definitely holds people accountable. And when I asked him, I think we talked about what Peter calls upgrading your peer group. I don’t know if he grabbed that from you or not. It’s been said by a lot of people before, but it was, you know, it was.

22:24 It was, you know, get rid of the people that are bringing you down. Dead weight. Yeah, the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And he was quite militant about getting rid of those people. I couldn’t agree more.

22:35 One of the most successful mentees who lives here in London, who came to the seminar in 1996, he came back and he, on his phone when you called him, it said, this is so-and-so. If you don’t have my forwarding number, go fuck yourself. I never want to see you again. That was the extreme. He’s a very successful guy in the city.

22:56 Extremely successful. And I’m not suggesting everybody can do that because we have two bank accounts in life. Just like we had two ends of the continuum for leadership. We’ve got an emotional bank account and a financial bank account. Most of us, not me, but most of us worry about the financial bank account.

23:13 But it’s your emotional bank account that you’re going to run out. When it’s cold and windy and you’re at night, nobody there to wipe your tears away. It’s your emotional bank account. Whether you can suck up your pantyhose, a phrase I use, or man up to use new parlance. Those are the guys that make it.

23:30 And the people that can’t man up don’t. Interesting. Or woman up, excuse me, ladies. So that’s what makes a successful people is what you’re saying, that deep emotional bank account. Passion.

23:41 Passion, okay. And I guess having a support base too to get you through those times. Correct. Okay. Now, just like in the seminar, the YouTubes that are on, about the seminar I give, the first five minutes of the seminar we tape in the morning, at lunch, after lunch, and just before we close, three times during the week.

23:59 I have the same fire and passion, the first five minutes of the seminar, as I do the last five minutes of the seminar a week later. Whereas the guys in the audience, the guys in the audience, nobody goes to sleep in my seminars because I kick the chairs out from under you. I have this writing crop that I go on. I smack the desk with. It sounds like it’s worth the price of admission.

24:20 Yes. I mean, it’s, when I hear people use the terminology that came out about 15, 20 years ago, boot camp. Yeah. Well, I’ve actually been through a real boot camp. Okay.

24:29 You are in the service. Yes. I was in the service. I went through officer candidate school, you know, ranger and all that stuff I’ve done. And to call these marketing seminars a boot camp is a joke.

24:41 I mean, these guys, most of the people that give the seminars would piss their pants if they really went through boot camp. Okay. Okay. And so it’s emotionally tough, you know, I wasn’t a Marine. I was an army officer, but it’s the guys that are emotionally tough.

24:56 And that’s why I’ve trained Peter Sage like that. And I’ve trained a whole bunch of other guys to be more emotionally tough and to look within. Okay. And to practice success before you’re successful. One of the stories, and I know Peter remembers it.

25:11 Before I had any money, I used to go to the Rolls Royce dealers and sit in the cars and smell the leather, touch the leather. Okay. And these days, this is 40 years ago, I went to million dollar houses and my wife and I would walk through the house and they’d say, when are your parents getting here, kids? No, we are the buyers. Okay.

25:30 And to get used to it, and that’s the reason the castle is so effective. And the reason I stopped giving outside seminars is that the success rate is almost five times greater. Going to the castle, having a butler weight on you, dressing, thinking more of yourself, because self-esteem is the key to high performance. If we feel good about ourselves and we hang around with people, the average of the five people that we are mostly around is who we turn out to be.

26:01 And Peter has articulated that very well. And it’s not for me to tell you who his friends were 18 years ago, that’s for him to say, but they’re not the same people that are his buddies, if you will, today. What do you do when you see a guy that comes into one of your seminars and you can just tell, he’s kind of a little bit emotionally unstable. Well, you know, if you yelled at him to man up, he might just break down. But you can see he’s got real potential there.

26:25 You know, how can you get someone to get strong that way? Because I break them down in the seminar, but then during the private time, I build them up. Okay. Okay. Because we’ve had plenty of people cry in the seminar.

26:38 We’ve had one psychiatrist pass out, because we have medical doctors, Harvard doctors, we’ve had one psychiatrist actually pass out. And we’ve had a big eight accounting firm, now a big four, that actually went to potty in his pants. Okay. Okay. And he’s still around in the city.

26:59 Okay. Okay. And if I named the firm, you probably could guess who it is. Did he learn something from you? Absolutely.

27:06 Okay. Absolutely. He’s now one of the big mucky mucks for one of the big four. What’s the first thing that you see when people walk in, as far as the most common thing you see from people that they need to change? Lack of self-assurance.

27:18 Really? Lack of self-esteem. Lack of self-worth. Now, they think they have self-worth. Right.

27:24 They think because they’ve made a few bucks. But in actuality, and when they measure it against the other eight, ten, twelve people sitting around the table, they realize, or they start to question, hell, maybe I was just lucky. Now, all of us, when you’re only a one-trick guy or gal, think, was I lucky? Now, I’ve done it so many times, I know I wasn’t lucky. I might have been lucky the first time, but I haven’t been lucky the 15, 20, 40, 50…

27:52 I know that. But maybe I was lucky the first time. And maybe that’s why I get such a great feeling of pulling the guys across the goal line. But they all have a… It’s like the first date you ever went on.

28:06 Do you remember asking the girl? Yeah, I think so. Terrified. Okay. I was too.

28:11 I practiced in front of the mirror. I practiced in front of my mom. I practiced in front of my little dog. And I was still scared when I asked her. And then I saw her at our 30-year high school reunion, and I said, Dan, my God, why were you worried about asking this woman out?

28:25 All right, we’ll get back to that one. Let me ask you another question. When people come into your seminar and you’re looking to kind of change them in some way, how long does it take you to figure out what’s wrong with them? No more than a week. Okay, I thought you might say like 30 seconds.

28:45 No, no, I said no more than a week. Okay. Because some people don’t talk. See, some people won’t talk, and we have exercises. We have role-playing.

28:53 Because raising money in the city or in New York or in Tokyo or any place, it’s a matter you’ve got to be able to interface. And so we do financial role-playing. We show them how to get board of directors because I’m a big proponent of the dream team. How you get accountants to represent you on a success-free basis, which everybody says is impossible. Happening today in London as we speak.

29:15 Today, I just came from a meeting, a success-free meeting. Today, April 4th, 2014. But if you go and you call up an accountant… They’ll sign out of that. Oh, what, are you crazy?

29:26 Okay, what are you smoking, kid? So it still happens. And so it’s all about communication because communication is message sent, message received, and then message acted upon when I want you to do it, not when Brian wants to do it. And that’s leadership. But I can tell normally in 30 to 60 seconds whether it’s going to be hard work because I gave them a free year mentoring program after the seminar for one year.

29:55 So that’s why about a third of my time is pro bono because I’m spending a third of my year learning these over a year, 25 to 35 business models better than they know it because I make them give me weekly reports. And in some cases, daily reports. If I really think you’re shift-less and I got any chance because I want to make everybody successful. Okay, Brian, I can tell. You walked away from such and such.

30:23 You did such and such. Daily reports. You want daily reports after the scene, this? Yeah, daily reports, daily reports. You’ve got to whip me in shape, Dan.

30:34 Well, I think that that’s not for the audience that’s still here. Let me talk about the charming fellow that’s interviewing me. Even though you’re from San Diego. Yeah, but you’re from Los Angeles, right? Correct. No, East L.A., the bottom.

30:47 East L.A., okay, your surname is Pena. Pena. So you are a Mexican-American. Yes, correct. And you’re a long way from home.

30:55 You got that right. East L.A., I mean, you know, come on, this is East L.A., you know, this is, how old are you? You’re 70 next year. No, yeah, I’ll be 69 in a couple months, 70 next year. There’s a picture on my side that shows me standing out in front of my house, where my house used to be.

31:11 The picture was taken in 1993 in the body. You can see it’s the body when you look at the picture. And then there’s a picture of my wife and I standing in front of the castle, 2013, 20 years later. And then there’s a picture down in the left-hand corner because I just bungee jumped for the first time in New Zealand five weeks ago, six weeks ago. Okay.

31:31 And it’s a quantum leap. So, and then it says, picture’s worth a thousand words. And I hadn’t really thought about it until after I jumped and then somebody said, Dan, did you do that as a promotional? Because it’s a quantum leap. Yeah, and I said, that’s a great idea.

31:49 And so, but when we were there jumping, it was real windy and all the young guys, your age to 25, we’re all talking about jumping. It’s too windy, they said. So I look around and I’m the only guy that jumped all day. All day. And the kids say, are you, you know, are you all right?

32:07 And I don’t lie, but I had a lie on the form because I have a artificial hip, artificial shoulder. I got more things busted up than you can count. And although the only thing I don’t have is a bad heart and high blood pressure. Okay. So I fudged on it because they weren’t going to let me jump.

32:25 And so, and I jumped. How was it jumped? Oh, it was, it was, it was, I wasn’t nervous getting up to the jump. I wasn’t nervous until I hit the bottom and I heard the snap. Okay.

32:36 And then I looked up, I said, I hope the fuck this thing holds. And then these little skinny kids are pulling me up on a, on a winch, an automatic winch. And these kids, you know, it takes forever. Yeah. It took forever.

32:47 I jumped one time and it was, I bounced to the top. And when I came back up to the first bounce, I felt this kind of a zero G situation on that first bounce. That was a little freaky. Yeah. Yeah.

32:58 But it’s interesting. Do you know that you can pop your retinas out? On the way. Oh, they, with the acceleration. Correct.

33:03 Really snap and all these other things. 18 people died last year doing bungee jumps. Okay. You’re going to do it again? Yeah.

33:10 I’m going to go to the, one of my goals between now and I’m 70 is to go to the biggest bungee jump in the world. Okay. All right. Take me back to East LA. Where’s your accent by the way?

33:19 Your English is, you know, almost the Queen’s English. You have no Mexican accent. No. My, my parents try, my dad was a cop. My mother was a housewife.

33:29 My parents tried very, very hard. They didn’t speak Spanish at home because they wanted me to speak English. And even though my father spoke Japanese, French, Spanish, and English, my mother spoke Spanish, French, and English. But, so I learned speaking English. So that’s, that’s, I don’t have any accent.

33:48 How did you get out of East LA? When my dad and my mother, we moved from the barrio to a little better neighborhood. When I was taking the picture of my former home in the barrio, there was a drive-by shooting while I was taking the picture. Just a couple of blocks. 20 years ago.

34:07 20, 1993. Just a couple of blocks away. And of course the camera guys and everybody, you know, pee in their pants because of the noise. And I just told them it’s a backfire. You know, don’t worry about it.

34:19 Just keep taking it. Just keep rolling. Right. Keep rolling. And by my life change, when I went, I was pretty much a haphazard kid, got in a lot of trouble, got arrested four or five times, thrown in jail.

34:31 And this is with my dad. It’s a cop. Imagine this. I guess he didn’t like that very much. No, that’s an understatement.

34:37 But then I went, I volunteered for the draft in 1966 at the height of the Vietnam War. And I went to OCS and that changed my life because it was the really first real high performance thing that I could measure myself against other, with other people. And it was a boot camp. No. Well, I mean.

34:55 This is officer training. Officer candidate school is six months long. Okay. It went to the regular boot camp, which is four months. And then you go to officer school where they, in those days, they could still beat you.

35:05 If you got captured in doing maneuvers, they would put battery wires to your testicles. They would. Absolutely. It’s the Army. Correct.

35:15 Okay. It’s Army. And now even SEALs. And I have a lot of respect for Navy SEALs. They let you go home at the weekends now.

35:20 Yeah. Are you kidding me? Anyway. So why was officer training school important for you? Like you said, you could measure yourself.

35:27 I measured against other people that were striving to be high performance. Okay. Brought out the competitive side. Correct. Correct.

35:36 And where did that lead you? That led me to go. I got commissioned. Trump went to military school when he was kid. Trump was a real punk when he was a kid.

35:42 Correct. And his father sent him to a military. Correct. Okay. And really straightened him out.

35:47 Two thirds of all Fortune 500 CEOs have one thing in common. Military background. Really? Two thirds of those two thirds have something else, which you can probably relate to. Martial arts.

35:57 Really? What are you learning in martial arts, Brian? Discipline. Focus. Right?

36:03 Yes. I don’t need to write this book for you, right? No, but those are good. Okay. Okay.

36:09 So it changed my life and I came out and I originally thought I was going to be a regular army officer, but the Vietnam War was winding down and I knew that I wasn’t going to get to be a general quick. And speaking of generals, Tommy Franks, who the commander of Desert Storm one went to OCS same time I did. Okay. Okay. But he stayed in the military.

36:33 He stayed in the military. Do you ever regret not staying in the military? Sometimes when I say sarcastically tongue and cheek, sometimes I’m going to have an interview like this. You know, if I’d be a four star general, I could just tell you what I wanted to say and I’d have to answer questions. I’m being facetious now.

36:46 No. But dealing with some of the people that I’ve dealt with because I tell my staffs and I tell various companies that I’m involved in when I see mistakes. If we were at war, we’d all be dead. Do you understand what I’m saying? If we were at war because they think a little air, we’re dead.

37:07 I mean, if we were in the shuttle going to the moon, we’re history. I mean, we’re toast, you know, we’re dead, you know? And so I’m very exacting. I just earlier today, I had a conference call with my Asian key team, 13 or 14 people. And they think, well, I’m just a fat, I’m not fat, but a fat, old, rich chairman.

37:31 He’s probably not going to want to the day he after he lands from a 15 hour flight that turned into 17 and a half hours. He’s not going to want to have his weekly meeting. I was there, you know, checking the numbers. And as usual, I’m more prepared than anybody in my staff. I know the questions to ask that aren’t in the PowerPoint because, you know, they can tell you, show you the PowerPoint on the screen, even though I’m not there.

37:55 And I ask questions, I ask tough questions. So detail oriented that you were taught that by the military. Correct. There’s an astronaut named Christopher Hatfield. He’s actually a Canadian astronaut, but he spent a good amount of time up in space.

38:06 He’s got a book called An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth. Oh, I just saw that on the internet. Yeah, it’s good. I listened to the audio book, actually. And he talks about how, as an astronaut, you prepare for every single contingency.

38:19 You prepare for all the contingencies that never happen. And he was just saying how just being that prepared, you know, allows him to get through life, you know, in all these ways. I have another way of saying it. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. OK, yes.

38:31 And now do you have a lot of these phrases that you say earlier? Earlier, I said we had a guest on Silicon Real yesterday. She’s on the board of the London Stock Exchange. And she said, make decisions on imperfect information. That’s what she said.

38:42 But you had a different way of saying it. Yeah, the other way of saying that is perfection equals paralysis. OK, so you can never make a perfect decision. No, no. If you left it to engineers, no car would ever come off the assembly line.

38:57 No car would ever come off the assembly line. And I’ve been in business with enough engineers. I can attest to that with my hand on my heart. They’d still be trying to make it better. And the internet business is very much the same.

39:10 The internet kids want to test and test and test. And they want the landing page to be this. Roll it out. The great thing about the internet is your results are instantaneous. And you can make changes instantaneously.

39:23 Correct. I mean, if something that I’m overseeing at the Concord level, 60,000 feet, doesn’t work in two days, shit can it. Forget about it. Move on. And today at our meeting, now the young kids are, we ran it three days, sir, and we closed it down.

39:45 And they are thinking, I’m going to ask why. I said, no, that’s fine. Next, because without them making mistakes and without them being allowed to make the decision, they never get any better. And 95% of the time, I know probably better than they do, but we’re never going to be able to know everything unless they will never know everything, but unless they make mistakes and get comfortable with making mistakes. But most people, Jack Welch said to me a number of years ago, one of the two biggest problems in business, and he talks about this in the GE way, is one, lack of candor, meaning you can’t be honest with your employees and your employees aren’t honest with us or with management.

40:28 And the second thing is the bureaucracy of getting things done in a big company. When he took over as CEO about 25, 30 years ago, he went from 310,000 employees to 140,000 employees. They called him Nitron Jack. He killed all the employees off, but he left the buildings. Nitron bomb doesn’t destroy buildings.

40:48 And he also had a system that every third year, you roll out 20% of the bottom performers with new people. Interesting. The truth of the matter is he rolled out every other year 40% because there’s nothing wrong with trying to build a high-performance environment. Another one of my great influencers is Toyota, Toyota Automobile. He wrote a book called The Toyota Way, and he said constant, supervised stress.

41:19 Constant, supervised, actually I think he used the word organized stress. What does that mean? It means keep people accountable, just like Peter Sage says. Keep people, what gets measured gets accomplished. And I have signs in most of the business I’m involved in.

41:36 When you walk in the door, there’s a big thing about it, as big as that painting there. What gets measured gets accomplished. Right. Without measurement, you’re just fooling yourself. I’ve just recently had two Google employees in here sitting in that chair actually, and they have quarterly OKRs, which is like a very specific, quantifiable, accountable goal.

41:54 And if they don’t hit that, apparently you need to hit that like four in a row to be even considered for promotion. So that’s how they do it there. And they’re public, so the whole company can see how you’re doing, and you can see how everyone else is doing, including the CEO. Absolutely, I couldn’t agree with them all. What are your other big role models when it comes to public company CEOs or other like company managers, even today or in the past?

42:18 Well, one of my own mentees, who’s the CEO and chairman of Alcoa, Klaus Kleinfeld. OK. He was CEO of the 20th largest company in the world, Siemens. He came to me as a middle manager in 1997, 98. In 2005, he was promoted to CEO of Siemens.

42:39 And he’s a systems processes guy. He’s a smart guy, but, you know, I helped him to get more focused. He’s a great leadership guy. He says he came to speak at my seminar to celebrate my 20th anniversary a year ago this month at the castle. And he says that, you know, and I knew he has management, senior management meetings from his direct reports twice a week.

43:09 Tuesday and Friday. I have come from you. Yes. I have management, senior management Tuesday and Friday. OK.

43:18 And the reason it’s not Monday is because some of the people is focused over the weekend. So I give them a day to get caught up before we have. And I always make the management meetings at night. Do you know how popular it is to go to a management meeting on a Friday night? Yeah.

43:34 So you see who’s really dedicated? Correct. OK. Interesting. Let me let me ask you something.

43:39 Besides the business practices, is there other things that you teach at some of your seminars or the things that you hold yourself accountable, whether that comes to like exercise, mentality, meditation, everything? Or is that important to be successful in business? Absolutely. Exercise is critically important. I don’t meditate, but the number of my mentees do.

44:00 Why don’t you meditate, Dan? I’m pretty zened out without doing that. OK. You’re a pretty zen guy. Yeah.

44:10 No, no, not zen in the terms like the audience might think. OK. OK. But I’m high on life. OK.

44:17 OK. But I’m high on life. I always have been high on life. I’ve got a lot of energy. I have the same energy I have today as I did 30 years ago.

44:25 And so I have found a need to meditate. So you’re naturally a positive person. I’m 100% positive. OK. You know, the most contagious thing in the world isn’t a positive action.

44:37 It’s a negative thought. A negative thought. And because that can grow geometrically and kill people. That can grow geometrically and kill deals, kill even companies, for that matter. But I’m extremely positive.

44:53 I still believe the wall of China can be built without all the modern equipment. They say now, even with the modern equipment, the wall of China can’t be built. They say that pyramids can’t be built, even with modern equipment. I don’t believe that. And the great thing about working with young kids, they don’t believe it either.

45:12 If I tell them you can go do this, we just wrote in one of my newsletters a 23-year-old kid from Australia when it raised $100,000 in Australian Melbourne. No assets. No co-signatory. No guarantee. $100,000.

45:29 Kid doesn’t have a pot of piss in there or a window to throw it out of. OK, so he’s optimistic. No, I’m optimistic. And he came to the seminar in September. So you have a lot of young kids at your seminar.

45:40 Yeah, we have. But the last seminar was 18 to 52. OK. Now, let me just finish with your routine. Exercise is important for you.

45:47 I exercise at least six days a week. And I got up early. I exercise this morning. Most of the hotels don’t have good gyms. Yeah, I know.

45:59 I mean, some with greatest respect. Where I’m staying now, Pennsylvania geeks must go there. Well, you’re a weightlifter. Well, I used to be a big weight. But I’m still stronger than almost all the other 70-year-old guys that I know.

46:15 There’s a couple exceptions to that. But exercise, what you put in your body, food. I don’t drink very much. Once in a while, like last night, I had two glasses of red wine, which is an exception. At the seminar, drink more.

46:27 Because if I don’t drink at the seminar, nobody drinks. Right, because they’re all worried about what you’re going to drink. Correct. So I drink more. And I normally gain two or three pounds during that week, which takes me a month to get off.

46:38 It takes me a week to gain, but a month to get off. And I also don’t have much time to exercise during the seminar, because I’m spending all my, other than the 10 hours a day in the seminar, the extra five, six hours a day, I’m talking to you on special time, talking about your personal needs, your wants, your desires, telling you how I change your business model. I used to do an exercise. I don’t do it anymore. You give me your business model in 120 seconds, and I’ll tell you in 60 seconds whether it will work, if it can’t work, how to fix it, or whether the shit can’t.

47:11 Okay, that’s your specialty. Correct. But you probably charge a lot of money for that. Well, I do, I do, but I used to do it at the seminar, but I’m only writing 95% of the time. And so everybody thinks they’re the five.

47:24 They think they’re the 5%. So now I just work with them, and especially since we added the mentor program four or five years ago, where I mentor you for a year. They get that from you. Yeah, they get that from you. And is there anything, would you demand that your guys not only give you those progress reports when necessary, do you sometimes demand that they exercise?

47:41 Do you demand that they write their goals down or write a gratitude journal, or do you make them do other things? The report has got 15 items to fill out. One is how much daily exercise, how much time on your affirmations, how much time on your goals, how much time building a dream team, how much time on creating new contacts that are high-performance people that are outside the five average of the five bums that you hung around with before the seminar. And some of those people that aren’t are detrimental to you, unfortunately, are your family.

48:14 Because, you know, as a parent, we all love our kids, and we try to do our best, but we’re not trained to be a high-performance person, unless you’re a Rockefeller, unless you’re a Kennedy, which is instilled in you for generations. Parents don’t have any clue. The only benchmark that we use, did he go to Harvard? Did he go to Stanford? Did he go to Oxford?

48:34 But there’s a lot more benchmarks. Peter Sage is a good example. He didn’t go anyplace. Right. So you’re saying you should get rid of your parents’ potential?

48:42 No, no, no. But just remember, they can love you, but giving you business advice is a joke. Okay. Unless they fall into one of those categories I just mentioned. Right.

48:52 Talk to me about work-life balance. Is this something you instill in these guys? You’re talking about Friday night meetings. Do you say that people should take two of the seven days off? No.

49:01 Where does that come from for you? Is there any… No, no. I’ll put it like this. You’re a hard-nosed guy.

49:06 AOL said on a Bloomberg interview about two years ago, and he said the kids were saying, I forget what school he was at, but he was being interviewed, and he said, well, you know, I’m having trouble getting enough rest, and he jumped out of his chair and said, fucking rest. You can sleep when you’re 30. And he says, I want somebody that works 28 hours a day and bleeds through his eyeballs. And you agree with that mentality? Well, I don’t need the blood through his eyeballs, but…

49:35 But you think more work is better. No, more smart work is better. Okay. Most people make play at their work. Just because you might work 12 hours a day doesn’t mean you’re working 12 hours.

49:47 You’re staying busy 12 hours a day. Right, right. Usually the people that tell you they’re working 12 hours a day aren’t the ones that are working. Yeah. Usually the people that tell you how many hours a week.

49:55 I still work… I’m retired a 60-70 hour a week. Okay. 60-70. 60 to 70 hours a week.

50:01 Okay. Okay. And when my wife and I go on cruises, I only work probably three to five hours a day. I’m on the internet, and then I go by the pool or whatever. But the 60-70…

50:14 When I was your age, I worked 120 hours a week. Yeah. You’re trying to make me feel bad here. No, no. But you’re retired now too.

50:23 Let me ask you a question. Why live in Scotland? Why be in the UK? You could be… That’s a great question.

50:29 You could be on Central Park. You could be in San Francisco. I can see why you have the show now. That’s a great question. You know, Letterman.

50:34 Letterman is just… I could take his job. Absolutely. Okay. He’s zen.

50:39 He’s pretty zen. Yeah. He does the short form chit-chat. I don’t know if I could do it in six minutes. You could.

50:44 Eight minutes. When I retired the first time on my 39th birthday, because the day I went public and I got wealthy, ostensibly wealthy, it was my 39th birthday. Okay. It was also the day… That can ruin a lot of men if they had success that early.

50:56 Yeah, well, yeah. It tried to ruin me, but it didn’t succeed. The second thing is that the day we went public was the day that Mrs. Thatcher was privatizing Jaguar. Okay.

51:06 August 10, 1984. They said you can’t go heads up against the Jaguar privatization. I said that’s BS. So I went and I sold the shares in the city with the help of my brokers. And at the end of the day, the headlines the next morning said the one that really roared, great western resources, up 20%, Jaguar down 20%, with all the money, et cetera.

51:32 I went to Scotland because it’s the home of golf and I actually thought I could retire after that. Okay. I tried to retire, really, really retire three times. Okay. And I went to Scotland because it’s the home of golf.

51:42 I also thought that if we ever had a whole, a worldwide Holocaust, who’s going to come to Scotland? Okay. Oh, you mean like World War III? Correct. Okay, you’re far up north.

51:54 Who’s going to come to Scotland? And who wants to go to the Arctic? Yeah, well, and so, and I wanted to be in a castle on an island, not the kind of island I thought it was going to be because Britain’s an island, so. Right. As my wife would say, it’s on an island, Dan.

52:09 Singapore’s an island. Yeah, yeah. But you didn’t want to go back to the States. No, I left the States in 1981. Okay.

52:15 I’m an American in London, and I must say, I like being an American in the UK. And tell me if this is true about you. I find that I feel like just as much of a Londoner as the Queen in this city. And in a multicultural city like London, I think everyone who lives here is a Londoner. But as an American, I find here, I almost can get away with being the American.

52:36 And if I’m a little hard-talking or a little fast-talking or a little brash or a little bit like, what’s going on here, guys? I get away with it because they’re kind of like he’s the American, and that’s what Americans do. Correct. Do you find that that’s applicable to you? Yes.

52:48 It’s easier now to be an American than it was 35 years ago. What was it like when you went there? Well, I used to wear a bowler. Okay. I wore a bowler, and I carried a Brawley.

52:57 And this has been my uniform for a lot of years. British-inspired. Correct. And why were you assimilating? Well, I was taught by some very smart people a long, long time ago.

53:07 I used to be with the Onassis group. Konstantin Grazos, the CEO of Onassis, shipping, who was the right-hand man for 60 years of Aristotle and NASA. Onassis, right, the Greek shipping. Yeah. He says, Dan, just remember, dress British and think Yiddish.

53:23 I’ve never heard that. Yes. But I like that. What does that mean? That means, well, dress British.

53:28 Right. You know, not being braggadocious, but this is a Savile road suit. Right. Very formal. Yes.

53:35 And think Yiddish. Think in a canny manner. Think shrewdly. Right. I don’t think derogatory at all.

53:42 It’s actually a great compliment. Okay. And one thing about the Scots, the Scots are canny, shrewd people. Yeah. Very real.

53:50 Yeah. Yeah. They’re very real. Yeah. They’re almost the opposite of what you’d expect a British high society to be.

53:56 Yeah. They’re kind of the counterbalance. Correct. And that’s why the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. Right.

54:01 To keep them up. To keep them up. Or the Scots, as they were called, picks that they used to be called, from England because they were crazy. Okay. So you’ve always dressed like the Brit, but you have you embraced your role as the American over here?

54:13 Not so much now. I’m just I’ve been here so long. You know, it’s it’s a lot of people think that they asked what kind of name Pena. They can’t say Pena. What kind of name is Pena?

54:27 What kind of Scottish name is that? They think you’re Scottish. Yeah. Well, you look kind of you could be Scottish. Yeah, I could be, you know, I’m a light spirit skin blue eyed Hispanic.

54:35 So I mean, I can get away with it. Do you ever feel ties to, you know, your Latin roots? Did you ever have any, any desire to reconnect with that whole side of your heritage or not? From time to time I do. But no, my parents, my parents didn’t raise me like a Hispanic.

54:56 They thought rightly wrongly, I think correctly that I had a better chance at being successful in life. And they didn’t know what that meant. Success to my parents, especially my father, was to keep Dan alive till he reaches the age of reason. Now he wasn’t sure if that was going to be 20, 30 or ever. Did he state this goal to you?

55:14 Yes, he did. Wow. And you probably thought he was crazy. No, I got in a lot of trouble. I mean, I was arrested a few times.

55:22 Mostly my arrests were alcohol driven. Okay. Alcohol driven. Dan gets drunk and does some crazy stuff. Yeah.

55:29 Or induce other people to do crazy stuff. Okay. So I guess. Gang leader. Yes.

55:35 I guess I’ve had these latent leadership qualities even as a kid. And then, you know, he saw, he lived to see me be successful. He didn’t understand what I did. And the only thing he ever asked me, I got a big award in 1981, ostensibly the most successful Hispanic in the United States from the Latin Business Association. And he said, just tell me it’s not drugs.

56:00 What did you tell him? And I said, dad, it’s not. It’s probably a very good question in 1981. Yeah, he says, it’s oil. He says, you know, he said, selling cans of pencil, Dan, you don’t get this kind of money.

56:14 So that’s all he knew is pens oil. Okay. And I said, well, now it’s legit. I pay taxes even, dad. He said, okay.

56:21 You know, we were talking earlier in the kitchen, you know, I was saying like the oil business in the, you know, 60s and 70s was much like Wall Street later became in the 80s and 90s. And now what I think, you know, tech startup is today, as in that’s where the speculators go. What do they call a speculator oil man? What do they call them? I thought it was that word.

56:38 Wildcatters. Yeah, wildcatters. And that’s where the guys go for the big payoffs and the big risks. Correct. And you were in that business.

56:44 Correct. Yes, I was. When you see the young tech guys today, you see the guys at Silicon Roundabout here, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, is there stuff that you can see similarities? Oh, absolutely. The wildcatting that you were involved in.

56:54 Absolutely. And the, but now there’s more people in the tech business, the internet, than there was in the oil business. Although oil is back at 110 or whatever, it is a barrel. And so it’s had a resurgence the last few years. But in the oil business, just like in coal mining, which I was also in their mining, you got to get your hands dirty.

57:15 Right. And most of the kids don’t want to get their hands dirty. Okay. They want to hide behind a computer or computers and trying to generate money. And we all dream to be, I don’t dream, but they all dream to be at Zuckerberg or Instagram or one of these guys.

57:32 And it’s possible, but there’s only been maybe 15, 20 guys out of the 10 million that are in the business. Right. Yeah, we celebrate the super success. Correct. And that’s great.

57:43 Yeah, it is great, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s like now, you know, we’ve talked a lot about, and I don’t know if you’re going to get around to the $50 billion that I created for my mentees. I was waiting for you to bring that up. Okay. For my mentees in the last 20 years.

57:59 But I take just as much pride, the $50 billion that my mentees have created in equity and value in the last 20 years is my $450 million with $820 bucks. Now, the reason I say that is because I’ve had to take thousands across the goal line. I just saw Forrest come for about the 15th or 20th time. It’s a great movie. And…

58:22 Robin Wright is in that movie. Okay. You remember how he’s carrying all these people, and that’s how he got the Medal of Honor, carrying them? Yeah, I know what he was doing. Well, I know what carrying people is.

58:31 Okay. I mean, I’ve carried countless, more than you can ever imagine. Have you ever thrown anyone out of your seminars in Scotland? Have you ever just said this is not going to work? Just one. One guy.

58:41 One guy about in the late 90s. One guy… Bad attitude. No, he had only paid all the money because he was smitten, infatuated, with a lady lawyer who came there. So he just paid to be around her.

58:55 He thought… I don’t know what he thought. I’m sure we all know what he was thinking. Up there a week, alone, drinking, you know. And I threw him out.

59:04 But other than that, I have never thrown anybody out. Okay, so back to what you’re saying. Carrying people across the goal line. The goal line, it gives me great satisfaction. And people say, why did it take you 20 years to create?

59:14 Well, because 50 billion dollars is a lot of money. But I mean, it only took me eight years to do the 450 million. Because I’m having a deal with thousands of people. And the… But my success rate grew geometrically when I started the Mentor Program.

59:33 Why is that, do you think? Because I’m one-on-one beating you, with the greatest respect. At least weekly. And in your case, you’d be a daily guy. Oh, man.

59:43 A daily… Now, just imagine listing everything you goddamn do from the time you get up in the morning to go to sleep. And you can probably tell if I’m lying, right? Absolutely. And if I think you’re lying, I call you.

59:54 I don’t Skype you, I just call you and you better pick up the goddamn phone. Now, this isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. And I realize that. Because when you talk or you hear people talk about being a one percenter, that’s not my goal. For my people.

1:00:08 It’s one-tenth of a percent. Let’s just say we’ve got seven billion people on the earth. It’s actually more, but let’s call it seven billion. One-tenth of a percent is seven million. My market is the seven million.

1:00:20 To make you one of the richest seven million people on the planet. Which means you’re not making $400,000 a year, which would make you a one percenter. It means you’re making multiple millions of dollars a year. I had an email. It’s part of the e-book that I just wrote.

1:00:37 A guy over Christmas is my Christmas present. He says, Dan, I know you’re going to use this in your next book. But I put $50 million cash in the bank. I mentored him for five, six years straight, then he went up on his own. $50, $60 million in the bank.

1:00:52 Cash, not deals. I had another email during the seminar, and I read it to the kids. Since 2010, when I went to the seminar, I made $200 million. And this guy couldn’t give, with greatest respect, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this guy couldn’t give away ice to an Eskimo. And you straightened him out.

1:01:12 Yeah. He doesn’t love me. But I’m not here for their love. 20 years from now, all I want is their respect. Why are you doing this?

1:01:22 I mean, you stop doing business to your own, and you’re mentoring these people. That could be the evolution of you. You’re giving back a little bit, as opposed to being completely self-centered in the generation. No, giving back a lot. Not a little bit, a lot.

1:01:35 A lot. Why do it? Do you ever look at the look at why you do it? Yeah, sure I do, and I get asked all the time. The media and I just came from, in the city.

1:01:41 The guys, when they’re walking me to the lift, which the Brits still do. They’re walking to the lift. Yeah. And he says, why, Dan? I’ll walk you to the lift.

1:01:48 Okay, yeah. Well, you gotta go and come get me out of the street, because I went to the wrong building. I was being British, too. Okay, yeah. And I said, because, you know, I can’t say that this was my goal when I started.

1:01:59 But in the last 10, 12 years, it’s evolved. It’s morphed. I’ve pivoted, because now I’ve found a way to make it even more successful. And nobody likes success more than I do. And I get off.

1:02:12 I’ve got a guy that had one O-level in carpentry. You know what an O-level is? No. An O-level is you’re 16 years old, you don’t go to school, on to school, and you take O-levels for ordinary grades. One guy with an O-level, we did a $400 million public to private deal here in London.

1:02:28 One O-level. Public to private, $400 million. Nobody on the planet can do that. Or nobody has done it, I should say. And the guy had one O-level.

1:02:42 All right, so you take pride in your mental health. Oh, I mean, I do. And I beat him like a rented mule. Okay. But see, I’m like Tom Landry, the coach, former coach of the…

1:02:52 Cowboys. Yeah, Cowboys. I do what you know, what you don’t want to do, but that you know that you got to do to be where you want to be. So you’re the hard ass? I’m the Vince Lombardi.

1:03:05 And I’d have to contact you every day, Dan? By email. Really? Yeah. And what would you tell me after, say, a week of my progress in Portland?

1:03:12 Well, maybe after one day. Okay. After one day, I email you back. Or I might tweet you. And I’ll say, Brian…

1:03:22 In all caps. Yeah, okay. Brian, what are you smoking? And I said, do you actually want me to… I don’t smoke.

1:03:28 I don’t smoke. No, no, but you know what I mean. Do you actually want me to believe this is true? I said, if I get another one of these, well, there’s only going to be one more of these. And then, since I’m interviewing you for free, I got nothing to lose.

1:03:48 Because… And I don’t mean to… This sounds really rough to some of the kids that are watching this. Nobody that I mentor is going to change my life. Right.

1:03:57 Zero. But I can change their lives. And every single person of the… We figure I’ve touched a minimum of 250,000 people. Maybe much as a million.

1:04:09 If you just count… Videos or people who know people. Yeah, but if you just count traffic on my website. 250,000 to 300,000 people. That’s a minimum because we subtracted for people that…

1:04:20 On the site more than once and done all that stuff. All the permutations and the Google Analytics. So a quarter of a million people… And I’ve got people that said, you helped me make 50 grand. I have people that say, you helped me make 10 grand.

1:04:33 And I have so many… Half a million. A million. Five million. Twenty-five million.

1:04:38 Fifty million. Six hundred million. A billion. Twelve billion. Okay, all right.

1:04:44 We understand. So you’re successful at this. Yes, I am. When are you going to want to stop doing this? You’re turning 70 next year.

1:04:51 Is this something that’s in your DNA that you feel really good? You have human contact with people. You’re always constantly trying to solve problems. You have a scorecard in the net worth you generate. Are you slowing down?

1:05:03 No. Are you going to change things up at all? No, no. Are you ever going to go back and put something on yourself again? I know you get involved with businesses here and there.

1:05:10 Do you miss? Probably not. This is more fun. I don’t know whether to shit or go blind. What does that mean?

1:05:17 That’s an oil field term. It means that it’s happiness. Okay. I really enjoy it. One of the reasons that I’m as lucid as I am is when you’ve got to keep track of 20, 30 models and understand them.

1:05:32 Now, most coaches, life coaches in my judgment, don’t understand. They know the platitudes. They don’t know really about Brian. They don’t know what you really tick. They don’t know you are the way you are because your mother did this or your sister did that.

1:05:48 Your dad always had a favorite and it wasn’t you. They’re not interested in all that crap. It’s not crap. It’s part of your emotional bank account. Do you delve into that stuff?

1:05:56 Absolutely. Oh, you do. Because there’s a reason why you do the things you do. Definitely. And we, as we discussed somebody earlier about self-sabotaging activities, you know, it’s why the former CEO of Dunlap about 15, 20 years ago, who was at the top of his game, he got ousted because he promoted some girl from human resources up to such and such and he wound up that he almost made it public that he was sleeping with her.

1:06:24 Now, why would a guy at the top of his game do something so stupid? See it a lot. Yeah. A lot of people don’t believe they deserve to be there. Right.

1:06:33 You must come across those people all the time. What do you do with that? Okay. I convince them and we have these drills. Why you belong there?

1:06:44 A lot of people that come there, you know, with money that have made money think they made it by accident. Right. I just had one of my superstars who’s made 100 million bucks tell me in the last week, you know, I’m not sure I’m going to have another lucky accident. It’s the first time he ever said that to me. Okay.

1:07:01 I mean, my neck almost went around like in the exorcist. And I said, you did it. I mean, you know, you tried a lot of things. Tom, I said this and I wouldn’t have done it 10,000 times. Okay.

1:07:13 I would have hired an engineer from MIT to do it. But I mean, I’ve tried a lot of things. Nobody’s failed at more things than I have. And the first 100 million are successes, but I could write a book about failures that would be like Churchill’s volumes, the history of World War II. I mean, because I’ve tried a lot of different things because failure is just testing.

1:07:33 And one of the reasons I’ve been so successful in generating this equity and value in my kids, and I call you all kids, is because I convinced him that making a mistake is okay. Our parents tell, your parents probably told you, you can be anything you want. They did. That’s bullshit. It’s a very American thing.

1:07:51 Yeah, but you can’t. That’s horseshit. You can’t. If it’s all juxtaposed, Obama is a great example of the juxtaposition of life. Okay.

1:08:04 Okay. I don’t agree with his politics, but I admire his bodacious goals, audacious goals, excuse me, audacious goals. God bless him for that. Or all of whoever you want to bless him with. Right.

1:08:15 And the, but you can’t be. You can be anything you want. You can be president and not have gone to an Ivy League school. Not likely. Okay.

1:08:25 You can be prime minister and not gone to one of, you know, Oxford, Cambridge university Edinburgh. Not likely. So, but what you tell them is that you can do anything you want that you have passion for because that eliminates most of the crap because most people don’t follow their dream. You know, like they say in the sound of music, you can’t have a dream come true unless you have a dream. Now I still dream.

1:08:50 I dream in technicolor. My affirmations and goals every single night, or at least five nights a week when I’m on the plane, 15 hour flight and do it on the plane. But I have done it on the plane. Is this like 10 goals and 10 affirmations? No, I have seven, no, 19, no, 20 affirmations, 17 goals.

1:09:08 And these are constant or you’re right. No, they change. They vary. Affirmations are things you believe about yourself. Can you, can you give me two or three of them?

1:09:15 I feel great being 200 pounds like I was when I was 43. You look great. Yeah, thank you. I’m only 10, so I’d like to lose another 10 pounds. But if I never lost another 10 pounds, it’s not the end of the world, okay?

1:09:26 But me striving to not gain weight keeps me where I am. Okay, affirmation. I feel comfortable living, comfortable, excited, and privileged living in a penthouse in Trump Towers, okay? Of course, I’d go to Trump Towers. I’d look at him.

1:09:48 I’d smell him. I’m not saying that now, but that’s what I used to do. I’ve been driving Rolls Royce since I’m 26 years old. And you affirm that that’s okay. That’s all right.

1:10:00 That’s all right, yeah. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. That’s why we’re only after the small percentage of the people. Plus, I normally save this for the last, like sex. It all comes at the end, but I’m going to tell you now.

1:10:12 Okay. Well, I’m thinking about it. It’s bloody hard to be a high-performance person, because I want to make sure I look into the camera. Are they all looking at me? They’re all looking at me.

1:10:24 Okay. It’s bloody hard. And any person that tells you any different is full of shit. And they haven’t been successful, because except for a few exceptions, like Tony and a couple other guys, they’ve all made their money. Tony Robbins.

1:10:41 Yes, Tony Robbins. Putting assholes on seminar seats, selling books, and CDs. This is your competition you’re saying? There is no competition. Yeah, there’s no competition.

1:10:52 Okay. These are fellow, these are the life coach industry. I’m sure you hate that industry. Yeah, I know. Personal development, high performance, whatever they call them.

1:10:59 Right. That’s what they tell you. But it’s not, you know, Tony has helped millions, probably millions. I don’t know. Last time I checked, he had touched two or three million people.

1:11:07 God bless him. Yeah. But if you can find one of these coaches that has taken zero and turned it into $100 million, I’ll jump off the top of this building without a parachute. Okay, so your track record speaks for itself. Correct.

1:11:22 And people have to understand it’s hard work. It’s bloody hard work. You tell people all the time, you try to give them reasons to stop listening to you, to stop subscribing to you. Unsubscribe to my newsletters, unsubscribe to my e-book. In fact, Brian, from a marketing point of view, I stopped selling my product a while back because I found out it’s for free on torrent.

1:11:41 I didn’t even know what torrent was a couple of years ago. Okay, okay. And I said, fine, I beg you, get it from torrent. Don’t bother me. Because you didn’t want to sell it anymore.

1:11:48 No, I don’t care. I only got product in the 90s, middle 90s, because somebody said we needed it. You’re going to increase your track record for success, which was true. But I didn’t know it was going to all be free 10 years later. So now people call me if you want a real crisp copy of the book like I just gave you, I still sell it to you.

1:12:08 But I also tell you that I have tons of free content on my website. I’ve got enough free content to last you a year, studying every day like a master’s degree. But if you really want, and maybe that’ll make you a millionaire if you’re not, it’ll make you a few bucks, but if you really want baptism by fire, you figure out the scratch credit cards together, whatever you have to do to get to the council seminar. I also have a student plan for young kids, and I’ve got some other stuff.

1:12:42 Let me ask you a question. You know we’re very zen here on this show, and we talk a lot about it. I’m here anyway. Yeah, you’re here anyways, exactly. We like to shake it up here and try some different things.

1:12:52 What if I said to you, OK, this guy is going to be ultra successful. He’s going to make a billion dollars. What if I said, Dan, why does it matter what he makes? It doesn’t matter. Or my question is, to you, that is the ultimate metric of success.

1:13:05 No, no. Money’s not the only thing in life, but it’s the only thing anybody keeps track of. It’s measurable account since the pharaohs, size of the pyramids, et cetera. It’s a metric you can keep track of. I wouldn’t say it’s the only thing people can.

1:13:21 No, no, it’s the only thing that you write down. You know, I keep track of the lives I change now. That’s a new metric for me. OK, that’s a good metric. I like that.

1:13:29 OK, I hadn’t really thought about it. Whether it’s zen or not, it probably is zen. It is a little more zen, yes. But don’t give me too much credit for zen more than I deserve. But it’s not for everybody.

1:13:40 But what I give you, Brian, is the ability to have more choices. I have more. I’m just assuming I have more money than you. So I’m going to say that I have a lot more choices than you do. Because you have more money than me.

1:13:53 Correct. And I can do, I support three orphanages. I support 160 girls my wife and I adopted. We support 25 nuns, a few priests. We support the prevention of accruity to animals.

1:14:07 We support all kinds of stuff because I have more choices in life. I take four or five months a year traveling with my lovely wife because we can make more choices. Because we have been successful. I’ve worked over 40 years. She’s almost worked 30 years.

1:14:20 Do you ever think your money can hinder you in some way? No, no, no. If you work hard at it, no. People that don’t work like the young kid, Beaver, Justin Beaver, whatever his name is, he’s getting in all the trouble. Yeah.

1:14:31 OK. He’s young. Yeah. But anyway. If you had that much money at 21, Lord knows what you’ve been doing without the military.

1:14:38 But what he needs is to go to a real boot camp, that kid. Do you ever see guys that come to you and that their success or their obsession with financial success is really plugging in an emotional hole that they should find some other way to sort out? No question about it. Really? No question about it.

1:14:55 And so we’re not always successful. We’re successful most of the time. But we try to make them understand why they’ve got that emotional hole.

1:15:11 And when we have the private time, you bring in husband and wife. I talk to the husband separately and the wife separately. The husband thinks that everything’s Jake, meaning everything’s cool. Right. OK?

1:15:22 The wife says, I’m going to leave him next month. And he has no idea. What a dipshit. You know? OK.

1:15:26 Of course, guys aren’t that smart about stuff like that anyway. So and he thinks I love the business. I hate the business. I hate going to the office every day. I hate him going to.

1:15:37 And now I hate him going to the office every day. And you have to be in touch. And again, it’s communication. In touch, not just your feelings like in a zen, but you have to be in touch with other people’s attitudes. And a lot of very successful entrepreneurs drive like Vince Lombardi or General Patton.

1:15:56 But they’re not in touch with the 10,000 people they have or the 30 people they have. Because they have different desires, different ones. But when we have, in my company’s interviewing process, we have a corporate video that we put out. It’s not on YouTube. We have a corporate video that has some of the people that I’ve trained with some very successful people.

1:16:15 And there’s one theme across. And I’m just going to give one example. Ted Turner just gave his 75th anniversary party on CNN a few months ago. And he makes a couple of comments. And he says, number one, and I’m not suggesting this for everybody.

1:16:32 It’s how I lived, though. First 10 years of starting CNN, I slept on my couch. I didn’t have an apartment. Bill Gates slept in the office. Steve Jobs slept in the office.

1:16:46 And I can go down a whole list. Now, these are super successful, mega wealthy guys. I slept in my office. Not everybody’s willing to make that sacrifice. But it’s not the only thing.

1:17:02 But even if you don’t sleep in your office, if you want to send your kids to a better school, if you want to be able to take care of your mother when she gets dementia, if you want to do this, this all takes money. Not Zen. I never paid a bill with Zen. I never heard anybody paying a bill with Zen. But I would argue that once you have enough money to live or live reasonably well, that that extra $10, $20, $100 billion doesn’t necessarily get you incrementally happier.

1:17:32 No, but it can make somebody else incrementally happier because you give it away. My children aren’t getting any of my money when I die. Good. I like that very Warren Buffett. OK.

1:17:42 One centavo, not one penny. And two of my kids are cool with it. One of them is not so cool with it. But I’m not going to, I think Andrew Carnegie, by the way, Andrew Carnegie, arguably the richest, most successful entrepreneur of all time, comes from Dunfermott, Scotland, just down the road from a castle. He said the best thing that you can have for a child is him to be born into poverty.

1:18:13 And I agree. You do agree. Absolutely. Yeah, I’ve heard that from a few people. We had the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on here recently, and he said the same thing.

1:18:21 He said, immigrant parents come to America. They make it all really well. And then they spoil their kids, and they miss the immigrant experience. Correct. I see what you mean by that.

1:18:30 My mother, forgive me, mom, swam, as legend has it, swam across the Rio Grande River from Mexico to Texas. She was born in Mexico. My dad was born in the United States. So right now, I’m trying to get a Mexican passport, because my mom was born there. It’s not so easy.

1:18:46 OK. Interesting. Let me ask you another question. First of all, thank you for your persistence for contacting me and coming on the show. I appreciate that.

1:18:55 I always learn things from people that come here. With the castle and your lifestyle, do you ever think, and the money, do you ever think, in a weird way, it’s a buffer from you, from dealing with the harsh reality? What if we took all that away from you and you had to start again in Manhattan somewhere and build yourself back up? I’d be richer the second time around than the first. Do you think, you know, you said you have to struggle in order to learn.

1:19:21 You have to go through tough times in order to learn. Do you ever think to yourself and look in the mirror, and when you’re in your castle, and you’re like, you know what, I need to get rid of all this stuff. I need people to meet me and not know that I’m, you know, a dampena of the castle in my CV. And I need people to tell me straight and be like, who the hell is this guy? And I have to start over again.

1:19:38 Do you ever think that that would be the ultimate challenges for you? No, but I’ve got a better challenge. Bringing 25,000 people across the goal line that should be living in a homeless shelter is much more satisfying than that. No, and I agree with that. I just wondered if that ever comes to your mind.

1:19:56 No, not at all. Plus, I don’t have a castle on my forehead, you know, and when I was on the plane yesterday, sitting in my jeans in a… I can’t picture you as a… Yeah, jeans and a shirt. Nobody knew who I was, and that’s just fine.

1:20:17 But I enjoy nice things. I always have. And my wife, who’s also from a poverty background, who lived in a caravan, a little caravan, when she was little. That’s a trailer in Britain, basically. Yeah, that’s a trailer in Britain.

1:20:35 Walk me through what you did when you went to those luxury homes and looked at them, and you went to the Rolls-Royce dealerships. If some people are listening around the world, is that something that you would recommend? You said something like, get yourself ready for success? Yeah, no, practice within when you’re without. That’s one of my five Fritos.

1:20:52 Practice being successful. How many people listening to this today practice being successful today? What does it mean to practice being successful? Okay, okay. It’s through affirmations, through going to the Rolls-Royce dealer, maybe Lamborghini, maybe something else.

1:21:09 In my particular case, it was Rolls-Royce. And within a year of me going to the Rolls-Royce dealer, I had a Rolls, okay? Within 19 months of me, dreaming and adding it to my goal as a castle on an island, I own Guthrie Castle. 19 months. 19 months.

1:21:28 Okay. Okay. So how can people practice being successful? Affirmations, visualized. Go shop for these things.

1:21:37 Go to stores you can’t afford. Okay. Go hire lawyers you can’t afford. Go hire them. Oh no, I’m gonna use them.

1:21:46 Okay, use it. Lawyers will meet with anybody. Accounts will meet with anybody. Go to the big four accountants with a business idea. The first couple of meetings are for free.

1:21:58 Jettison probably a lot of the people you’re gonna hang around with. If you have poor public speaking skills, join Toastmasters. Right, is that still around? Yep. Okay.

1:22:11 Join improv. I’ve got a few people that do improv. You ever do improv? You ever do comedy stand up? No.

1:22:17 Okay, I hear that’s really good as well. Yeah. But I mean, Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

1:22:22 You know Joe? No, but I couldn’t believe it. Is this the same guy? I mean, when I was looking at your site. Yeah.

1:22:28 Yeah, yeah, he’s comedy. Yeah, I know he is. Yeah, yeah. Do these. If you went to a good school and you’re not successful, go to the alumni deals.

1:22:39 Okay. I didn’t go to a good school. I’m a perfect living example that a lot of trouble as a kid, working class background, my parents, went to just a mediocre university that I flunked out of three times before I finally graduated with honors, and had no money to begin with, $820. You know, it was no money, but $820. So it’s all possible.

1:23:06 But I, you know, I devoted myself to feeling successful. I was wearing suits like this before I could afford them. How’d you get them? Credit cards. Right.

1:23:17 So as they say in Hollywood, act as if. Correct. In a way, okay. Correct. Right, right, okay.

1:23:23 You know, I’m gonna hit you with a few questions here. And I think you know what they are, but I’m gonna hit you with them anyways. If you could pick up the phone and make a phone call to the 20 year old, Dan Pena, that’s almost 50 years ago, right? 64, 63, something like that. What advice would you give that young man?

1:23:40 It’s the same advice that I give and the best advice that I got. Just fucking do it.

1:23:51 That’s it. Do it. It’s like the Nike slogan. Correct. Except with the bad word.

1:23:55 With the bad word in there. Okay. On that same note, what is the best advice you’ve ever received? And who gave it to you? I know you got some mentors like Grazos, like Jim Newman, like Jerry Ormond.

1:24:06 Correct. What’s the kind of advice that they give? Well, the best, it came, Costa Grazos, the CEO of Onassis Shipping Group, boyhood friend for Air National for 60 years. He said it more articulately. He said, Mr. Pena, most people procrastinate because they’re unsure.

1:24:26 So just do it. He said the same thing. But I’ve never had a problem just doing it. Because one of the things you learn as a young combat interview officer is, time costs lives. Fred Smith, who I like a lot, who’s a similarly trained officer like I was, who was a Marine officer, he said, when I got back out of school, I think he went to Yale, but he’s from a very uppity background from Tennessee, one of the Southern states.

1:24:55 He said, when I learned that mistakes weren’t causing arms and legs and life and death, making decisions was easy, similar for me. We overanalyze because we’re unsure. We’re not overanalyzed. We don’t overanalyze because we are not sure if it’ll work or not. We’re more worried about on the emotional side it embarrassing us.

1:25:22 And many of the Asian cultures, I mean, carry that to the 10th degree, losing face. Putting the family name and dishonor. Correct, correct. Do you have a lot of Asian people to come to you? Yeah, we have Chinese, Indian, Malaysian, yeah.

1:25:38 And do you have to approach them differently because they have their own cultural background? I treat everybody the same with disrespect. And advice from Jim Newman, advice from Jerry Ormond, anything that comes to mind? Yeah, well, Jim Newman wrote a great book. It’s out of print, Release Your Breaks because I was fortunate enough in 1976 to meet him.

1:26:02 I went to a seminar. I went to Dennis Waitley because a psychology of winning. And I said, who taught you this stuff? He said, well, my mentor is Jim Newman. So I went to the horse’s mouth.

1:26:12 Then I went to Newman. And his analogy was, are you old enough to have driven a car that had emergency brakes that don’t automatically go off when you put it in drive? You’re probably too young. No, I remember that. You had a fully emergency brake.

1:26:25 Just imagine you drove your car through life with the emergency brake on. It’s bad for the transmission. It’s bad for the tires. It’s bad for the universal. It’s bad for everything.

1:26:34 Right, and you never really. Then you take, oh, geez, the emergency brake’s on. Then you release the brake. What happens? Whew, surge ahead, right?

1:26:44 Yeah. Most of us go through life with our emergency brakes on. And that was easy for me to adopt. And as Jim told me, I still remember in this house, he says, Dan, this will be easy for you because you have high self-esteem. Most of us, and he was talking about himself as well.

1:27:05 And he came out of IBM with Ross Perot. That’s his contemporary. And he says, most of us keep the emergency brake on because we want a reason not to test ourselves. But once I get you to release your emergency brake, Brian, then you’ll be carrying it over the whole life. Now I’m standing near Zen.

1:27:27 Yeah, you think the Zen is hurting me, potentially? No, no, no, it’s where you’re supposed to be today. The journey. As I say in my, I wrote that e-book before. You asked me to be on this show.

1:27:39 And I said, when I look back at the 20 years, actually the 40 years of my career, but the 20 years I wouldn’t give it up. And one of the reasons that I wouldn’t give it up the 20 years is not just the council’s lives that I’ve changed, but because it keeps me sharp. I have to talk to tongue in cheek, people that’s smarter than you come to the castle seminar and they keep me on my toes. Now it’s not too often that I get caught with a conundrum I can’t figure out, but it does happen.

1:28:08 We’ve had people as high as 170 IQ on the show and as low as 90. Okay. We give you a test. Take it on my site, a success test. It’s only got a 95% accuracy whether you can make it or not.

1:28:23 It’s only 16 questions. What is that, danpena.com? Correct, danpena.com. And then if you really want to back it up, there’s a pessimism test and an optimism test. I’ve heard about these tests.

1:28:31 Okay, and I’d like to say that I was smart enough to write the test, but I didn’t. I borrowed them and it’s acknowledged from two doctors from Boston College. But it’s got, I mean, you will see if you’re optimistic, you will see if you’re pessimistic. And more importantly, those 16 questions are ball breakers. I mean, they’re not as easy as they sound, but if you answer them correctly, a perfect score is minus three.

1:28:57 And we send them by computer, we send it back to you. Okay, I might take that test. Okay, take it. I will, I will. Okay, let me know.

1:29:04 I’ll know what your score is anyway. You’ll see, right? Because I get the big print out and I say, don’t, don’t, don’t. And you can call me up any time. And I’ll say, you need the daily reports, Brian.

1:29:13 Do you ever have someone that comes to you and they come to you one of your seminars and then the week after you’re like, I don’t know how I’m going to help this guy. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to have to go back to the drawing board. I’m going to have to get really creative to try to find some way to motivate this guy. No?

1:29:27 No. Okay. No. Because I have you fill out paperwork like this before you come to the seminar. So you know all about them.

1:29:34 I know more just reading the, I asked questions about your business that you haven’t even thought of. I believe you. You know, I’ve been involved. I stopped counting at 700, over 700 deals. I stopped counting at 700, 75,000 business decisions.

1:29:56 Stop counting. There’s, you know, once in a while, there may be a derivation of something that I don’t know, but it’s so infrequent. You’ve seen most things. Last part of that question is to the 20 year old listening to us in China or in Australia or in South America, what advice do you give to them? What should they do?

1:30:19 You know, if they want to change their game up and get their act together and become one of these elite entrepreneurs that you speak to. Follow your dream. I mean, Steve Jobs said it in his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. I’m gonna not say it as articulately. Another college dropout.

1:30:35 I went to college a grand total of, I think, three weeks. He said, unless you’re passionate about it, it gets old quickly. That’s true. Yeah, i.e. you’re here.

1:30:47 Yeah. Okay, okay. And so follow your dream and don’t listen to conventional wisdom, no matter what they say, because conventional wisdom is almost always wrong. Almost always wrong. I can go back, the world is flat.

1:31:02 There’s all kinds of, you know, we can’t fly, fix wings. We can’t go to the moon. I can go on and on and on. To current day, when I started here, and the only reason I never published my numbers of how successful we’ve been getting kids to generate money is because they’re awestruck. I mean, I could have said 18 million a long time ago.

1:31:30 I could have said 25 billion, excuse me. But, you know, I’m getting towards the end of my career. So I’ll publish it because I can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. See, everybody wants riches, but not all of them want fame. So there’s certain people I can’t talk about.

1:31:47 And there’s certain people like Klaus Klinefeld, who’s the CEO and chairman of Alcoa, I can’t talk about. But I have people that I can’t talk about that have made, I have the records, you know, to prove, but they don’t want that. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t pay taxes. Yeah, I won’t even go there. Yeah, the last thing I wanna ask you is for these 20-year-olds that are listening to us around the world, how do they find a mentor?

1:32:11 How can someone find a mentor and then get a mentor? Okay, you need to have three things, at least three things that you need to keep in your head. You want somebody you personally like a lot, okay? You want somebody that, you have something in common. Jerry Orman was golf for me.

1:32:30 Jim Newman was tennis. Costa Grazos was good food and wine, okay? So you can, so it’s not just all work, it’s not all just, and the lastly, you want somebody that is geographically desirable, although my mentors weren’t geographically desirable. Because you wanna be able to spend time, can I buy a lunch brine? Can we play some tennis?

1:32:54 Can we go pump iron? Can we do this, you know? Those are the things. But they wanna be, and this is the most important, whether they like you or not, they’ve gotta be where you wanna be. Not some math teacher, unless you wanna be a math professor, not some math teacher that you like, blah, blah, blah.

1:33:14 He’s gotta be where you wanna be. Okay. Full stop period. If he’s not where you wanna be, then how is he gonna mentor you? Even martial arts, I mean, all these guys have coaches.

1:33:30 All the athletes have coaches. Bill Gates’ mentor is Warren Buffet. Okay, why do these guys have mentors and coaches? Because it’s how you stay sharp. I’m privileged, I stay sharp because I’m coaching and mentoring so many people, so many different business models, and that’s why I know the internet business so well.

1:33:50 Because in the last 10 years, we’ve had a lot of internet gurus come through, and I’ve had to come out of the bricks and mortar world, and we’ve generated a lot of success, and I’m proud as hell about that. Fantastic. I think it’s important to select the right mentor. I think you probably have to push yourself when you choose a mentor. Outside your comfort zone.

1:34:10 Yeah, exactly. Because you gotta choose someone that you know is gonna be hard on you, and that knows is gonna probably criticize you and your decisions, but you gotta choose him over not the math teacher, but maybe someone who’s gonna be a little kind. Tough love. Tough love, that’s what you’re all about, Dan. People can find you at danpana.com or D-A-N-P-E-N-A.com.

1:34:28 On Twitter, you’re Dan at Dan S. Pana, correct? Expect all caps from you, right? Yep, in red. In red, on the emails.

1:34:37 You can’t do red on LinkedIn, though. There’s no colors, or at least I don’t know how to do it. I don’t think you can do it on Twitter, either, colors. No, or Facebook. Okay, but you can do caps.

1:34:48 Right. Do you have something to set on your email so it’s always red in caps? Yeah, yeah, it is. But I’m always capped. Sometimes I’ll hit the wrong button and it’ll go, half a sentence will be in caps and half a sentence won’t, then I’ll notice it, then I’ll, rather than go back and change it, I’ll just start in caps again.

1:35:06 That means nothing, like, it’s not because this part is supposed to be intense and this part’s not supposed to be intense. It’s not because you’re slowing down or anything? No, no, no, I just don’t wanna have to go repeat it because I still type like this. Okay, oh, the fingers. Yeah.

1:35:18 All right, well, I appreciate the long emails even more now. And so you think you could whip me into shape? Yeah. You think? You’d be a tough sled, but like Atlas Shrugged, you know, pushing the.

1:35:29 Why would I be tough, Dan? Because you’re, you. Am I set in my ways? No, no, no, no, no, at your age, you can’t be set in your ways yet. Okay, am I in my comfort zone too much?

1:35:38 That’s probably, I don’t know you well enough, but that could be it. Okay. You seem to enjoy what you do. I do. Or you got a pretty good act to stick about it, so like.

1:35:48 But there will be a life beyond London Real? Yes, there probably will. Yeah, I’m sure you’re too young. I don’t think you can do London Real until you’re 55 or 60. It’s not likely.

1:36:02 Okay, this is good. Come on. Yeah, yeah. Give me a few minutes, free consultation. No, no, I mean, it’s, you know, I don’t know what you’re passionate about.

1:36:09 You seem to be passionate about health, what you put in your body. Martial arts, you know, working out, staying fit. And there’s some people that make a living doing that. I have got a couple of mentees, one of the most successful physical fitness centers in the Washington DC area is one of my mentees. But if you, you know, we only make changes for two reasons, Brian.

1:36:36 Desperation or inspiration? Okay. That’s it. There aren’t any others. People don’t come to me unless they’re desperate or they’ve had an epiphany and they’re inspired.

1:36:46 Dan did something like this. I want to do something similar, then they come to me. Okay, I have spiritualists come to me, channelers, all that kind of stuff. Because by the way, for the audience, most spiritualists, channelers, et cetera, psychics get tired of dealing with your problems between three and seven, maximum 10 years. Then they start writing books and they know they can’t make a living doing that.

1:37:11 Then they start doing CDs and they can’t make a living from that. So then they go back to, you know, three or 500 bucks an hour. You need to be doing, in my judgment, when you’re done with this portion of your life, find something that you’re still passionate about. It seems to me, health, science, diet might be a road. We explore those kind of things.

1:37:35 I do enjoy communicating, like, you know. No, no, but I mean, David Letterman, I told you that earlier. Right, maybe he should watch his back. Well, I guess he’s leaving, so. Yeah, he doesn’t have to watch his back.

1:37:45 They’re already talking about DeGeneres taking his job. Really? That could be interesting. She’s a high-performance gal. She’s great, she really is.

1:37:52 By the way, I interviewed a guy a few months ago who used to be the personal assistant to Tom Cruise. Okay. And he was gonna come to the castle. He wants to add some stories. But the only thing I wanted to know, not about his personal life, just give me an average week from Sunday morning to Saturday night.

1:38:13 He said, 80, 90 hours, not shooting movies. 80, 90 hours, he gets up every morning like he never made a successful picture. He goes after every project, like he never did a project before, after 30 years of success. But is he happy? I don’t know that.

1:38:38 He says because the, what is he, what do you call it? That thing he and John Travolta are? Oh, the Scientology. Yeah. He goes off to Scientology meetings once or twice a day, according to this guy.

1:38:51 Right. But he’s just like J.Lo. Right, oh J.Lo. Approaches every single project like that. She never made a successful song, never made a successful picture.

1:39:04 And all these people, and I approach every single new man, T, like I never had, you know, a couple hundred thousand successes. And I get people to do that they think they’re impossible. You come to me with your goals. By the time you leave at the seventh day, your goals are a factor between five and a hundred times bigger. A hundred times.

1:39:26 You’re selling me, Dan. You’re selling me. No, no, no, I’m not selling. But women say that my deal works better for weight loss than it does making money. Oh, because they want to lose more weight when they…

1:39:36 No, no, because it works, because the stuff we do, I’ve had women lose 220 pounds, 170 pounds, 190 pounds. Well, just could you change their mentality and give them goals? Correct. Correct. I think maybe your ulterior motive for coming on today was just to get me to one of your seminars in Scotland.

1:39:56 And it might happen. Well, it might, you know, I mighta, I coulda, I shoulda, yeah, I’ve heard that before. Oh, Dan, thank you so much for coming on. Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

1:40:06 My audience is either gonna love you or hate you. I don’t know. Normally, they fall into two groups. I never want to fucking hear him again. What are you, a moron, Brian?

1:40:17 I’m gonna take a speed. You are the greatest thing since sliced bread. And that the, but actually, I only want 5% of your audience. You probably want, you know, less than that, really. Okay, no, no, no.

1:40:31 I only want 5% to like you so you don’t like me so you don’t get so too disenchanted. Okay, but the, well, what is the, other than the 25 and 3 million downloads, do you have any idea what your, well, you can talk about that later. Yeah, I’ll tell you my average thing. I’ll show you all my stats if you want. Okay, yeah, that’d be interesting.

1:40:51 Dan, you are an original. You are a unique gentleman. Thanks for coming here and telling us about yourself. I ask you some hard questions and I appreciate your answering them. My pleasure and I wish everybody in the audience all the luck and good fortune they earn.

1:41:07 And to your quantum leaps in life and business. Fantastic, as we say on London Real, it’s about the journey. You’ve had a fantastic one and I wish you well on your future one. Thank you very much, I appreciate it very much. Thank you.

1:41:18 Alright, thanks Dan, take care.