Full transcript: Dan Peña on London Real
0:02 Dan Peña: This is a seminar room that has become famous now, partially because when we put up the wall of influencers, people that have influenced me in my business career, they go all the way down here. In fact, just beyond this buttress here to Bob McNamara, the former head of the World Bank and the architect of the Vietnam War. And then we can talk about the Hall of Fame afterwards, but everybody on this wall, either directly or indirectly, influenced me. And the kids often ask, why is Adolf Hitler there? Why is Stalin there? Why is Condracula here? They can more appreciate, you know, why John Kennedy is here, why Jesus Christ is here. Why is Freud there? Why is Churchill there? And because they did. They inspired me, just like Andrew Carnegie, who’s on this wall, and a number of Henry Ford. They inspired me while I was going through my development as an entrepreneur and as a leader. And General Patton, who was my idol when I was a young army officer. Ross Perot, who was the mentor of, or who was mentored, excuse me, by Joe Batten, who wrote the famous book, Tough Minded Leadership and Tough Minded Management. Of course, there’s Schwarzenegger, Steinbrenner from the Yankees, Turner from CNN, Bob Guccione, the founder of Penthouse Pedigree Awards, Napoleon, Darth Vader, I’m called the Darth Vader of high performance coaching because I’m a hardass.
2:07 Dan Peña: But all these people have left something with me. I used to study Churchill, Hitler, John Kennedy, how they spoke, the public speaking techniques. I just recently heard on a CNN special about Hitler that he, when he was rising up through the ranks, when he was a chancellor, trying to become chancellor, he had a PR guy take a million pictures of him, one million pictures to find the right ones.
2:42 Brian Rose: That at best angle. Correct.
2:44 Brian Rose: This is highly politically incorrect, Dan, to have Stalin. How many did he kill?
2:51 Dan Peña: 20 million. How many did he kill?
2:54 Dan Peña: At least 6 million Jews amongst others.
2:57 Brian Rose: But you still have them on the wall. Yeah. Even though they did horrific things.
3:02 Dan Peña: Yeah. I mean, but not everybody on that wall was an angel.
3:06 And we have Dr. Oppenheimer, the father, that’s right there with your fingers, the father of the atomic bomb. Yeah. You know, a lot of people say the atomic bomb shouldn’t have happened. Gaddiadda, Oppenheimer hadn’t done such a good job and would have killed all those poor people in Japan. And he’s only three down from Walt Disney, you know, who hardly anybody says anything bad about him. But all these people had something to do with me, with my development Walton Crock of Steve Jobs. I mean, they all, they all did. I mean, there’s, of course, my mentor, Costa Grazos. I mean, one of the few pictures of him. Okay. And I mean, these are all, of course, my dad. That’s my dad on his 90th birthday. Looks like a nice little old man.
3:59 And of course, my family, when they were kids were little. I talk about Eric Haydn here. Why do I have Eric Haydn? He won seven, eight gold medals during the 1980 Olympics. We had 36 inch thighs. Is that balanced? Do you think he had a balanced life building up 36 inch thighs? There is no work life balance. As Jack Welch says it more eloquent than I. There’s work life choices, and they have consequences. Pure and simple.
4:30 Brian Rose: And with these two guys, you’re seeing the benefits, the high performance aspects of these two.
4:37 Dan Peña: Yeah, I mean, these guys, Hitler, post being in the trenches of World War One, where he was a corporal. And his goal was to be chancellor of Germany. Now from a 20 year old corporal in the trenches of World War One, to be the chancellor of Germany is pretty fucking bodacious. But is it more or less bodacious than Barack Obama saying he’s going to be the first black president of the United States when he was smoking weed in college, when he went to, I think, Occidental or wherever he went before he transferred to Columbia? I don’t think so.
5:16 Brian Rose: And you like people with bodacious goals.
5:19 Dan Peña: You’re fucking right. I do. I mean, the bigger the goals, the more inspiring, the more wild, the better. And there are, you know, all these people represent one form of that. There’s a picture of me on the hood in the hood in the body.
5:34 Brian Rose: This is you in East LA in 1993,
5:37 Dan Peña: standing in front of the lot that used to be my house, but they tore it down because it became a crack house. And you can tell just by the size from the wall to the fence how little the house was. And when we took that picture in 1993, there was a couple of drive by shootings, you know, five or six blocks away. And the camera crew jumped into the limo, hiding them, you know, because they were afraid maybe a stray bullet would hit them.
6:06 Brian Rose: And you’re you’ve button your top button like a proper cholo.
6:10 Dan Peña: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
6:12 I had my top button button. And there’s, of course, the queen. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times. A very, very nice woman who arguably hasn’t done one thing wrong in her whole entire life, except for the kid she born, which didn’t turn out necessarily so great. And then there’s John Connelly, who got the bullet in the leg right there.
6:43 Brian Rose: Next to Bush. Okay. Oh, next. Yeah. Okay.
6:46 Dan Peña: Who got the magic bullet in the leg when President Kennedy had been shot. And how he, you know, was it from the knoll or whatever. And, and I had the privilege of being his friend. And he was a great guy.
7:00 Brian Rose: Nixon, controversial. Why is he on your home?
7:03 Dan Peña: Well, one of the presidents I met, Richard Nixon, during my military career.
7:08 And he had been, he had been thrown out, written off as a loser. When he lost the presidency to John Kennedy, after he was supposedly a shoe in, after being the vice president of Dwight Eisenhower, he came back from the ashes and rose like the Phoenix. The, you know, and it’s a bunker hunt, who I was with when the last picture on the right, the little pudgy guy right there, when he cornered, he and his brother cornered the silver market. Of course, Jack Welsh. I mean, these guys, I counted 35 of the 45, I believe, that are up there. I actually met.
7:58 Brian Rose: Okay. Okay.
7:59 Brian Rose: Obviously jobs you didn’t meet, but he’s up there.
8:02 Dan Peña: No, I didn’t meet back in the 80s. No, I had him early on. But like Edison, Tom Edison, I never met. I’m old kids. I’m not that old, but I didn’t meet Tom Edison. And I didn’t know him before the first.
8:14 But I didn’t know. And I didn’t know Teddy Roosevelt. But Roy Disney Walt’s brother, arguably the brains behind Disney is the one that taught me when value is clear, decisions are easy. You know, he also said, has Rolls Royce or Tiffany ever had a sale?
8:37 I now know what he meant. I didn’t know 40 years ago or 45 years ago when he told me what he meant. But I now know. And most of the guys out there that are selling stuff could learn something about when value is clear, decisions are easy.
8:55 Brian Rose: Now, I’ve been in a lot of classrooms in my life.
8:59 But I’ve never been in one with so many pictures on the wall. What what are you trying to tell those students when they walk in here?
9:08 Dan Peña: Okay, a couple of things. One, I’m not influenced by just one person. Okay, they seem to talk about, you know, one guy or one gal that has influenced them.
9:19 I’ve been influenced by a whole bunch of people, men and women, good, bad, indifferent, the good, bad and the ugly. I mean, the one thing that the kids have trouble relating to having resonate with them is that being a high performance person doesn’t mean you’re a good guy or a nice guy or a pleasant guy.
9:44 Brian Rose: Yeah, I mean, they’re the most obvious. But most of these guys and girls aren’t nice.
9:51 Dan Peña: No, they’re not. And if you go back to the 13th, 14th, 15th century derivative of the word nice, it means jerk, retarded, idiot. When they used to say, yeah, he’s a nice guy, they were saying he’s retarded. Go back and Google it. But it has now come full circle that nice is, you know, he’s a nice guy. Well, that means, you know, he’s a nice guy. To me, it doesn’t. But I don’t like to be called nice. Not too many people call me nice. But I don’t like to be called nice. And but these guys and gals are, you know, what they are is they’re all focused. And do the ends justify the means?
10:38 To most of them, the ends do justify the means. The only place that I draw the line is, it’s got to be legal, moral, ethical. But I mean, some of the guys on here that are the multi-billionaires, they think I’m soft, the ones that I’ve known. Now, I’ve been called a lot of things, but normally it’s not soft. But in today’s world, I’m considered, they say, I’m old school. I’m a Neanderthal or whatever. But soft isn’t normally one of the adjectives they use to describe me, because I’m pretty tough.
11:15 I know tougher people, but not too many. So when the kids come in here, they see a lot of people. And three of the biggest influencers on this wall are the three statues up next to Steve Jobs. And on the other side of Howard Hughes, the top row, Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle, which the main part of the QLA program model is mentorship. And they were each other’s mentors centuries ago, thousands of years ago. And they started it.
11:52 I don’t know if they were the first triumphant of mentors, but they were certainly at the beginning. But the QLA system is based on finding someone that is where you are now that has already accomplished what you want to accomplish, and have them mentor you and model their success. And in some ways, I’ve mimicked almost every single person on this wall and have adapted myself to some aspect of what they’ve done. And it’s worked. And I mean, excuse me, Bill Gates’s mentor was Warren Buffett. And then Warren turned over $30 billion to him, the manage of his money. But interesting story is that when before Bill asked Warren to be his mentor, Mrs. Gates, Warren’s mom, had heard that Bill wanted to have Mr. Buffett as a mentor.
13:04 So being the good mom, she arranges a dinner party. And she asked some luminaries, one of which was Mr. Buffett. He came to the dinner. Bill Gates, Jr., not his dad, Sr., who was a successful guy, successful lawyer, walks in the room. And he sees his mentor to be Warren there. He’s all excited.
13:22 And so they sat down to dinner. There’s a long conversation as there can be. And Mrs. Buffett asked the collective table, what would you consider your success or your secret to your success? Simultaneously, Warren and Bill Gates said with one word, focus. And I’ve added to that laser beam focus. What does that mean? That means you’re doing only one thing and you do it the best you can, the best possible outcome from you and nothing else.
13:58 And for several years, I only focused on one thing, and that was building the largest energy company that I possibly could. And I was focused on one thing. I stopped playing golf. I stopped running. I stopped doing some of the other outside things I did. I stopped hunting.
14:23 And I got very focused and I made a lot of money. And when you focus on just one thing, you know, you see somebody yawn, you get sleepy. If you think about just making money and creating wealth, guess what? You create wealth. And then now we tell the kids, create wealth, go do good.
14:46 And when you hear guys that are into two and three deals and four deals, no chance. Well, it’s not geometric, or I should say it’s not arithmetic, you’re a decline in probability. It’s geometric. Okay. It’s geometric.
15:02 Dan Peña: And as an engineer, you can explain that to the.
15:06 Brian Rose: So yeah, two deals, maybe four times as likely to fail, three deals, eight times as likely. Exactly. Exactly. I agree. When I hear people, I hear it in the tech community all the time in London, they’re like, I’m doing this startup and this startup and this startup. And it’s just like, it seems like a recipe for not getting anything done.
15:23 Dan Peña: Correct. Correct. And you spend all your time trying to decide which deal to work on, which trigger to pull. And when there’s only one trigger to pull, it’s much, much easier.
15:35 Brian Rose: Jack Wells here. You said it before, there’s no work life balances, work life choices.
15:41 Brian Rose: You’re showing those 36 inch quads on that Olympic skater with six or seven gold medals. In order to be high performance, is your life going to be unbalanced by definition?
15:53 Dan Peña: Yes. There’s no possibility of anything else. And that’s why I say for those of you that have significant others, you might have a family. That’s great. But you better hope, pray and make sure that the other side of the significant relationship is going to be a great parent because that’s pretty much who is going to be left with a parenting.
16:16 And most people don’t want to hear that. I know, of course they don’t. But I’m not here to tell them what they want to hear. I’m here to tell them what, based on my success. Now we’re going to turn to the Hall of Fame in a second, but it’s interesting. When I re-engineered all this 23 and a half, 24 years ago, with one of my smartest buddies and how I turned 800 bucks into 450 million and we moved backwards.
16:49 And then at that time, his name was Bud Grubbs, Charles Grubbs. And he said, Bud-Dan, I mean, you were able to do this, but you’re really smart. We took the decision right then. We couldn’t tell everybody that you had, if you were gifted, you could do this because then nobody would do it. Now, 23 years ago, or actually about eight or 10 years ago, we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt regular people can do it. And so now, and we’ve created $50 billion with regular Joes, more or less. And I’m not even in the top 25 of my own list. But before, in the beginning, even though I could show that I did it, I proved that I did it, but what I couldn’t prove is I could get you to do it. And now we can point with people from ADIQ to 180IQ that have done it.
17:48 And the ADIQ guy has done bigger deals than the 180IQ guy, because it’s easier for him to focus. The 180IQ is thinking about landing on Mars or whatever he’s thinking about. The ADIQ only knows I got to hit the nail on the top of the head with a hammer and just keep hitting it.
18:07 Brian Rose: And you say in the seminar that being a high performance person is hard.
18:12 Dan Peña: Yes, sir.
18:13 Brian Rose: And that’s because what? You have to wake up every morning. And like you said today, if you’re tired, you got to snap out of it. If you don’t want to do that, make that phone call, you got to force yourself to do it.
18:23 Dan Peña: Correct.
18:23 Brian Rose: And you have to do it day in and day out and day in.
18:27 Dan Peña: Correct. Well, it’s like, you know, I had the surgery, I don’t feel that taut, my leg hurts. Other than facilitating this because I get to sit in this chair right now, I still give the seminar. And, you know, Alistair Cook, the famous BBC presenter said it 40 years ago, being a professional is doing what you don’t, doing what you don’t want to do.
18:51 No, having to do what you don’t want to do when you don’t want to do it, but still doing it. And so that’s what a high performance performer, high performer does. Every day, I mean, you don’t feel like doing some of the stuff. Every day, you know, I don’t, when I get the weekly reports and I read through some of the reports and I can see that there, it’s not resonating with the kids. And, you know, I go back and I think, how in the fuck, how could they make such a horrid mistake? And then I think about it, then, you know, I send out a thing to the mentees. Sometimes, in fact, most times not too politely.
19:32 And to get them to react. But the kids, if they want it bad enough, they can get it. But that’s the operative part, if they want it bad enough. I’ve had hundreds of people come to here, want to be billionaire, billionaire. You know, and I’m not poking fun, but you get a hundred million in the bank after taxes, their life has changed. And all of a sudden, it’s a lot of work to get another 900 million. I’m happy. And I gave an example. I’m not going to use his name, but he’s in the Hall of Fame. And he’s got a big mansion on the Gold Coast in Australia. He’s got a 110-foot yacht. He’s got a place in Snowmass, Colorado. He’s got a penthouse in New York City. He spent the whole time at the Olympics, this last Olympics.
20:38 He spends three weeks at the World Cup. He spends two weeks at the, what do you call it, the Open Championship, British Open. He has his own fund. He’s got three lovely kids and a beautiful wife. And he stopped at a hundred million pounds sterling. And I asked the group that just left, how many would settle for that today? I am the devil. I can cut you a fucking deal right now.
21:11 You have no idea how many people raised their hand. And many of them say, I want to be in there. Because no matter what deal I do from now on, my lifestyle is not going to change. Somebody dropped a trillion dollars on me. My lifestyle is not going to change. I’m not going to go back to having private planes. I think it’s a waste of money. I’m certainly not going to buy a fucking yacht again. That’s certainly just pissing money down a rat hole. But for most people, most people, 10 million after taxes changes your life, let alone a hundred million. And then over the last several years, he’s accumulated those assets.
21:48 I mean, he’s got the world by the ass. So they say, but he was at my, I’m sure you talked to him when he was at my 70th. But not everybody wants to stay the course. So when they say billions, I know that’s just the same billions. But what they really mean, if I can have enough money that my lifestyle is going to change for the better, that’s what I want to do for myself and my family. And so I know that they’re bullshitting themselves.
22:23 But as they get money, and then their focus normally wanes. They’re wanes and wanes. And I hear from them less and less. Although almost all of them were at my party. They came out of the cracks to come and help me celebrate along with you and your lovely family.
22:46 But surprisingly enough, they didn’t talk very much about any of their money, any of them. Because once you have it, you don’t talk about it. The reason I talk about it so much is because I want to instill the hope in the kids that it is possible.
23:06 Brian Rose: But let’s take a look over here. This is the Hall of Fame. When did this concept start? The influencers make sense.
23:15 Brian Rose: You’ve been collecting those for most of your life. Why the wall of fame?
23:22 Dan Peña: Well, the same guy that actually gave me the idea for the influencers said, you know, if they could see and relate to somebody that actually did it. And so we started putting up a Hall of Fame members. But only the ones that I can use their picture.
23:44 There’s no names on here, although a couple of them you know who they are. And there’s a bunch of them that I can’t use their picture or their name. So they don’t want the fame and the notoriety. But, you know, like everybody knows, and Klaus Kleinfeld is on my website, you know, and the story about him is legendary. He came to me about 20 years ago now as a middle manager at Siemens with a goal, and I helped him realize that goal and increase that goal and he became CEO of the 20th largest company in the world in about six or seven years. These guys are guys and gals, a few gals, that stayed focused longer. It’s that simple. They stayed focused longer. And we have some, you know, he’s known too. He’s the current governor of the state of Florida, Rick Scott.
24:43 Famous story. He used to be my lawyer and he wanted, how do I make more money? And I said, you got to leave me. And he said, what should I do? And I said, healthcare, telco and healthcare. He founded Columbia Healthcare until the Justice Department threw him out.
25:00 It was the largest healthcare company in the world with about 300 plus thousand employees and 29 or 30 billion in revenue.
25:08 Brian Rose: And he got very wealthy. And those are three of your industries. You suggest healthcare, telcos, which now includes internet. And what’s the other one you like the third?
25:18 Dan Peña: No, those are the two major, but now, for example, cybersecurity is part of telco. Right. I mean, cybersecurity is hot. Every time WikiLeaks and Putin supposedly stealing our emails and putting them out. I mean, cybersecurity is hot. I mean, it’s sizzling hot.
25:35 But other industries that are hot are like whole foods, you know, natural, organic. That’s hot. The other things that are currently in vogue are certain internet plays. But the problem with the internet is they’re not lasting because pretty soon somebody in Belarus, somebody in China starts copying it and then it’s dead. But I tell and I said it earlier in the interview, you do something that will influence a billion people. And by definition, you’ll make money, a lot of money. And the best example in recent years is Facebook. I mean, he’s got a billion people.
26:20 Brian Rose: What do you see in Zuckerberg? Is he a high performance person?
26:25 Dan Peña: Yeah, but I don’t think he has. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.
26:30 But I mean, I don’t think he has great leadership skills. He’s not old enough to have developed any. But I mean, he certainly had a great idea. And I think he’s managing it pretty well, although he’s made some mistakes. When his board of directors found out that he made a billion dollar acquisition in Instagram, they found out on CNN. He didn’t tell anybody. Now, that’s no way to build up camaraderie, a spirit of core, etc. Now, he’s improved greatly since then. I hear he’s quite bright. And there’s other people that have dropped out of Harvard that are quite bright. Bill Gates, the name one. But dropping out of Harvard in your third year is no secret to success or graduating from MIT. But I mean, Peter Sage, who I knew as a 20 year old kid. And if he had to mention my name on his interview.
27:32 We might not have met. We might not have met. And he has gone on. He’s changed a lot of people’s lives.
27:41 Brian Rose: And who are some of the rest of these faces? I’m sure you don’t want to say some of their names.
27:50 Dan Peña: Well, I mean, you’re right. I don’t want to say their names. This is Ted Nicholas, the father of modern day marketing. And he came to my first seminar, the young kids. Yeah, the young kids. This is Ron Legrand, the father of house flipping, who’s quite successful, made a lot of money. Let’s see. There’s Dan Lok, one of my Chinese superstars who is a Canadian, who’s done great things. He’s kind of a mini me. And there’s George Verdeer.
28:28 God love him. People are still calling him after 23 fucking years. Leave him alone. Why would you bother the poor old fuck? I mean, and that’s when I used to tell people their names.
28:40 I don’t do that anymore, because they’ve been calling him 23 fucking years. And he’s still super successful. So this represents not the 50 billion, because a lot of that doesn’t want to be talked about. But the number is probably up near 100 billion. We think it’s close to 150 billion.
28:59 Brian Rose: When are you going to change the name to the $100 billion man?
29:03 Dan Peña: No, no. Well, the $50 billion brand is pretty good. And until the guys, at least until some of them die, and I can use their name, or until they change their mind, the guy that called me with the $3.78 billion is already up here.
29:18 Brian Rose: He called you to tell you his net worth had gone up by that money.
29:22 Dan Peña: He created $3.78 billion more. But he’s already up here.
29:25 Brian Rose: He’s up here, but you won’t point him out.
29:28 Dan Peña: No, no, no, no.
29:29 Brian Rose: You’re very serious about privacy.
29:32 Dan Peña: Correct. Very serious. Correct. Yeah.
29:36 If they want to be anonymous, then you came to the right guy. But it’s easier for me, and I’m not trying to make it sound better than it is, but I’m not selling anything. So I don’t, you know, probably the smartest marketing move, if you want to call it that, that I ever made was, and to solidify my USP, was when I gave everything away free. Which, by the way, all the marketing gurus said I was committing suicide. To a man and woman, and to an algorithm, everybody said that I was through.
30:15 And it’s just the opposite. So much for the marketing pundits.
30:18 Brian Rose: And so what does this message tell the students when they come in here for the first time, they see the influencers, they see the Hall of Fame, are they all thinking I want to get there one day?
30:29 Dan Peña: Well, not all, but almost all.
30:30 Brian Rose: Okay, at least it’s in the back of their mind. Correct.
30:33 Brian Rose: It helps you do your job, because they can say I want to be able.
30:37 Dan Peña: Yeah, yeah. And for some of them that they really know a lot about, Peter Sage, Dan, where’s Dan? Dan Lok. Yeah.
30:45 Klaus. Maybe me. Now you, Rick Scott. I mean, these are guys that they know of, that are, you know, more or less current day. And it’s not easy, but it is easier than you think. And getting back to, again, what we did in those three days during the hardcore seminar, to see it all come to fruition in just three days. And because we come up with reasons between our ears why it should take longer. We come up with reasons that, for example, you know, I’m not as articulate as Dan. I didn’t go to this school or that school.
31:35 But at the end of the day, I mean, you know, some of these kids never went to school. Some of these kids, you know, dropped out when they were 15 years old. And, you know, so that takes that excuse away. Because what I’m really great at, I think the best, is getting people to do what they don’t want to do to be what they want to be. And you alluded to that last night. And I have a way of finding the buttons to push.
32:04 And we all have buttons. God knows. And like I tell the kids, I’m going to say again, now, most of your Facebooks that you have out there are embarrassment to you, your family and God, if there is one. I mean, you should just close them fucking down and forget about it. Okay. And people do look at Facebook when they’re going to hire people and go into business with them, even though there’s a law passed in America, not supposed to use Facebook as a differentiator to hire anybody. Most people that use LinkedIn should either change their LinkedIn profile and what they write and what the picture of themselves or close it down.
32:39 Forget about it. Same with Twitter. I mean, some of the handles that people use,
32:48 I got an email, Bad Girls Slut. Now, what’s that, what kind of message is that supposed to send? That’s her Twitter handle, Bad Girls Slut.
32:58 Brian Rose: So these people should be thinking about their future and the message and profile of their children.
33:05 Dan Peña: Absolutely. And they don’t. And they don’t.
33:08 In the old story, if you don’t want your, if you would be embarrassed that your grandmother saw what you wrote or how you look, don’t do it. That’s pretty, you know, that’s, that’s pretty good advice. I didn’t come up with it. Somebody else did, but.
33:23 Brian Rose: And so what does it take to get on this wall?
33:26 Dan Peña: Well, well, well, under normal, there’s two ways to get on. One, influence a whole bunch of people in a positive manner. I.E. you. Okay. We have four other people that fall into that category.
33:40 And one of them got rich after they got on the wall. Because they discovered that you could influence a lot of people and make a shit ton of money as well in a good way. A lot of people are hindered because they think that by definition, to, to make a lot of money, you’re doing it by in a bad way, which is not true. The other way is to create, uh, billions or hundreds of millions. But there’s people up here that have created 50, 50 million.
34:10 Brian Rose: Is that the cutoff?
34:12 Dan Peña: It’s a good kind of 50 million. Uh, and, um, but we also have people, we have five that have created 20 billion or more, five billions, as they say in Switzerland. And of course the kids, I mean, when some of these guys went from 2 billion to 20 billion, they didn’t really do anything different. It just, they were in the right place at the right time.
34:43 And the deal exploded. But, uh, the, uh, the, uh, nobody, uh, you know, uh, when Rick Scott founded Columbia healthcare, he, he wasn’t saying that I want to create 30 billion and have, uh, 300,000 employees and have 400 hospitals. What he did say was, I want to build the largest healthcare corporation in the world. And he did. Bill Gates now says, I wish instead of saying that I want to put a computer in every house in America, I should have said, I want to put a computer in every house on the planet.
35:23 Brian Rose: So think big, don’t focus on the amount of money, just think big as far as big messages.
35:30 Dan Peña: Correct. That’s what’s going on here. 60,000 foot Concord view, uh, and, um, and stay focused and, and, uh, put the right team together. Uh, dream team that are, uh, people that are like-minded.
35:44 And, uh, we, we spent a good portion of the seminar on, um, it’s not, um, what you do. It’s who you put on your bus, your bus, meaning your team. And, uh, because you’re going to pivot and you’re going to do something different, very few big fortunes and creation of a massive wealth ended up as they started. They started at one thing and they ended up doing something else, but it was the people, uh, you know, the atomic bomb, they didn’t know if it was going to implode or explode. And, uh, and the atomic bomb, uh, Dr. Oppenheimer, he said the key to his success was focus and constant stress, constant stress, stress. And I, uh, Mr. Toyota, the Toyota car, he wrote a book. I’m not saying you have to read it, but the bottom line of the book is constant stress. And that’s how you get better. And that’s how you get better forging that steel.
36:39 Yep. And, uh, make it tougher and tougher and tougher and keep pulling the trigger. And, uh, it’s probably the, uh, the hardest part is when you pull the trigger a couple of times and fail to pull it again, because all of a sudden the naysayers, Oh, I knew that Brian was never going to make it. Then I’m fucked up. What does he know? Uh, and, uh, to pull the trigger again and again, but it’s like falling off a horse. You got to get back on right away and pull the trigger again. And, um, and I’ve been pretty good at that, but I, I have been a young man and now an old man that doesn’t give a shit what other people think.
37:17 And, uh, the, um, you know, uh, I said earlier in the interview, I think Dr. Teter said the only thing that’s changed with Dan is that his accomplishments caught up with his big fucking mouth. Now on CBS television, six o’clock news, they bleep the fucking part out. But I mean, what kind of shit is that? You know, surely God rest her so she’s dead now, but the, uh, um, my mother was mortified.
37:45 Brian Rose: I can imagine.
37:46 Dan Peña: Yeah. Well, I must say, uh, by the way, your picture is going right here. Is this me? No, it’s going to be right here. Well, I don’t, well, maybe we’ll put the big one by the way, this is, uh, to your quantum leap in Chinese. Okay. Yeah. And, um, the, uh, these, uh, one of my members just passed away. Oh, really? Yeah. One of a hall of famous.
38:10 Yeah. They, the family didn’t say I mentioned his name. So, or announced it. So I’m not announcing it either. We’ll keep him up there, but he’s gone at 56 young guy.
38:20 Brian Rose: Wow. Time is now to do things.
38:23 Dan Peña: Yep. And he was a 20 billions boy, really 20 billions. A lot of money. Yeah. Money. He created a lot of money. And, uh, but, uh, most people went 120 foot yacht, Gold Coast, beautiful wife, three lovely kids, World Cup, Super Bowl, Olympics work three months a year. Right. The easy life. They don’t want to keep pulling the trigger.
38:52 Brian Rose: Nope. All right. So I’m going to be up there. Well, I, uh, I plan on doing you proud and, uh,
38:57 Dan Peña: well, you’ve already done me proud, but you can do me a lot prouder. Okay.
39:01 Brian Rose: I’m sure you’re going to stay on me.
39:04 Dan Peña: Oh, absolutely. I’m going to stay on you. And, uh, the, um, the kids, um, a lot of kids look up to you. So, I mean, you have an important place. Uh, and, uh, when you have as many, as much traffic downloads, views, all those things.
39:20 I mean, uh, it’s important what you say because the kids listen, you know, whether they take action or not, that’s a whole other, but they listen and, um, the, uh, but, uh, the only thing that I, not the only thing, but one of the things I would do because you know it notwithstanding your model, I would tell them that it is harder because you may, you try to make it sound like it’s not. And, uh, if you would like me to outline, underline some of your emails, I’ll be happy to, uh, the last 10 or 15 emails.
39:56 Brian Rose: It’s hard though.
39:58 Dan Peña: You fucking ain’t right. It’s hard.
40:00 I mean, it is. And, and you know, it’s hard to get them to listen to you and more importantly, it’s hard to get them to take action. You know, I can sense your frustration in your emails. And I mean, but they’ve got so much shit in their lives now, so much content, uh, which most of the shit, but, um, so it’s even hard to differentiate. Let’s say that a hundred percent of your content was good.
40:31 And I mean, they’ve got 20 other guys or 200 other guys that are putting out content. And the problem is they read it all. So they can’t really differentiate. They can’t read one sentence or one pair of that shit deleted. They read through all this shit. There’s no way they can get to all this stuff. There’s just no way. So even if you had the best content that there ever was, um, and you had a day after day, page after page, by the time they get done reading it, uh, and then they go on to somebody else and there’s a lot of people out there putting out content now, as you well know, I’m sure you know better than I.
41:07 Brian Rose: Yeah. And it’s hard to get people to take action and it can be frustrating and you know that more than anyone. So yeah. So that’s the wall of fame. Uh, and if I, if I stay in good stance, I stay off the wall of shame, but those are for the people that is messed things up.
41:21 Dan Peña: Yeah. And we’ve got, uh, that’s about half of the ones we have. Uh, but, um, they, they took, they went a bridge too far.
41:29 Brian Rose: Right. So that’s always a good reminder as well. Yeah. Because again, you always say ethical, moral, illegal, and those are the rules and you always have been about that. Yep. And so, and in your mind, you can still make money that way. Absolutely. Right.
41:45 Dan Peña: And part of it is, you know, why am I so honest? You know, if you went to the seminar, my dad, I stole a golf club for two, a $2 and 50 cents golf club at a big five department store. And unfortunately my dad was with me and they caught me and he gave me a fucking beaten. I mean, like you, like in a goddamn horror movie. And now if I see Brian, I don’t know, Brian and a 20 pound note falls out of his pocket. I’ll chase him down for 10 miles. Oh, sir, sir. So you dropped this and that’s, you know, he taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.
42:21 And so, um, the, uh, but it was a traumatic experience at the time, believe me. But, uh, that’s one of the things that happened to me changed my, it changed my life dramatically because in the neighborhood I was in, everybody stole shit and broken houses and stuff like that.
42:37 Brian Rose: Well, can we, can we finish on that? Cause cause Manny 90 year old picture of him, he’s down there and let’s be honest, he was probably your biggest influencer and in a strange way, you know, in a weird way, he is responsible for creating these 50 billions, you know, because of those hard lessons. And I know you had a bunch of those lessons, uh, beat beatings, horror movie beatings, you know, guns to the head, but it also meant that you didn’t do drugs, which, uh, I don’t know how you did that. An oil man in the eighties, a wall street in the eighties. I don’t know how you did it, but that saved years off your life and probably tons of money. And whereas most people that could have ended their careers in their lives, it saved you. Correct. And again, with honesty, that could have derailed so many different things. And yet thanks to your father, that kept you on.
43:27 Dan Peña: Correct. Yeah.
43:28 Dan Peña: Well, thank you. And that’s true. And that’s true. But at the time, I mean, it’s just, I close my eyes and I can still remember the, uh, some of those episodes. Um, and, um, but you know, I, I am who I am because of that. And, uh, the, uh, and so when the kids here in the seminar are, uh, I can relate to most of, except for the guy that we had a double murderer. Uh, we had a double murderer here come to the seminar. And, uh, but other than that, uh, anyone in here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’ve had, uh, convicted terrorists come through.
44:04 Brian Rose: Yeah. He was a realer. He was a realer. So you’re open to anybody.
44:10 Dan Peña: No, you gotta pass.
44:12 You gotta pass. Uh, you know, he, they did their time. They, they did their penance, whatever you want to say. And they were on the path. I won’t say the righteousness, but they were on the path. And so, you know, then I make a value judgment. Some, you know, a lot of them, well, we don’t let in, but, uh, the, uh, those two cases I was just mentioning were both realers. They were both realers. They were devotees.
44:38 Brian Rose: You always give me all the bad apple realers.
44:41 Dan Peña: No, no, I was that are good. You just, no, no, no, no, no, I mean, uh, I’m here because I’m a realer. Yeah, I know. And I’m here because of Peter, uh, who mentioned me on your show. Yeah. And now I’m, uh, you know, uh, I’m sending, uh, an email to Joe Rogan because Tom and Christina, his two comedian friends mentioned me a couple of times, uh, and, uh, the, uh, um, the, uh, Oxford, although, uh, the kid that actually finally got it done for me was a mentee, but the first guy that asked me to go to Oxford was a realer.
45:14 Yeah. And, um, so, um, and, uh, when I speak in front of the United Nations some day, it’ll probably be a goddamn realer.
45:22 Brian Rose: They got you there.
45:24 Dan Peña: Yeah, they got me there. And, uh, so, uh, you know, I, I, I look forward to that. And I know the kids enjoyed it last night, uh, seeing you and, uh, it kind of, uh, solidifies, uh, the fact that one of them got inducted, uh, and that inductee is like a, some of the guys who told you are the reason that I met them. So, uh, together we’ve changed a lot of lives, but you have, you know, a great responsibility because you’ve got millions and I know you know that, but I mean, um, the, uh, so, uh, and I know that’s why you try so hard to put the right content and, and et cetera. Uh, but, um, you can drag them. You can’t make them drink the water.
46:09 I don’t, uh, you know, you can get them to the trough. You can even hold them under a little bit, but they have to decide.
46:16 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, I guess that’s what we’re both trying to do on different kind of different levels and different scales.
46:22 Brian Rose: Correct. Well, then it’s an honor to be up here with, I mean, honestly, people like your father, that alone is an honor to be on the same wall as him and not to mention all these presidents and queens and millionaires. And so, you know, I, I think I’m going to be working for many years just to remain worthy of being up there.
46:39 Dan Peña: Well, I’m sure you will. You’ll do great.
46:46 Brian Rose: Thank you. Thank you, Dan. I said this last night, you had a big influence on me the last two and a half years.
47:03 Dan Peña: Well, good. Good. Goodbye, realers.
