Episode Transcript
Transcripts are displayed as originally observed. Some content, including advertisements may have changed.
Use Ctrl + F to search
0:00
OneKey cards earn 3% in
0:02
OneKey Cash for travel at grocery
0:04
stores, restaurants, and gas stations. So
0:06
the more you spend on groceries,
0:08
dining, and gas, the sooner you
0:10
can use OneKey Cash towards your
0:12
next trip on Expedia, hotels.com, and
0:14
Vrbo, and get away from groceries,
0:17
dining, and gas. And Platinum members
0:19
earn up to 9% on travel
0:21
when booking VIP access properties on
0:23
Expedia and hotels.com. OneKey Cash
0:25
is not redeemable for cash.
0:27
Terms apply. Learn more at
0:29
expedia.com/OneKeyCards. And basically, I had a bong
0:31
next to my bed. And I was
0:33
hitting the bong every morning. Wake and bake. That's
0:36
wake and bake. And the rest of the day was just,
0:38
I don't know what happened really. I had
0:40
a lot of girlfriends and a lot
0:42
of sex and I did a lot of drugs and
0:44
it was freezing cold and I said, this is terrible.
0:51
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get
0:53
you from where you are to where you want to
0:55
be. I'm John Gafford and I
0:57
have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop
0:59
their secrets to help you on a path
1:01
to greatness. So stop drifting along,
1:04
escape the drift, and it's time
1:06
to start right now. Back again, back
1:08
again for another episode of the
1:11
podcast like the opening says, man, get you from where
1:13
you are to where you want to be. And today,
1:17
in the studio, ladies and gentlemen, I
1:19
got somebody that's got a pretty
1:21
wild story, man. This guy dubbed
1:24
the bad boy of Wall Street at one
1:26
point. And no, it's not that wolfy dude.
1:28
It's another guy, a better
1:31
guy that built phenomenal companies,
1:34
took them public on
1:36
the London Stock Exchange, had
1:38
a little bit of a problem with the
1:40
government, but his back bigger than ever, star
1:43
of his own reality show, Facing Life. And
1:47
when you talk about facing life, this is a
1:49
dude that's got some life lessons we're going to
1:51
learn today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program.
1:53
This is Ross Mandel. Ross.
1:56
What's shaking, Big John? How are you, buddy? What's
1:58
going on? got to say
2:01
before I came here today, I'm staying
2:04
at the Wynn Hotel in obviously
2:06
Las Vegas. And Donnie,
2:10
who booked me here today, made the
2:12
introduction. He said, why don't you watch
2:14
an episode of
2:17
John's podcast? And
2:19
I was tired, been very busy. I've been filming. I
2:21
did three days filming yesterday and one day. And
2:25
I lay on the bed. I
2:27
put you on and I got jazzed up.
2:30
I got energized. I said, I got energized, bro. I
2:32
said, this guy's got real energy. I loved it. Well,
2:34
thank you so much, man. I appreciate that. And now
2:36
that I'm here, you know, I was listening to you.
2:46
You're interviewing this guy. Just do it.
2:49
I'm six, five, I'm two 80. I played tight
2:51
end for Notre Dame. Oh, John's are. Yeah. John's
2:54
are a son. I mean,
2:56
you know, you must have been there. Now you're just as big. I'm
3:00
not as heavy. I'm as tall. You're much
3:02
leaner. I mean, you probably look like you're in shape.
3:04
Yeah, I try. I do what I get. Like I
3:06
told you when you came in, like I'm not winning
3:08
the battle anymore, but I don't feel like I'm losing
3:11
any ground. I like that. I'd like
3:13
to get all we could do is, you know, hold up position.
3:15
That's it. You just dig in and hold
3:17
the foxhole. That's what we're doing. Father time
3:20
is undefeated still. I'm still going to.
3:22
I mean, I'm still going to make a run out. I
3:24
live my life by the motto of Ricky Bobby from Talladega
3:26
Nights. And he says with the advancements in modern science and
3:28
technology, I don't see any reason I can't live to be
3:30
137, 107 years old. So
3:33
that's what I'm banking on as we go. He
3:35
looks at, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't seen
3:37
this man in person, you owe it to yourself.
3:39
I'm a ravishing Adonis. That's how it works. It's
3:41
like a Ford supermodel. I'm not. I'm
3:44
not just saying that you speak my mind. See that it's
3:46
getting, we're going to start hugging and then people are
3:49
going to have to watch this sunlight. It's going to
3:51
get weird. It's going to get weird. Yes. We're
3:53
bromancing right now. We're going to be awesome for sure. Let's
3:55
get to you, dude. So obviously, man,
3:57
you don't, you don't just wake up one day and become a
4:00
the bad boy of wall
4:02
streets. But true. So I want to talk
4:04
about this man, because obviously you don't reach
4:07
those heights of early success without
4:10
some sort of catalyst to move you forward. And
4:12
I'm always a real big, I have
4:15
a huge interest in the kind of the
4:17
nature versus nurture idea, right? So do
4:20
you think that the way you were
4:22
raised, your upbringing, your experience as a
4:24
smaller human led to your desire
4:26
to build something great? Or do you think it was
4:28
just a natively born within you? You
4:30
know, it's a good question. I question that myself
4:32
a lot. I will credit my mom
4:35
who just recently passed away. She passed away in
4:37
July. And we had
4:39
a pretty rocky relationship
4:41
over the course of
4:43
our lives. And one
4:45
thing she did, I give her credit. She used
4:47
to say to me, you could be anything. You
4:51
could be anything in this world.
4:54
And you could be the president. Like
4:57
who would want to be the president? Obviously. But
5:00
you know, I had that in my upbringing. I
5:02
never really thought about it until recently. My
5:06
wife, Stephanie, was brought
5:08
up in the Bronx. She was the youngest of four
5:10
kids. She was the
5:12
princess of the family. Stunning,
5:14
gorgeous her whole life. She was born beautiful.
5:16
And she's always been prettiest and nicest or
5:18
whatever. Everywhere she's gone. But
5:21
her father was like, you better get married. You're
5:24
going to work in a deli. Don't
5:26
go to college. Really. He was a real Bronx
5:30
Italian, like off the boat type of guy. Girls
5:32
got married young and they took
5:35
care of the house and they had babies. And
5:37
that was that. Don't waste your time trying
5:39
to be something. And you
5:41
know, she ended up,
5:44
you know, I went to prison for nine
5:46
years and four months. I was in
5:48
federal custody. And the day I left for
5:51
prison, I left her and
5:53
my two daughters, 14 and 11. And
5:57
when I got out, they're both in their 20s. the
6:00
women and my wife
6:02
had to face life. And
6:08
she ended up building a tremendous little
6:10
business. She became
6:12
the Florida sea turtle lady, floristieturtles.com.
6:14
Okay, little plug for the wife. I
6:17
like that. Correct. She's in about 65
6:19
stores. She's got a big online
6:21
shop and she does this
6:23
eco warrior kind of thing where they clean
6:25
the beaches and they make sure the turtles
6:28
are okay. And
6:30
it's really like a marvelous, wonderful
6:32
thing. And they say that necessity
6:34
is the mother of invention.
6:39
That's the truth. You
6:41
know, we're faced with
6:44
sort of life or death, you
6:46
know, eat or go hungry, find
6:48
a way to eat. And
6:51
I was a good kid, very competitive, but
6:54
not super competitive. I was an athlete, but
6:56
I wasn't, you know, a six foot four,
6:59
Don is from North Florida, like my friend
7:01
Johnny over here. And
7:05
my father dropped dead suddenly at six, when I was
7:07
16 years old. Oh man. I
7:09
went from being number six academically,
7:12
my high school class, to
7:14
barely graduating. He only let
7:16
me graduate because they knew my father died. I basically stopped going
7:19
to school, started doing a lot
7:21
of drugs, smoking weed, taking
7:23
a lot of pills. Quaaludays
7:26
is the wolf of Wall Street.
7:29
I'd say glamorized a little bit. It was
7:31
every bit the truth and
7:34
drinking and just drugging and
7:36
using women and abusing
7:39
cars and abusing myself. And
7:43
I just was very angry for some
7:45
reason. Well, your father died. I think
7:47
that's pretty, a 16 year old kid that
7:50
probably idolized his father at that point. My best
7:52
friend, he was a good man to this day.
7:54
He's probably the most honest man that
7:57
I ever knew in my life. Yeah, I think being mad
7:59
at the world probably an appropriate God.
8:02
I like to say my story, I was
8:04
a God-fearing kid. And when my
8:06
father was taken away like that and my family was just
8:08
fucked, I just said, you know what,
8:11
fuck God, there's no God. I get to
8:13
be a God. And that's the
8:15
big argument I get from people that
8:17
I have friends who we get into these discussions and I
8:20
was in prison, well, you know, I was
8:22
framed, I didn't do anything wrong, I'm in jail, how could
8:24
there be a God? I had
8:26
a baby and she's autistic and
8:28
has to live in a home. She never did a
8:30
thing wrong in her life. Why is she, why is
8:32
my wife, why are we punished? So, you know, there's
8:34
all kinds of questions. So God
8:37
died when my father died. And
8:39
17 years later when I got
8:41
sober in rehab, I found
8:43
God again through the program, the 12 step programs.
8:45
Well, let's talk about this. So when
8:49
did you get into the Wall Street game?
8:51
Okay. So I go to college. So
8:53
you were still drinking, drugging, partying like crazy. I don't
8:56
remember college. I don't remember a day. How did you,
8:58
so- To get honest. They let you graduate. You somehow
9:00
got into college. I got into college and just so
9:02
you know, the way I graduated high school, I had
9:04
to take a summer school. I wasn't allowed to graduate
9:06
with my class. So
9:09
I couldn't go to graduation. I
9:11
had to take a course and read a couple of
9:13
books and write a big paper about
9:16
World War II and the use of the atomic bomb
9:18
on Hiroshima and I could suck, like an expert in
9:20
that field. It's something I really remember
9:22
from the last year in high
9:24
school. But I'm drinking. I'm drunk. I
9:27
don't know what's funny about that is
9:29
technically, technically speaking, I've
9:32
never said this on this show, but I'm gonna
9:34
say it now. Technically speaking, I did not have
9:37
enough credits to graduate from high school. I love
9:39
getting honest. Yeah, yeah. No, because my senior year
9:41
of high school, I played on our golf team
9:43
and the coach of our
9:45
golf team was also the guidance counselor. So
9:49
my senior year of high school, my schedule, if you had,
9:51
if you took team sports, if you played a team sport
9:53
with high school, you could go practice. So
9:56
I took my schedule. My senior year
9:58
was teams in which team sports had no. credits,
10:00
right? My senior schedule was
10:02
team sports, team sports, team
10:04
sports, team sports, AP
10:06
English, lunch, AP
10:09
calculus, team sports. That was my
10:12
schedule. Right? So I would just go play golf all
10:14
day and then come take two classes, go to lunch,
10:16
go play golf again, and then practice with a team.
10:18
And I was just doing that constantly. And at the
10:20
end of the year, my counselor
10:22
calls me down and he says, Hey, you don't have enough
10:25
credits to graduate. I was like,
10:27
well, dude, that's your
10:29
fault. You let me, you, you saw me
10:31
do this. You let me do this. You
10:33
helped me do this, whatever. And I don't
10:35
know what he did, but
10:37
I got to graduate with 23 and a half credits
10:41
from my school gaming the system
10:43
all these years later. I'm
10:45
happy to statute of limitations is probably fast, but,
10:47
uh, you're safe. We're getting, we're getting honest to
10:50
you and I love it. Well, I'm keeping it.
10:52
I'd keep it real cause my father also
10:54
did not graduate from high school. Wow. Later
10:56
became a judge. I mean, went
10:59
to law school, did everything else. And well he went,
11:01
yeah. Cause back then you could just, you know, he
11:03
never took the GED, but he just, with the credits,
11:05
he just, he went right into college, right? They didn't
11:07
require him to have a high school degree. And it
11:09
was funny as years later when he was judge, um,
11:14
like his 50th class reunion or some shit,
11:16
our small hometown, he wanted to go. So
11:18
he's like, would you guys give me an
11:21
honorary degree? And they're like, sure. Take the
11:23
G. They said, they said, take
11:25
the GED. Yes.
11:27
They want to take a GED to get high school. You
11:29
didn't do it. It's good to be
11:31
the judge, right? Yeah. It was so fun. I
11:33
was like, I have two college degrees and I'm
11:36
like, what's going on? Anyway, enough
11:38
about that. That's very funny. Yeah, it is
11:40
funny. Sorry. I'm entertaining myself right
11:42
now and I should be being entertained by you Ross.
11:44
I'm sorry. Let's go. No, no, I love it. This
11:46
is fantastic. Get back to you. So, you know, I
11:48
go to, I go to, uh, uh, SUNY at Albany
11:50
because I had a full scholarship because my academics from
11:53
grades nine, 10 and 11 was spectacular. I was
11:55
like number six in the class of the six
11:57
24 and my senior year was just
11:59
based. Basically, I got a pass because
12:02
I wrote that paper. Yeah. So
12:04
my transcripts, I had already applied to like a bunch
12:06
of schools early application and I was
12:08
accepted, went to University of Albany. And basically
12:10
I had a bong next to my bed
12:13
and I was hitting the bong every morning. Wake
12:15
and bake. That's wake and bake. And the rest
12:17
of the day was just, I don't know what
12:19
happened really. I had a lot of girlfriends and
12:22
had a lot of sex and I did a lot
12:24
of drugs and it was freezing cold. And I said,
12:26
this is terrible. What year is this? This is 1975.
12:30
September 75, that semester. All
12:32
right. And myself and
12:34
a bunch of kids, like sort of a
12:37
Long Island high school kids that wish to hang out
12:39
on Long Island, go to the city and all that.
12:42
We all decided to transfer to University
12:44
of Maryland, College Park. Okay. Which
12:46
I later believe I'm not an endowed, gave them half a
12:49
million dollars. And that's a
12:51
legacy I left there before
12:53
I went to prison, 2004. Okay.
12:56
You know. So it became a tarpon. So
12:58
I become a tarp, lefty dries out was
13:00
the coach. And you know,
13:03
we had some really famous athletes there
13:05
and Randy White, the big tip from
13:07
the Texas. Big 10, those Cowboys. Big
13:09
10 now. Yeah. Yeah. But
13:11
that was, it was, it was pretty cool. And the
13:14
drugging and drinking continued. And
13:16
I was like a cool kid. I like
13:18
a Camaro. I had
13:20
a wrestler's body. I used to wrestle in a
13:22
high school and I played football and all that.
13:25
And I was lean. And
13:28
I just didn't, I had this like, I
13:30
didn't give a fuck attitude. And something about
13:32
that makes you attractive to young people. When
13:35
you're older, you're a bum. You
13:37
know, but when you're a kid and you're not
13:39
bad looking and you have this attitude, you're
13:42
doing drugs, you're drinking, you become popular somehow.
13:45
I don't know. And I ran
13:47
with like a group of guys that
13:50
were basically not really interested in
13:52
school, who were interested in
13:54
throwing parties in the college. And I, and I heard
13:56
you share about that with the kid
13:58
from Notre Dame. Oh yeah. And I was also one
14:00
of those kids that, you know, we used to throw parties at
14:03
the hot clubs. That's the way to do it. It's freaking $20
14:05
to get in. Then we would sell them
14:07
quaaludes when not the way to, not the way to do it.
14:09
That part's not the way to do it. The very enterprise. But,
14:12
you know, don't do that, kids. People say to me,
14:14
so, you know, I
14:18
was basically drinking and drugging all the
14:20
time and it's expensive. It's
14:23
really an expensive hobby. And
14:25
the old you get in the fancy, you know, you talk about
14:27
bottle surfs and clubs, and I was one of those guys sitting
14:29
with him, $10,000 on the
14:31
floor at Marrakesh in the Hamptons. You know, this is
14:33
what we're talking to in 1980. And
14:37
one of those guys, best table VIP.
14:39
So I'm I'm using and
14:42
every dime I'm earning hustling, I'm
14:44
spending. And I hooked up
14:46
with a group of men, went to
14:48
graduate college. We all just went to sell something. That's
14:50
what guys like us do. It
14:54
doesn't. Didn't pass me
14:56
that you're selling real estate. Because guys like us sell
14:58
stuff. You sell. That's what we do. And
15:01
I was pretty good at selling because I love people. I
15:03
get it. You know, I can
15:06
hang pretty much with any crowd. And
15:10
but I need money. And so one day one of
15:12
my friends calls and says, listen, I want you to buy this stock.
15:15
I get a tip from my broker. Even
15:18
though we was talking about what some stock
15:20
for three and it went to eight. He
15:22
sold it and made money. We said, fuck
15:24
this. I'm going to Wall Street. Yeah. That's the best
15:27
job in the world. Right. And so, you know, we're
15:29
also going out in those days of Studio 54 and
15:31
the disco Arizona, that kind of thing magic.
15:34
Expressing your love can look many
15:36
different ways. And with the right
15:38
jewelry gift from Blue Nile, it
15:40
can truly sparkle. Blue Nile's collection
15:42
of classic diamond jewelry makes for
15:44
the kind of gift that speaks
15:46
volumes without saying a single word
15:48
or switch things up with a
15:50
Sapphire piece, sure to spark conversation.
15:52
Either way, Blue Nile's diamond guarantee
15:54
ensures you get the highest quality at the
15:56
best price. Express yourself with Blue Nile and
15:58
get a- up to 30% off
16:01
at bluenile.com. That's bluenile.com.
16:04
OneKey cards earn 3% in OneKey Cash
16:06
for travel at grocery stores, restaurants, and
16:09
gas stations. So the more you spend
16:11
on groceries, dining, and gas, the sooner
16:13
you can use OneKey Cash towards your
16:15
next trip on Expedia, hotels.com, and Vrbo.
16:18
And get away from groceries, dining, and
16:20
gas. And Platinum members earn up to
16:22
9% on travel when
16:25
booking VIP access properties on
16:27
Expedia and hotels.com. OneKey Cash
16:29
is not redeemable for cash.
16:31
Terms apply. Learn more at
16:33
expedia.com/OneKeyCards. Imagine earning a
16:35
degree that prepares you with real skills
16:38
for the real world. Capella University's programs
16:40
teach skills relevant to your career, so
16:42
you can apply what you learn right
16:44
away. Learn how Capella can make a
16:46
difference in your life at capella.edu.
16:50
I don't think it's like that anymore.
16:53
But what do I know? Old as
16:55
fuck now, so
17:07
I look at it. We
17:11
would go to the studio 54, there'd be 10,000 people on
17:13
54th Street and they let a hundred people playing
17:16
the game with the velvet ropes. Sure. And
17:19
you'll finally, we'd get in and we'd say, you know, how
17:21
did you get in? How come you have, you pulled up
17:23
in a Lamborghini or a
17:26
Rolls Royce and you have this hot chick and you had the
17:28
best table. Like, if you don't mind me asking, why are you,
17:30
how do you get this? It wasn't a movie
17:32
star. It wasn't a face. I recognize. I
17:34
work on wall street. I'm a trader. I'm a
17:36
broker. Uh, you know, I do arbitrage.
17:38
I do leverage buyouts. So you went to wait,
17:41
you went to the EF Hutton training program. I
17:43
did. I did. So if you had to take,
17:45
cause cause that was probably back then, that was
17:47
almost a gold standard. It was. They went Merrill
17:49
Lynch. Yeah. My good friend over here
17:51
went to Merrill Lynch training. Yeah. But, but you look
17:53
at, you look at training programs, you know, for sales
17:55
and that was probably a gold standard. I mean, I
17:57
think spectacular. I think even today there's a. couple that
17:59
I would say, you know, I advise people to do
18:01
this. It was the advice I got years ago when
18:03
I got out of the bar and restaurant business and
18:06
got into sales. My buddy said, look, dude, at this point,
18:09
the easiest, fastest way to get a PhD in sales is
18:11
to go sell Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door, or
18:15
go or go sell Highline cars.
18:19
Either one of those things. Well yeah. Now I, now
18:21
I'd probably also say solar would probably be a good
18:23
thing to write. Cause some of those solar companies have
18:25
amazing training programs, but yeah, it was, it
18:27
was a great way. But back then that EF Hutton, you
18:30
know, gold standard training program. What was
18:32
the, if you had to pick one
18:35
thing that was a best thing that you learned out
18:37
of that training program, what would it have been? So
18:40
they're trying to teach you a certain way to sell. You
18:43
want to sound educated. You're talking about securities.
18:45
You calling people cold on the phone. You're
18:48
asking for, you know, orders of a hundred, $250,000 and you have
18:50
$1,500 DNA. And
18:54
so, you know, I learned
18:56
humility. I
18:59
learned humility. There were guys next to
19:01
me that looked like you six four
19:03
gorgeous. Doesn't matter on the phone, baby.
19:06
You know, many of you, many of you guys
19:08
sounded great. You sounded slick. So I'll
19:10
never forget. I started out in this training program, 130
19:13
people and we all had a big board
19:15
room and they put us on the phone. And when
19:17
you got a guy on the phone, a lead
19:20
pitch, you had to raise your hand. And you, everyone, everyone
19:22
is at a desk, a numbered desk. I was number eight.
19:25
And I go like this and the guy at the front
19:27
of the day, it's with senior brokers like 20 of them.
19:29
They'd see, I raised my hand. They
19:31
would go to the brain and they would listen in. So
19:34
the first time I made a co-core and the guy
19:36
answered, my hands were shaking so bad I hung
19:38
up. And
19:41
I'm looking around and all these people are raising their hands and they're
19:43
pitching and all this. And, uh, and
19:46
so then I dialed, I dialed, and then I got a guy answered
19:48
the phone and, uh, I hung
19:50
up the second time. My hands are shaking. But
19:53
meanwhile, everyone around me seems to be like on the
19:55
phone and everybody's attacking and feeling good. I'm like, I
19:58
mean, get your shit together, bro. Jumped at
20:00
myself talk. I mean come on just do it right.
20:03
I was scared of shit and a lot of people
20:05
say worse man That's good. What and
20:07
I was I confess it's the truth and it's something
20:09
everybody should know Nobody just has
20:11
the balls to get on the phone and be a star
20:13
and all these different things You got to go through it.
20:15
It's a callous God, I go
20:17
through it bro. You play golf. I'm never
20:20
played. I wanted to play golf one year
20:22
I'm with the golf school and
20:24
I go out there and I'm playing golf playing 1836 You
20:27
know 54 my hands are sore. I
20:29
got blisters and cowards is right. There's
20:32
no way around it Yeah,
20:34
I mean he'd buy golf clubs But I this
20:36
is if you want to play you play football
20:38
you're gonna have those aches and pains and the
20:40
saunas and all that Good stuff So
20:43
okay, so I go to this program and
20:45
I'm doing my thing and I
20:47
understand there's no one way To
20:49
be great at sales It's very
20:52
stylistic But there are certain certain basic
20:54
tenets and techniques that everybody should know
20:57
You could buy books and you can listen to
20:59
tapes and video and you know The wolf of
21:01
Wall Street, Jordy Belfer teaches a straight line method,
21:04
which is called the Lehman method Yeah, but the
21:06
only way to be greater anything is repetition repetition
21:09
repetition repetition I see morons
21:13
They just that have no business picking
21:15
up a phone making a half
21:17
a million seven hundred fifty thousand a year Just
21:20
because they don't quit stick
21:22
to it ofness. It's a great quality. You
21:25
don't get down You eat
21:27
rejection and you just keep going
21:30
the only way to lose is to
21:32
quit well what we teach our people
21:34
here that is for me the ultimate
21:36
cure for that for that ailment of
21:39
Terrified of the know right as
21:41
we value the know in everything we do and every
21:43
business that I have that involves Outbound
21:46
reach, you know outbound calling No,
21:49
it's converted warmly to this whatever it is anything
21:51
that balls outbound. We value the know which I
21:53
say, okay, look You're closing
21:55
probability on these is about three to five percent.
21:57
Whatever it is, which means that three percent three
21:59
people out of 100 you're gonna say yes. So
22:02
when they say yes you make five
22:04
grand. So now you take
22:06
you know three percent so
22:08
now you say 15 grand is what you're gonna
22:10
make per 100 calls. So everybody tells
22:13
you to go fuck yourself you're
22:15
really making about 150 bucks. Kind of makes
22:17
it go down a little smoother when
22:19
you're looking at that way. You
22:21
see I found you put blinders on and
22:23
you don't calculate you don't analyze you don't
22:25
think. No. You just do. So I'll tell
22:27
you this story but we have Hutton. Yeah.
22:30
And finally I raised my hand they get
22:32
a guy in the phone and I make
22:34
my pitch and at
22:36
the end of this a week they rate every
22:38
one of the sales people. Out of 133 people
22:40
I was like 80.
22:43
I was like you know
22:45
barely in the top 70 percent or whatever it
22:47
was. That would make people
22:49
better than me and
22:51
that was very humbling and
22:54
I thought I didn't think I was very
22:56
good but you know what that
22:58
doesn't matter. All that matters is
23:00
that you keep going. And
23:02
so what happened was at
23:04
the end of the first year we got our three sevens
23:07
and then we went on business for real. It
23:11
was February of 1984. I started
23:14
by the end of the year I was
23:16
number one in opening accounts by
23:18
a mile by the way. By a mile. And what
23:20
do you attribute that to? And then
23:22
I was second in gross production.
23:24
I was generated commissions. The only one that
23:27
was ahead of me was
23:29
Marge Shot's son, Steven
23:31
Shot, who had a 500 million dollar
23:33
trust fund and was just trading his own money to
23:35
make commissions. Yeah right. He had one account himself and
23:37
his mom you know I mean. So
23:39
I and so I was shocked by this because
23:42
if you just heard heard me in a
23:44
room of a hundred people selling you would
23:48
think I'm okay but you know
23:50
you walk by nothing. That's what made you great.
23:53
Just psychology. Just stick to it
23:55
of this and learning
23:57
to manage.
24:00
Fear everybody's afraid.
24:02
I never understood that when
24:04
I was a kid and you know the
24:06
first day of school We I don't know if you had a school bus
24:08
where you grew up you to go in a corner and wait for a
24:10
school bus I went I'd be like daddy.
24:12
I'm scared I'm so
24:15
scared and like when I had to
24:17
go away to sleep away camp I was like 10
24:19
years old or eight years old and I was leaving
24:21
parents drop you off And then you don't see it
24:23
for two months and I said
24:25
daddy. I'm so scared My
24:27
father would say son you're not scared
24:30
You just have anxiety you nervous and he
24:32
taught me the word of anxiety of anxiety
24:36
Just don't worry. Everybody feels anxious
24:39
and that was like a volume to a young
24:41
boy Because I I
24:44
would go through life looking at you and say
24:46
look at this guy. So toys handsome. He's got
24:48
a great rap He's not scared. Oh But
24:51
I'm scared and once I learned they
24:53
figured that everybody's scared So
24:56
not just picking up the phone not just me the
24:58
guy that's answering the phone is scared. He's
25:00
got fear He's got anxiety and
25:02
so all of it just went away It
25:04
went away when I realized that I was sort of normal that
25:07
way and you just got
25:09
to keep going You have
25:11
to you have to learn every technique there is but
25:13
then adopt it and create your own style And
25:16
I quickly learned that I can't
25:18
sound as slick as
25:21
some of these sort of Harvard educated Ivy
25:23
League educated guys a guy like you father
25:25
was a big attorney. You well spoken, you
25:27
know, you're very Well
25:30
manicured we're gonna start dating you keep He's
25:37
got no hair out of place I'm
25:39
gonna have to understand my wife's I'm gonna explain
25:42
this episode to my wife You
25:44
know, your wife is that good-looking I should
25:46
explain it So what
25:48
I'm saying really is that I
25:50
adopted my own style and people
25:52
are just people We're
25:55
all the same. We all
25:57
feel the same kind of things, you
25:59
know A lot of people go through life
26:02
and they say, oh, look at that guy, look
26:04
at that, this guy's a garbage man, this guy's
26:06
a lawyer, this guy's a judge, this guy's a
26:08
waiter. But we're all
26:10
the same. If you stop looking for
26:12
the differences and you focus on the
26:15
realities, the blessings, the common threads we
26:17
all have, it allows
26:19
you to move through the world in a much
26:22
cleaner and more effective way. Well,
26:25
the best thing I think I've ever heard about
26:27
sales, I was watching, there's a show in HBO,
26:29
which is almost unwatchable, it's called industry. The reason
26:31
it's unwatchable, especially if you've got kids, because it's
26:34
essentially really great trading floor
26:36
dialogue than drugs, than
26:38
sex, then really great trading floor dialogue, than drugs
26:40
and sex. And it just repeats
26:42
every episode. It's just like, yeah, it's just like, can't
26:45
watch it with kids walking around. But
26:47
there were times, it's there's a trading floor
26:49
in London at a company and the guy's
26:51
explaining to the first year people
26:54
on the teams, he says, listen, he's
26:56
after him, similar job is, our job is
26:58
to talk people into making
27:00
a decision that we know is right for
27:02
them much faster than they want
27:04
to make that decision. I like it. And
27:07
I thought, man, that is such a good way to
27:09
explain really what sales is on an
27:11
intimate level. What's about identifying a need?
27:13
Yeah. You like to make money? Sure.
27:17
You sure? I wouldn't be here if it didn't. Okay, or if
27:19
I could show you a way that you can make some money,
27:22
you'd be interested in chatting with me. You've talked about how
27:24
attractive I am. I think you're gonna turn me out Ross.
27:26
I think this could be a problem. So you understand it's
27:28
like, it's about
27:30
understanding we're all the same and
27:32
we all have certain needs. And, you know,
27:35
when you go to Wall Street, they teach you to tap into fear
27:37
and greed. I have an opportunity for
27:39
you. Okay, so you
27:41
can't take advantage of this opportunity. Don't worry, I'm
27:44
sure there'll be another opportunity or down
27:46
the road. I just hate to see you miss out
27:48
on. FOMO. You know, the old,
27:50
the takeaway sale. I mean, there's just so
27:52
many methods and effective techniques that are taught
27:54
by geniuses, experts. I
27:57
mean, they have analyzed this fricking field and
27:59
you can, there's so many. much information available,
28:01
but again until you do
28:03
it over and
28:05
over and over again, you
28:08
don't have an edge. You know, I used to
28:10
make $300 a day for 20 years. I used
28:13
to pitch a minimum of 10
28:15
people every day. I'm qualifying, I
28:17
walk around through life and I qualify everybody.
28:19
I want to know everything about
28:21
everybody. I don't do it, I don't do it consciously anymore.
28:24
It's just, you know, when I went to prison and
28:27
I was in a few places, I know
28:29
everybody, I knew what their worth was, I know
28:31
what, you know, what they were doing, I understand
28:33
where they are in life, I understand details about
28:35
their lives, so forth and so on. And,
28:38
you know, I have an advantage in the fact that I
28:40
genuinely like people. It's not an act. Yeah, you can't, I
28:42
don't think you can be great in a sales job if
28:44
you hate, if you don't hate people. I don't think you
28:47
can. Well, I have, I have some examples
28:49
of guys that make millions and
28:51
really hate people. Really? Yeah, but I think
28:53
it's because they have low self-esteem and they
28:55
hate themselves. I haven't really analyzed it that
28:57
carefully, but I know that they really
29:00
think that they're very superior and they don't like
29:02
anybody and they don't care for people,
29:04
but they're great sales guys because they're practiced at
29:06
it. They're practiced at it,
29:08
but the best thing I could tell you with
29:10
sales is most salesmen are nervous, so you talk
29:12
at, you talk at the person and
29:15
the idea in sales is to talk with
29:17
somebody. Yeah. Doing something together. Yeah. Nobody wants
29:19
to buy anything, but everybody wants to own
29:22
something. It's like we always say, if you're
29:24
talking more than the person you're talking to,
29:26
you're doing it wrong. Well,
29:28
you know, I don't think there are any
29:30
absolutes. There are stylistic differences, you know? So
29:34
let's, so let's get back to EF Hutton. So, so you,
29:36
when do you leave EF Hutton and start your own deal?
29:38
Well, I go to EF Hutton and I leave in 1986
29:40
to go to Oppenheimer Company.
29:42
What was the offer that your boss put on the table
29:44
at that kind of production to EF Hutton? What was the
29:46
offer your boss put on the table as you're walking out
29:48
the door? Well, I had, I'll give
29:50
you an example. Right in 1987, I was lured
29:54
away from a place called DH Blair. This
29:56
is where I started making millions of dollars. I
29:59
went there in my... I had a few
30:01
thousand dollars and I ended
30:03
up having 30 million dollars on my account on
30:06
my 29th birthday. And
30:08
I left and they, you know, I was routinely off at 300,
30:10
350,000 upfront, which in those days is, you know. It's
30:15
good money. Pretty decent money upfront. Yeah. Very
30:18
little, just changing my desk and
30:20
you know. Well, I can just,
30:22
I can just imagine the powers that be
30:24
at these companies when you're walking out the
30:26
door, just doing, throwing just ridiculous shit at
30:28
you, they do, they do.
30:31
And they threaten to, it's, I was threatened
30:33
quite often for leaving. First
30:35
they try the carrot, then they go with the stick.
30:37
Yeah. That's a big play because these
30:39
men are lesser than you and
30:41
they don't know really to how to
30:43
sort of outsell you and
30:45
their propositions are not working. So then they go
30:48
with the stick. That's something that, you
30:51
know, small people are very good at doing. And
30:53
so a lot of the problems that I had on
30:56
my record were from me
30:58
saying, listen, I'm out of here, bro. I
31:01
wish you good luck. And then they would just write
31:03
me up on there. I'm like, well, you five it's
31:05
called within the industry. It's like, it's
31:07
like industry talk. I would get you five in a negative
31:10
way. I left. But
31:12
if I stayed, I was getting a 300, half a million to
31:15
put on an office, you know, partnership, but because
31:17
I decided to leave, they would write me up
31:20
like I'm a bad guy and all these different
31:22
things. Trying to damage that future deal. Yeah. That's
31:24
gross. And that happens a lot
31:27
in this business. It's just really, it's
31:29
cutthroat. That's gross. And then everybody tries
31:31
to steal everybody's clients. You
31:33
know, it's a very different kind of game than let's
31:35
say real estate. Not dude,
31:37
no, it is not. I mean,
31:39
we're a completely vertically integrated company here, right? So
31:42
we own our own mortgage company. We own our own title and
31:44
escrow company. We own everything. If there's a
31:46
nickel spin around real estate, we own part
31:48
of that company. I love it. That's just
31:51
doing that. And we have
31:53
had because, you know, like, look, if
31:55
you, one key cards earn
31:57
3% in one key cash for
31:59
travel. at grocery stores, restaurants, and gas
32:02
stations. So the more you spend on
32:04
groceries, dining, and gas, the sooner you
32:06
can use OneKey Cash towards your next
32:08
trip on Expedia, hotels.com, and Verbo. And
32:10
get away from groceries,
32:12
dining, and gas. And platinum members earn up
32:14
to 9% on travel when
32:16
booking VIP access properties on
32:19
Expedia and hotels.com. OneKey Cash
32:21
is not redeemable for cash.
32:23
Terms apply. Learn more at
32:25
expedia.com/OneKeyCards. Imagine earning a degree
32:27
that prepares you with real skills for
32:30
the real world. Capella University's programs teach
32:32
skills relevant to your career, so you
32:34
can apply what you learn right away.
32:36
Learn how Capella can make a difference
32:38
in your life at capella.edu. When
32:43
you're a real estate company and you all
32:45
of a sudden start opening a title company,
32:47
and you're competing with the big,
32:49
giant national powers that be that have always had
32:51
full reign of being able to walk in. I
32:53
mean, just so you know, this real estate company
32:55
that you're in, this is the number two highest
32:57
grossing company for real estate in
32:59
Nevada. Love it, and Nevada's
33:01
one of the best markets. Yeah, yeah, we'll do
33:04
$2 billion plus in sales this year. We'll do
33:06
4,000 plus transactions. We've
33:09
got just under 600 agents who work here,
33:11
which is great for the number. The number
33:13
one company has like 1,800 agents,
33:16
and the number three company has like 1,100 agents. So
33:19
we- We have 600, you said? We have just
33:21
under 600. So we're doing extremely well
33:23
what we do. So, you know,
33:25
we're big, we're 6% of the market is
33:27
this company. And when you shut
33:29
the door- In the bottom market. Yeah, and when
33:31
you shut the door on
33:34
the big national title companies, because you
33:36
opened your own, they don't like
33:38
that shit. They do not like that shit. And over
33:41
the years, we've had them come in and
33:43
poach some of our
33:46
bigger salespeople from the company. And
33:48
yeah, with the walking papers if
33:50
they were gonna try to come
33:52
in and steal our business. And
33:54
none of them have been successful doing it. We've
33:58
been able to kind of, you know. I'll
34:00
flank that in our own way through good
34:02
quality relationships. And we continue to have to
34:04
do that. So that's about it, we always
34:06
have to fight. That's not singular
34:09
to that, any one industry. If
34:11
you're making money and there's a bigger company
34:14
that's making more, you're gonna have a problem.
34:17
You know, there's a common thread that runs
34:19
through all business, I get that. And
34:22
then there are the differences, but
34:24
the common threads remain the common threads. So
34:27
I was speaking on a different level, but
34:29
when I went on my own and
34:31
I built my own broker dealer, that's
34:34
when things are really interesting. Yeah, so it's not like that.
34:36
Yeah, so in 1990, the end of 94, beginning of 1995,
34:42
I bought a broker dealer, it
34:46
was the NASD broker dealer, today the term is FINRA, from
34:49
a guy named Jerry Roth, who was a partner
34:51
at Spear Leech Kellogg, that
34:54
tried owning his own place. And
34:56
he just wasn't cut out for that kind of
34:59
thing. He was a very
35:01
successful trader, he had a huge house,
35:03
18 horses, stables, the whole thing, Bedford,
35:05
New York. So I paid him $2
35:07
million, and I signed
35:10
an amazing real estate deal. Best real
35:12
estate deal anyone knows. In
35:14
the middle of Manhattan, on
35:17
Madison Avenue, 52nd
35:19
Street, in the corner of Madison
35:22
Avenue, 52nd Street, and
35:24
I paid $23 a square foot, the
35:28
$250,000 build out, 12,000 square feet. And
35:32
eventually when I sold the firm, Blackstone
35:37
took my office space, paying
35:39
about 175 a square foot. Oh
35:42
man. I was paid $23 a square foot. That
35:44
is a good deal. It's a great story, but I
35:46
had to make the deal within two hours, take it
35:49
or leave it. Bank of America was being acquired by
35:53
Nations Bank, and they kept
35:56
their name back up America, but the deal was they had a
35:58
divest of like 10 million square feet of. Real
36:00
estate all around the country and I do it one day So
36:03
that fire sale my lawyer said you can go take a look It's
36:05
gonna be the deal of your life, but you have to make a
36:07
decision in two hours I said what I
36:09
don't like I don't like being rushed to hurried, but it
36:11
was legit and So I
36:13
made the deal and I got a build out and it
36:15
was amazing with an amazing run But
36:18
um, you know when you when you go on your own When
36:22
you work for somebody you don't really understand
36:24
the totality of the game once you
36:26
open up your own place The
36:29
people say ah fuck him. I could do this
36:31
I could do this on my own you never
36:33
really understand what it's like because if you're the
36:35
captain of ship You don't always
36:37
show to the staff the underlings.
36:39
Oh what it is you go. You got to
36:41
be the duck man You
36:44
gotta move and smooth and cool cool on
36:46
top of the surface of water But paddle
36:48
like a mother trucker below to keep up
36:50
you're an actor. Yeah, and that's part of
36:52
the game and basically a problem-solver and I
36:56
put together a group of young men
36:58
gave them a piece of the firm and For
37:02
you know what? I have like 150 guys working for me doing
37:05
tons of business I sold out
37:07
in about 18 or 19 months and
37:09
I made close to 40 million dollars Yeah, it's
37:12
good clip. It's just boom Bing
37:14
Bang Boom and then I found my wife there. I
37:17
Sort of just took it easy for a while. I just was trading the
37:19
market. It was the end of the 90s and It
37:22
was the beginning of the dot-com boom and
37:24
everything I bought just went wild
37:28
Every every company I put some money
37:30
in just went crazy yeah, and
37:32
I was getting in getting out getting in getting out and And
37:36
then the dot-com crash came To
37:39
March of 2000 to give you an idea Amazon
37:41
went from $300 the Amazon
37:44
we know today to three in
37:46
like three weeks The market
37:48
was the end of the world part one and
37:51
run fourth
37:53
biggest Company in the United States biggest
37:56
energy trading company in the world fraud
37:58
zero world calm world Bernie
38:01
Ebbers fraud. Yeah, that's the biggest company
38:03
in the world. The phone company forgot
38:05
to zero Fraud I got
38:07
but I got burned because of world calm Business
38:10
I was doing yeah, one of the guys that was a partner in a
38:12
business that I was in that we were about to launch Was
38:15
a VP at WorldCom and lost Everything
38:19
and like one day I supposed everything lost
38:21
it all over. He has entire Because
38:23
because world comes talk Scorching and
38:25
he just so he moved his entire 401k every
38:28
into it everything everything was a roll calm and
38:30
dude He lost everything in a day and he
38:32
went in a very dark place in it killed
38:35
that business I was stuck that I already
38:37
invested with with him. It's a loosen technologies.
38:39
L. U. A Bell
38:41
darling an a plus rated company
38:43
went from 82 to 0
38:47
to whatever it was, you know, it was crazy Yeah,
38:50
and I'm sitting at the beach at what
38:52
had nice beach house on Long Island and
38:55
I'm looking at these idiots They're preying on
38:57
CNBC with their thoughts about what's
38:59
happening. I said, what are these people
39:01
stupid? This is a
39:03
fucking this is a bear market. This
39:05
is a real correction and I've
39:07
made in 1987
39:10
I sat in front of the screen and
39:12
I watched I had about a hundred ten million on my money
39:14
line I watched you go down to
39:16
about 20 million. I Watched
39:18
my own 30 million dollars Go
39:21
down to two million dollars the
39:23
crash of 87. Oh in
39:25
in in less than a year I
39:27
went from having 30 million to
39:29
two million that some people say we
39:32
start to mean it's pretty good, but Work
39:37
like that when you're living on 30, it's
39:39
a what's yeah, and I was like I you
39:41
couldn't believe because there hadn't been a crash since
39:44
1929 Yeah, we
39:46
were just flying. I mean it was so easy to make
39:48
money. I go in two three days a week I make
39:50
a hundred grand, you know, I buy
39:52
new Mercedes I go next week two three two
39:54
three days a week make another hundred grand. It
39:56
was sick and I
39:59
learned a lot and I And again, the
40:01
market stock market like golf, the game, it's
40:03
humbling. There's a humility
40:06
that even the best have. But
40:09
once you sort of understand the game, it's
40:12
much easier to play the game and to succeed. So
40:14
in 2000, when the markets cracked, I was sitting with
40:17
a load of cash and
40:20
a new baby and a beautiful
40:22
wife, apartment in Manhattan, we're at
40:24
the beach, sort of
40:26
semi-retired. And I said, you
40:28
know what I called up my lawyer said, listen, I'm gonna start a
40:30
company. I sketched out on a pad what I wanted it to look
40:32
like. It's not going
40:34
to be like my last stockbroker's firm. This
40:37
is going to be an international firm. I want
40:39
to take it public on a foreign stock exchange,
40:41
preferably in London. My lawyers like,
40:43
what, what, what, what is this coming from? Says,
40:46
this is going to cost a lot of money. I said, what do
40:48
you think? Now, we like
40:50
it's going to at least four and a half million, five
40:52
million just to get started. So I want to
40:54
raise nine. I always raise double what I think I need. So
40:58
I raised nine million bucks quickly, put together nine million
41:00
really, and started to approach
41:02
people that I've worked with over the years,
41:05
named the company Sky Capital because my older daughter
41:07
was Sky. She was three months old at the
41:09
time. And so I
41:11
was, I was, I wrote a proposition out and
41:14
created a document around the proposition was
41:17
that this correction was going
41:19
to lead to a prolonged bear market. And
41:21
the financial services industry was going to be
41:23
particularly hard hit because
41:26
there's less trading, less transactions, less
41:28
customers, lawsuits, just
41:30
everything is it, you know, you
41:32
lose your income, you lose your portfolio value.
41:35
It's terrible for people in the industry. I
41:37
said, I'll be able to buy assets for
41:39
five, 10 cents on the dollar. And
41:42
I bought out nine firms and
41:44
put this together, went to England to
41:46
try to go public. So wait. So
41:49
everything you bought, obviously vulture for you, vulture
41:51
funded it, but everything you bought was they
41:54
were all trading firms.
41:56
They were stockbrokers firms, trading
41:58
firms, market making firms. with
42:00
black box technology, all
42:02
these different things. They were all in tatters. A
42:04
lot of guys said, listen, just take my guys, because
42:07
if I don't, they're on the contract, they
42:09
can sue me to death. So I just
42:11
took a lot of stripped assets. I
42:13
paid off some debts. I did the right
42:16
thing. Yeah. And I built Sky Capital, and
42:18
then I went over to England, and
42:20
I had a meeting with the top law firm in
42:22
the city of London, because one of the most famous
42:24
lords in England was a personal client of mine for
42:27
many years. I'm very
42:29
well together. And he
42:31
set up this meeting, and I go up to the top of Tower 42. I
42:34
did a part of the story
42:36
in the wealth formula, which
42:38
is a new curriculum that I'm launching literally in three
42:41
weeks, Bradley and Lightspeed.
42:43
Yeah, Brad's a friend. And
42:45
it's going to be, I
42:47
believe, the most groundbreaking, unbelievable
42:50
business. We'll get to that. But I just want
42:53
to say, so I tell this story on the
42:55
camera beginning of this wealth
42:58
formula. The guys at Tower 42, I told
43:00
them what I want to do. And they told me, young man, you
43:02
should just get in the taxi and go right back to the airport
43:04
and go home. It's impossible.
43:08
I said, what do you mean impossible? I
43:11
said, is it impossible, or has it
43:13
never been done? Is it
43:15
improbable, or is it impossible? And they looked at
43:17
each other like, it's impossible. I
43:19
said, listen. They said the
43:21
four-minute mile was impossible. Until
43:24
somebody did it. And then what, 57 more people did
43:26
it the first year after? Crazy numbers.
43:28
Now everybody does it. I'm the only
43:30
one that can't run a mile on four-minute. Depends
43:34
on who's chasing me. I'll say that quickly. When
43:37
the feds came after me, I was pretty quick. So
43:42
the bottom line is a
43:45
lot of stuff is up here to the mind. If
43:47
you believe you can, or you believe you
43:49
can't, you're probably right. Henry
43:51
Ford. And if
43:54
you believe you can, impossible is really
43:57
I'm possible. Break
43:59
it down. I'm possible
44:03
so it would have never been done and I
44:07
Asked these guys a bunch of questions to say well if
44:09
you if somebody was gonna try even try this here's what
44:11
you would need a Member of Parliament a
44:13
parliamentary appointee probably a member of your American
44:16
Congress this that the other Within
44:18
two hours I put together the whole
44:20
package a United States
44:22
senator former United States
44:24
congressman Member of
44:26
Parliament and then a parliamentary appointee all
44:29
on board Had the
44:31
money Now it was just running
44:33
around in with finding an underwriter. That was quite a
44:35
challenge I admit, but I got it
44:37
done. I got it done fairly quickly and we had a Mementous
44:42
stock offering which you call an IPO. Yeah, and
44:45
the reason it was momentous People
44:47
probably don't remember but you might You're
44:50
still a little young we had this dot-com
44:52
crash in March of 2000 Just
44:55
when things were starting to heal their
44:57
market was starting to move into a
45:00
positive direction. We had 9-11 9-11
45:04
they whacked out the World Trade Center
45:06
and The
45:08
markets closed for a week In
45:11
two world wars we didn't have that But
45:13
the stock market the exchange was almost destroyed. They
45:15
only had one pipe left they
45:18
knew what they were doing when Zarebs
45:22
and and was destroyed really,
45:25
you know our whole camera sure came
45:27
very close and There
45:32
were no IPOs for almost two years
45:34
in England zero and In
45:37
June of o2. I took my company public sky
45:39
capital was priced at pound 85.
45:41
It opened up at two pounds 25
45:45
and stayed there for months and And
45:47
Brits put me on national television and
45:50
they used me to say look see
45:53
American guy comes here does this everybody 40% in
45:55
day one. Everything's okay and everything's okay It's
45:57
so safe to come back into the markets
45:59
literally put me on national television for nine
46:01
minutes. And they put this whole
46:04
thing behind me, like my stock went, the chart went
46:06
like this, because it was one day. Got
46:09
all of the hockey stick charts. And I went to jail, right?
46:12
And to make a long story
46:14
short, I really had to run, and
46:16
I bought a firm two days
46:18
later that had done half a billion dollars
46:20
in revenue the
46:22
year before, wildly profitable,
46:26
a hundred million dollar deal. And
46:28
I was off to the races. And I
46:30
started raising money and I
46:32
built a fund. And I took that fund public in 04. So
46:35
life was pretty good. So when
46:38
did the fed show up? In
46:40
November of 06, I'm having a board
46:42
meeting. I'm running two
46:44
public companies. I had offended
46:46
everybody by doing that, especially
46:50
some cats in Washington and lower Manhattan, which
46:52
I didn't understand. I thought I was doing a good
46:54
thing. I created a
46:56
way for US companies to
46:58
go public for a fraction of the cost,
47:01
a fraction of the regulatory hassle, and
47:04
for triple the liquidity. I
47:07
created that footprint. And after
47:09
I did it the second time, Goldman Sachs came
47:11
at me, asked me how I did it. I
47:13
spoke there very graciously at Goldman Sachs. And
47:16
200 companies followed my
47:18
footprint, including KKR, Blackstone,
47:20
all the big boys.
47:24
And they just tweaked what I did a little bit here
47:26
and there, but you go public over there, and
47:29
you have only biannual reporting. So you know what,
47:32
you're a wealthy guy, you're a smart guy.
47:34
You understand quarterly reporting, right? OneKey
47:36
cards earn 3% in
47:38
OneKey Cash for travel at grocery
47:40
stores, restaurants, and gas stations. So
47:43
the more you spend on groceries,
47:45
dining, and gas, the sooner you
47:47
can use OneKey Cash towards your
47:49
next trip on Expedia, hotels.com, and
47:51
Vrbo, and get away from groceries,
47:53
dining, and gas. And Platinum members
47:55
earn up to 9% on travel
47:57
when booking VIP access properties on
47:59
Expedia and hotels.com. OneKey Cash
48:01
is not redeemable for cash.
48:03
Terms apply. Learn more at
48:05
expedia.com/OneKeyCards. Imagine earning a degree
48:07
that prepares you with real skills for
48:10
the real world. Capella University's programs teach
48:12
skills relevant to your career so you
48:14
can apply what you learn right away.
48:16
Learn how Capella can make a difference
48:18
in your life at capella.edu. In
48:22
the stock market? Yeah, of course. You have a portfolio?
48:25
I do. Okay, do you own any foreign stocks by any
48:27
chance? I do not. Okay, now most people would say the
48:29
same thing as you, even if you did
48:31
own them, you'd say you own them in America because
48:33
there were different ways to get their paper, to
48:36
trade their paper from the United States.
48:39
But what you don't know is, so
48:41
you buy American stocks that trade in America
48:44
because it's quarterly reporting, is at level
48:46
of transparency, every three months they
48:48
have to sit down with their accounts and report everything
48:51
that's gone in the company. The whole rest
48:53
of the world doesn't do that. What
48:56
a shock. You know nobody knows that.
48:58
If you listen to this amazing podcast,
49:00
Escaping the Drift, with handsome
49:02
big John over here, I promise you're gonna
49:04
learn something right now. There you go. They
49:07
only have what you call buy annual reporting.
49:10
The whole rest of the world, you report twice
49:12
a year, and after six months,
49:14
you just do a review. It's
49:16
not even audited financials. You
49:18
only get audited financials once a year at the
49:20
end of the year. It
49:23
saves the company's zillions of dollars
49:25
in accounting fees. The
49:27
PCOAB, I hope they don't come after
49:29
me, the PCOAB is a professional accounting
49:31
board in America. They
49:33
became like the Vatican. They
49:36
have powers like the Pope in business here
49:38
in America because you
49:40
need them to sign off on your financials,
49:43
on their comments, on the audits, et
49:45
cetera, and they see how much money
49:47
you're making and they
49:49
say, you're a little old accountant all of a
49:52
sudden. He's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. All
49:54
of a sudden he's like, I want some
49:56
of that and you need my signature.
49:59
So they... break balls, just business, they have
50:01
the leverage, right? So they're
50:03
gonna squeeze you as much as they
50:05
can, squeeze the companies as much as they can. They
50:07
don't have that kind of power when they only have
50:09
one audit a year, the rest of the world. So
50:13
companies that don't, are not, you know, it
50:16
prompted to have to perform every three months
50:18
and put up real, you know, these crazy
50:20
growth numbers. With stocks gonna lose billions of
50:22
dollars in value. It's crazy, it's
50:25
crazy. You have a, it's like running a marathon,
50:27
but you know, every quarter mile,
50:29
half mile, you have someone regulating you. Yeah. Very
50:32
hard to execute a real
50:34
strategy. A long-term strategy. Right, when you're
50:36
working every three months at a
50:38
time. And that's what, that's polluted the American, capital
50:42
markets. Well, that's why it's so hard for these
50:44
guys to take a step back to do the
50:46
right thing long-term, because you can't take long-term. You're
50:49
gonna get smashed. Right, your money, if you're taking
50:51
a company public and you're part of a growth
50:53
company like that, I mean, you know, this is
50:55
your future right here. And every 90 days you're
50:57
being evaluated, which is quite unfair in my opinion.
50:59
It's a lot. Right, especially, and so who gets
51:02
up getting screwed with the public? You
51:04
know, so I create a wonderful way.
51:06
You go public over there, you'll have
51:08
your, you get all your stuff sorted out. You're
51:12
already regulated in public, you
51:14
have audited financials. All you gotta do,
51:17
you bring it back to the United States, you can
51:19
trade in a number of ways, or you go right
51:22
to NASDAQ. You know, all you gotta
51:24
do now is become reporting every quarter. You've
51:26
just eliminated tons of fees. You already have
51:28
a shareholder base. I mean,
51:30
I created something brilliant. And I
51:32
thought that it was amazing. I learned later
51:35
on that according to
51:37
certain people in
51:40
government and private sector. That was the air
51:42
quotes for those of you listening and out-lots
51:44
and certain people. Lower Manhattan lost about $100
51:47
billion in fees because
51:50
of the footprint I created. I don't like
51:53
that. Well, you know, it's like when you're
51:55
in prison, they say, don't fuck with my money. Yeah, that's
51:57
what a guy will say to you. Don't fuck with my
51:59
money. In them in the real
52:01
business world. They don't say that they just sick to do
52:03
J on you So
52:06
November 6 or so November 5th I'm having
52:08
a board meeting up at
52:10
Sky Capital with a parliamentary appointee former
52:12
congressman for me United States senator and
52:15
40 SWAT 8th FBI agents come in at
52:17
jackets Like in SWAT
52:20
style guns raised everybody freeze nobody
52:22
move Well up
52:24
what the fuck what's going on a guy guy?
52:28
Kurt Kurt Dangler throws me up against
52:30
the wall and Tells
52:32
me to shut the fuck up and he
52:35
says that I better give him all the guns Tell him where all
52:37
the guns and drugs are and he'll go easy on me I'm
52:40
like what why would
52:43
I have guns and drugs? Consintra
52:45
investment back. I'm running two public
52:47
companies you stupid fuck. I Mean,
52:50
of course, we didn't get along too well for the next five years But
52:53
you know he's coming at me like what
52:56
Now he had some it's somewhat fed him information Understand
52:59
they were fed information. It was
53:01
a bad raid. It was a bad
53:04
they they had called all
53:06
the New York press Were
53:08
down in the lobby of 110 Wall
53:10
Street. He got perp walked out when no not that
53:12
I don't know. I didn't get arrested for three years
53:15
after that. That was just that was just a search
53:17
and seizure range No, they just
53:19
had executed search warrant Because that
53:21
how you execute a search warrant today guns
53:23
drawn 40 agents locking down a floor calling
53:25
a whole New York media downstairs I'm
53:28
sure they thought there were guns and drugs Someone
53:31
had fed him some information and that was they were to
53:33
take me away in handcuffs Guess
53:35
what? So nothing a
53:37
couple hours later. They're like it's got 300 boxes.
53:40
They said nobody's getting arrested Nobody's in trouble and
53:42
we went back to trading. You know, I'm in
53:44
the front page of every newspaper in 130 countries
53:47
Literally, and what does that do to your client? Well,
53:49
you tell me if you want to do trades the
53:52
next day You want to do trades with Sky Capital?
53:54
No, so they they admit They
53:56
admit the Southern District of New
53:58
York today admits that they acted his judge,
54:00
jury and executioner. They should
54:02
go to jail for what they did to me.
54:04
Now, remember, I had hundreds of shareholders on public
54:06
companies. The next day, the stock
54:09
exchange calls the department of justice. It
54:11
says, what the hell? Are
54:13
you guys going to shut them down? We
54:15
need to know. These are public companies. We
54:18
have an obligation to the public. They
54:20
refuse to comment. But when they
54:22
came to Sky Capital, they said, nobody's getting
54:25
arrested. Nobody's in trouble. But
54:27
the fact that didn't bother to comment to them.
54:29
They refuse to comment. The stock exchange froze our
54:31
stocks at that moment. And
54:33
so literally hundreds, if
54:35
not thousands of people got
54:37
hit and still nobody sued me because
54:40
what did I do? I'm running a clean
54:42
business. I'm being ordered by
54:45
the SEC, by the NASD, FINRA, by
54:47
the London Stock Exchange, by the FSA,
54:49
those authorities in London. I
54:52
was being regulated by everybody. And
54:54
I had clean reports every
54:56
year, you know, little teeny little
54:58
things. My trader didn't punch
55:00
a time clock, you know, stupid stuff. So when did
55:02
they actually charge you? So this is in 06 November
55:05
of 06. Now
55:07
behind the scenes, they had arrested one or
55:09
two of my guys. We're doing scheming with
55:11
customers, stealing some
55:14
money, selling cocaine to
55:17
an FBI agent. And
55:20
July 2nd of 09, so
55:24
you're talking about three years. Yeah. Government
55:27
calls. So in the meantime, 18
55:30
months became very difficult for me
55:32
to run this business, the brokerage business. Very difficult.
55:35
The markets were a wreck. And
55:37
March 31st of 08, I
55:39
sold the companies. But
55:42
before they bought the companies, the institutions and some very wealthy people
55:44
went to the DOJ and said, look, we're about to
55:46
buy this company for tens of millions of dollars.
55:48
If you're going to indict it, we need to
55:50
know. We need to know. And
55:53
these were big guys out of the UK. I
55:55
mean, big names, royalty, etc. And
56:02
the DOJ said, we have three questions for Ross Mandel.
56:06
If you can answer these three questions satisfactorily,
56:08
he's free to go and you're free to
56:10
do what you want. Buy the company, there'll be no
56:12
problems. March 31st of 08,
56:14
now you're a real estate guy. You remember 08,
56:16
09, what's coming. Remember what's
56:18
coming, 08, 09, right? Yep,
56:21
mortgage implosion. So when I
56:23
entered the letter of intent to sell in
56:26
October of 07, Dow Jones hit 14,000 plus. It
56:31
was an all time high. The day I signed the papers, it
56:33
was an all time high. Nobody knew, but that's what happened. By
56:36
the time we closed five months later, March 31st, there
56:38
was a lot of due diligence, public company, always shareholders,
56:40
the government, everything else. The
56:42
Dow was down to 10,000 and
56:44
dipping every day. And
56:47
I was like, my wife kept saying, you're so smart,
56:50
you're so smart. I got all this money and again,
56:52
10s of millions of dollars. I had
56:54
done very well, whatever. And she
56:56
goes, you're so smart, you're so smart. Every day I'm
56:58
sitting home on the couch watching CNBC and
57:01
I'm watching the market go down to the 300 points, to
57:03
the 400 points, to the 300 points. She's
57:05
going, oh my God, you sold to the
57:07
top. And I'm thinking, uh oh. Because
57:10
by now I've got a lot of experience in the market, a lot
57:12
of experience in life, a very bad
57:14
feeling. I sold March
57:16
31st of 08 and then the mortgage
57:18
crisis and the mortgage back security, they're too
57:20
big to fail and everybody's failing, AIG. We
57:23
need 120 billion by Monday, we're going out of
57:25
business. We lost A plus rated by all the
57:27
rating agencies. Companies A plus
57:30
rated. And
57:32
if it doesn't get $120 billion in four
57:34
days, it goes to zero. And
57:37
they indict me. My companies
57:40
didn't, never too, I had, my
57:42
companies were well funded, they didn't need money, anything else. The
57:44
guys that bought the company for me put
57:47
10 million good capital in it. And
57:51
with a yield within a year, they
57:53
were broke and they
57:56
were closing it down. Ugh, that's how
57:58
bad things were. July
58:02
2nd of 2009, they get a call from my attorney who had
58:05
originally told me it's over. He answered those
58:07
three questions satisfactorily. You're done. No fuss, no
58:09
must, I provided evidence. The government said, Mr.
58:12
Mandel is free to go. 18
58:14
months later, I'm being indicted on two
58:16
counts. Securities
58:18
fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The
58:21
same month the SEC had a press
58:23
conference and talked about how many
58:25
people they indicted more people up till now
58:27
than they've ever done in their lives. It's
58:29
really the SEC because they wanted the investing
58:31
public to know that they're
58:34
on top of it even though everything's going to shit. 0809,
58:37
too big to fail because all the banks failed. And
58:39
here's a great thing that I can explain to everybody. On
58:42
a Friday, Citibank received
58:44
a $50 billion cash injection
58:47
from the government. $50
58:49
billion on Friday. On Monday
58:51
morning, all the rating agencies put a rating on
58:53
it. You know what the net worth of Citibank
58:56
was? $20 billion. On
58:59
Friday, they got $50 billion
59:02
cash. They're covering with money. Monday night,
59:04
they were rated A plus with a
59:06
$20 billion net worth. So
59:08
they were short $30 billion. Covering those
59:10
costs. And they came after me. So just
59:12
so you understand the corruption in government. Well, dude, I
59:15
got one. I'm going to ask you an off the
59:17
cuff question because I'm just curious. So the fact that
59:19
you did have to go to jail for this stuff,
59:22
how, what is
59:24
your feeling about Nancy Pelosi being the best doctorate
59:27
or the history of the world? Well, I'm going
59:29
to say this to you. I had a number
59:31
of congressmen and senators as clients over the years
59:33
and they would literally call up, call me
59:36
up and call my brokers up and say, just get out of it.
59:38
I've just got out of a session in the Senate. Get
59:40
out. Bye. And
59:42
he's we need to do. I need to sell everything I can and buy this.
59:45
And they were always right. Yep. And
59:47
so the firm would say,
59:50
Senator Presley just called and then
59:52
everybody buy, you know, buy
59:54
Pfizer and that would run next. You know, Pfizer
59:57
gets some contract or some announcement come out and
59:59
they're making another. $25 billion and everybody
1:00:01
would make money. But here's the
1:00:03
thing, they're allowed to trade on inside information. They've
1:00:06
allowed themselves that, and you
1:00:08
know when they approve it every year, you know,
1:00:11
there were efforts to curb it. Yeah, yeah. And
1:00:13
they have these meetings in the Senate and the
1:00:15
Congress at midnight on a Friday. And
1:00:19
then they show up at Friday and they put
1:00:21
in their little chits and they turn
1:00:23
it down. There's still a lot to trade. I
1:00:25
think you're gonna see some change there soon.
1:00:28
I think there's enough noise in
1:00:30
the marketplace. There's enough noise. You
1:00:32
have to get the peanut gallery shaking and said, no,
1:00:34
it's like not a chance they're gonna do that. Why
1:00:36
would they get this benefit? Why
1:00:38
would they give it up? I
1:00:41
just, I think, look at AOC was
1:00:44
a waitress when she got, and
1:00:46
now she's worth what, $23 million? She
1:00:49
actually gives a yes. I mean, you know, she's very clever.
1:00:51
She's very attractive. So
1:00:53
gross. So gross. It's really
1:00:56
unfortunate, you know, with transparency
1:00:58
today, connectivity, the internet,
1:01:00
everybody knows everything. And
1:01:02
so to me, you gotta start getting honest
1:01:05
if you're in government. So you
1:01:07
still, even though you did nine and a half years, you
1:01:09
still maintain your innocence over any of these
1:01:11
charges. Okay, I learned that you can't use
1:01:14
the word innocence in the term. Okay,
1:01:16
I don't know. In terms of what? I'm
1:01:18
not guilty of the charges that were brought against me. And I can
1:01:20
tell you, I can tell you on my children, I'm not guilty on
1:01:23
the charges that were brought against me. I
1:01:25
don't think anybody would say, Roy Spindel's innocent.
1:01:28
I'm not that type of guy. I'm guilty of so
1:01:30
much in my life. But not that. But no, no,
1:01:32
I never stole from anybody ever in my life. I
1:01:34
never shopped with that. I've cheated anybody.
1:01:36
It's just not who I am. Okay. But
1:01:39
I've done plenty of things wrong. So after the nine and a
1:01:41
half years in prison, now I do wanna spend some time talking
1:01:43
about the new program that you have coming
1:01:45
out. Oh, it's incredible, I gotta say. So let's, let's,
1:01:48
You're in the business world, or if you wanna
1:01:50
be in the business world, I have provided means
1:01:52
to do that for a kid
1:01:54
that comes from the burial, from uneducated
1:01:57
and to the, to even guys like you.
1:01:59
If you... If you bought this course, it
1:02:01
would be a business bible for you. You
1:02:04
will be stunned at how
1:02:06
comprehensive. That's so far the
1:02:08
feedback. It's incredibly,
1:02:10
it's a 108 page written
1:02:12
text with 300 hyperlinks to
1:02:15
source material, online text, downloadable
1:02:18
PDFs and worksheets, and
1:02:20
then 13 extremely entertaining
1:02:23
modules narrated
1:02:25
by myself personally, edited by the best
1:02:27
in the world. Wood winning, award winning,
1:02:29
editors, producers, and the whole thing. And
1:02:32
now Brad is making it interactive so it's
1:02:34
like a training video. We
1:02:36
teach you how to go from all my life, people come
1:02:38
to me, this man, you're so successful, you're in the
1:02:40
stock market, blah, blah, blah. Will you mentor me? Will you
1:02:43
mentor me? Yeah, well, you'll mentor me, that's
1:02:45
a big one. You get that, I'm sure. But you
1:02:47
know, I have an idea. How do
1:02:49
I turn it into a business? Well, my wife's got this
1:02:51
product and my sister-in-law is doing this thing, it's amazing. How
1:02:53
do we turn this into a business? Can
1:02:55
you please help me? We do it
1:02:58
in a step-by-step comprehensive way but
1:03:01
it's really like a business bible. Everybody
1:03:05
needs it. So you're covering startup,
1:03:07
you're covering scale, you're covering marketing,
1:03:10
you're covering everything. Documentation,
1:03:12
vision board, vision plan, business plan, how
1:03:14
to raise money, pitch deck. You know,
1:03:16
this is for guys like yourself. What
1:03:20
sort of legal entity have you wrapped
1:03:22
your business around? LLC, Master Limited Partnerships,
1:03:24
C Corp, S Corp. What
1:03:27
is your jurisdiction? Did you incorporate in
1:03:29
Delaware? As Elon Musk recently found out,
1:03:31
is fuck all terrible? And
1:03:33
you know... Nevada is actually great. Nevada is a
1:03:35
wonderful place. Nevada? The
1:03:38
great state of Nevada. Yeah, great. Whether I
1:03:40
was in New York or Florida, the great state of Nevada. See,
1:03:42
I'm going to help you out with something else. I'm going to
1:03:44
just get you to something because when I first moved here from
1:03:46
Florida, I did the same thing. It's
1:03:48
Nevada, not Nevada. If you say Nevada,
1:03:51
people look at you like you're crazy.
1:03:53
Nevada. It's Nevada. I love
1:03:55
that. Which is funny because, you know,
1:03:57
when I'm from Florida, depending on which section of Nevada. Florida
1:04:00
you're in, it's pronounced a very
1:04:02
different way to be. You had scary South
1:04:04
Baja rednecks like I grew up with or,
1:04:07
uh, you know, you've got, you
1:04:09
know, people from all over the world that live in
1:04:11
Miami. So there's different presentations, but here it is Nevada.
1:04:13
Cause literally I was on the apprentice, um,
1:04:15
saying we were going to buy tickets to Las Vegas,
1:04:17
Nevada and, uh, Nevada.
1:04:20
And I got slathered for
1:04:22
it when I moved out here. Yeah. Nevada. Yeah.
1:04:25
You know what? Nevada is Nevada. I
1:04:27
love that. Nevada. So there you go. But you know, we
1:04:29
talk and people ask me, why don't we explain it? Because
1:04:32
you know, the, uh, we
1:04:35
explain in, in plain speak, I'm a
1:04:37
plain speaking type of guy and
1:04:39
we explain everything and break it down. And
1:04:41
you know, what we did was we went
1:04:43
out and bought every single online course that
1:04:45
that's available on social media and
1:04:48
the internet. And there's not even, if
1:04:50
you put them all together, it
1:04:52
doesn't make half of what we were offering right
1:04:54
now. You could, there's a presale of $300. And
1:04:57
it's really a $5,200 value. That's
1:05:00
not me. That's what the market would price it at. But
1:05:03
it's something that I want to do. So I'm 67
1:05:05
years old. I've been there and done that.
1:05:08
I've been a taker my whole life and I'm good
1:05:10
at it. And I just want
1:05:12
to give back a little bit and I want to
1:05:14
be an educator and I want to leave a legacy
1:05:16
for my children. I've got two daughters
1:05:19
and daddy went to prison when
1:05:21
they were 11 and 14, two young
1:05:23
girls growing up in Boca Raton,
1:05:26
Florida, like to show me city,
1:05:29
you know, and I was very public. I was
1:05:31
in the newspapers. I was on television, all that
1:05:33
shit. And everybody knew me. I was a
1:05:35
big, they seize all your assets. I mean, when you went
1:05:37
to prison, they seized, they didn't seize
1:05:39
anything. Cause they didn't have the grounds. I
1:05:41
didn't know this, but in
1:05:44
order to get bail, my lawyer said, look, I'm going
1:05:46
to put a $5 million cash, no
1:05:48
bond. And they say, he says,
1:05:51
what $40 million or so sitting in a
1:05:54
bank of America. He said, you'll have to
1:05:56
segregate that money. You can't touch it. Otherwise
1:05:59
they'd. They don't make it if
1:06:02
they can seize your money. They don't tell
1:06:04
you segregated. Yeah, they fucking but he Sucked
1:06:07
a sucking me in a very
1:06:09
bad guy Jeffrey Hoffman lawyer, New York
1:06:11
City bad, dude and Stephen
1:06:14
Altman bad dude, he's a bad guys
1:06:16
and They had their own
1:06:19
troubles with the government and they
1:06:21
basically sacrificed me took
1:06:23
a bullet point off the table and they got Altman
1:06:26
got to disbarred for 18 months Bad
1:06:29
guys guilty as fucking sin country
1:06:33
conflicts of interest I Had
1:06:35
just had I got screwed by lawyers.
1:06:37
What a shock I could be the first guy,
1:06:39
right? That
1:06:42
ever happens in this country, I don't think
1:06:44
so, but I want to give back. I
1:06:46
want to educate I want to create a
1:06:48
legacy sofa So my daughters come
1:06:50
to prison for the first visit like
1:06:53
daddy daddy kids are making fun of us daddy
1:06:55
people are asking me Where's my father? You knock
1:06:57
on a shop for dancing events and all these
1:06:59
different things you have children Yeah, two of them
1:07:01
boys girls one of each, right? So
1:07:03
you understand being a dad and the kids are bullies
1:07:05
and there's all kinds of nonsense social media and all
1:07:08
that So we had to teach
1:07:10
my kids how to respond to
1:07:12
other kids and other grown-ups I'm
1:07:15
teaching them from the prison visiting room and
1:07:19
Over the years they went to high school and they went to
1:07:21
college There's no daddy mommy had
1:07:23
to move him in mommy had to move out mommy had
1:07:25
a shop here mommy to show up there and They
1:07:28
became very adept and very clever at
1:07:30
avoiding. Where's your dad? Was
1:07:33
your dad do how come your dad's not here? And
1:07:35
so I was anytime the name dad came
1:07:38
up he changed the subject
1:07:40
very cleverly or just smart
1:07:42
very successful young woman today and I
1:07:46
Want that my daughters to be proud of me
1:07:48
and when somebody says that your dad? Yeah, that's
1:07:50
my dad You know,
1:07:52
I wasn't allowed to the unfriended me
1:07:54
in social media Thanks,
1:07:56
wife and my kids and
1:07:59
I'm not allowed to mention I'm allowed to comment on
1:08:01
their stuff, but now all of a sudden now I've
1:08:03
been out for about seven months and we're doing some
1:08:05
really good things. I'm really giving
1:08:07
back. I'm an educator. I'm helping a lot of
1:08:09
different things and they, uh, the
1:08:12
kids now take pictures with me. Well,
1:08:14
I think it's a big deal. Like
1:08:17
I think the lesson, the lesson there
1:08:19
is it doesn't matter how
1:08:22
old you are. You know, you
1:08:25
can always change the story. You
1:08:27
can always flip the script. You can always
1:08:29
write another chapter, you know, you
1:08:32
don't have to sit, you
1:08:34
know, your biggest failure doesn't have to become
1:08:36
your legacy. Correct. I want that. I want
1:08:38
my prison years to be an asterisk when
1:08:40
they tell my story. You
1:08:43
know, when I was away, I took
1:08:45
the time to do something I
1:08:47
had been putting off my whole life, which
1:08:49
is to read scripture. We
1:08:51
study it new to the old
1:08:53
Testament, the new Testament. I read the Quran
1:08:55
page by page with real
1:08:58
Muslim guys and I
1:09:00
read Hindi. What, what, what,
1:09:02
what prison you were on? I was at
1:09:04
the federal FCI Miami, which
1:09:06
was considered low security, but it
1:09:08
was really it wasn't a country
1:09:10
club. Oh, no, no, that doesn't
1:09:12
sound like that. Doesn't really exist anymore. Just
1:09:14
so you know, okay. I don't know. It
1:09:17
was revealed, uh, you know, uh,
1:09:19
years ago in a famous book. And so
1:09:21
defense quickly did away with that. It's fucking hell, bro.
1:09:24
It's prison as hell. I lived in a room smaller than
1:09:27
this with three grown men, a three
1:09:29
level bunk bed for two, two and a half years. It's
1:09:32
pretty tough. Prison sucks. No
1:09:35
prison sucks. Cause it's punishment. That's what they
1:09:37
tell. It's supposed to be. And
1:09:39
it's brutal. But I also went to a couple of camps. I was
1:09:41
in, I was locked in a detention center
1:09:43
in a room smaller than this 19 months
1:09:47
at the federal detention center in Miami, horrible
1:09:50
places. Nobody should know about
1:09:52
them. It's just horrible. But I got a chance
1:09:54
to read the classics. I
1:09:56
read Shakespeare and I listened to
1:09:59
Mozart. And I read
1:10:01
Chaucer and I read every
1:10:03
biography on jobs and Einstein always meaningful
1:10:05
people and I
1:10:08
developed a lot of things and one of the things in
1:10:10
that in I read Kabbalah 24 books
1:10:12
of the Zohar I learned the
1:10:14
Kabbalah and Zohar teaches you something
1:10:16
it says You can
1:10:18
change your past It's
1:10:21
an incredible thing. Mm-hmm. You can change it's
1:10:24
not just about changing your future By
1:10:27
doing certain things in your life. You can actually go back and
1:10:29
change your past That's it's another
1:10:31
conversation that yeah, no, it's on and on but
1:10:33
it's just an amazing thing And if I use
1:10:35
all the lessons I've learned and all the pain
1:10:38
that I've been through and help others and I
1:10:40
can help others I can literally change my past.
1:10:42
Yeah. Well if they if they want to find
1:10:44
you going forward, how do they find you Ross
1:10:47
Ross mandel? Com to SS 2
1:10:49
L's to SS 2 L's on
1:10:51
Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on
1:10:53
tick-tock. I'm everywhere So fine Ross.
1:10:55
Yeah Ross Mandel, I'm in Boca
1:10:57
Raton, Florida. I love that. Well, thanks for coming in
1:10:59
brother You always welcome back whenever you want big John.
1:11:01
I gotta say if you guys
1:11:04
don't know here comes again
1:11:06
This guy is good-looking Smart
1:11:08
he's got the see now when I was a
1:11:11
young salesman, I would have been intimidated by you.
1:11:14
You're so good No, I mean,
1:11:16
it's frightening your energy is just amazing. That's and
1:11:18
thank you so much for having me today I
1:11:20
appreciate it. Let's let's wrap this up today And
1:11:22
I think today is you know I saw something
1:11:24
the other day man that I thought was so
1:11:27
apropos for the conversation that we had today with
1:11:29
Ross Which is I was watching a clip from
1:11:31
Alex or Mosey and he was talking about in
1:11:34
life when you see adversity He
1:11:37
looks at it away and he says man This
1:11:39
is a story that I will eventually tell and
1:11:41
I want the adversity to be as big
1:11:44
as possible because the bigger the adversity The
1:11:46
bigger the dragon the bigger the hero and
1:11:48
I want to be as big of a hero as I can So
1:11:51
go out face your dragons be
1:11:53
a hero. I'll see you next week What's
1:11:59
up everybody Thanks for joining us for another episode of
1:12:01
Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of
1:12:03
it, or at least as much as I did out
1:12:06
of it. Anyway, if you wanna learn more
1:12:08
about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com.
1:12:11
You can join our mailing list, but do me
1:12:13
a favor if you wouldn't mind, throw up that
1:12:15
five-star review, give us a share, do something, man.
1:12:17
We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be
1:12:19
here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will
1:12:21
see you at the next episode. One
1:12:25
key cards earn 3% in one key cash for
1:12:28
travel at grocery stores, restaurants, and gas
1:12:30
stations. So the more you spend on
1:12:33
groceries, dining, and gas, the sooner you
1:12:35
can use one key cash towards your
1:12:37
next trip on Expedia, hotels.com, and Vrbo,
1:12:39
and get away from groceries, dining, and
1:12:41
gas. And Platinum members earn up to
1:12:43
9% on travel when booking
1:12:46
VIP access properties on Expedia and
1:12:48
hotels.com. One key cash is not
1:12:50
redeemable for cash. Terms apply. Learn
1:12:53
more at expedia.com/ onekeycards.
Podchaser is the ultimate destination for podcast data, search, and discovery. Learn More