John Gafford
Appearances
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? That sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando all over deodorant. Because this package they got is, man, I put it on the boy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah, you just want to slide in the middle. You know what's funny, man, that I find now is Is growing up wanting all of those things and now having kids kind of have all those things. You think their lives would be so much easier because they have it. But I find, I find, I see my kids downplaying their life for sure. Cause they just want to be, you know, they don't want to be up here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
They don't want to be down here. They just want to be right in the middle, right? They just want to fit in as all kids do such a, such a weird dynamic, but like the real estate, how did you decide you wanted to be a real estate agent?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah. The chemicals for the back. You see them in back of restaurants.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
That, that story right there is why so many people now, I think, I think you look at, you look at people trying to come up and they're like, I don't have enough hours in the day. And let me give you all the excuses on why I can't pull it together. Why can't you get this done? And, and bro, you're, you're working. I mean, that's, that's three jobs, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And that was obviously a necessity because you had two young kids and sometimes necessity is, you know, what forces you to do what you got to do. Right. So what do you think the difference is in you that you're willing to do that and the people that aren't?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, I think, you know, front of the show, Mikey C-Rock said on here one time that you got a choice with trauma. You can put it in the tank or you can put it in the trunk.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And that's your choice. You really lug that shit around or it can be gasoline to drive the engine. And that's a choice. And I think you making that conscious choice is just what did that. So, you know, all these little things that go into who you are and man, adversity, adversity just builds champions sometimes. And it is what it is. So again, how'd you get into real estate? We're selling Zep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
We're working at night at the kid's school. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's an antidepressant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Back again, back again, for like it says in the opening, man, another episode of the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, in the studio, something a little different than we've been doing. And I couldn't be more happy about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
30.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
You're not looking for a ticker tape.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So, you know, we've had so many incredible people come through the studio in the last couple months from the likes of Chris Voss and, you know, just all these incredible people that have just come through and shared some incredible knowledge. And sometimes, man, you forget that. The just wealth of great information you have that's right underneath your nose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
2002.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
2002.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah. Yeah. This is back when leads would come in barely on a website. Barely rich. No website. Oh, you were just hammering the phone back?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And as some of you probably know, and most of you should, I actually own the largest luxury real estate brokerage here in Las Vegas. And it's an incredible firm that we own. We've got about 585 clients. great, unbelievable agents that work for us, and somebody that has consistently finished in the top one, two, or three for the last several years. He will find out Thursday where he finishes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Like buddy, I've had adversity my whole life. It doesn't scare me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
This is a good time during the story today for me to make a little advocacy pitch to you, to all of you out there. If you're thinking about getting into real estate, I'm going to tell you a little story. Actually, I'm not going to tell you a story. I'm just going to finish my advocacy, which is this. We have the largest company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
We're consistently number one or number two in the entire marketplace as far as volume. I do not have a new agent training program. I do not have a classroom for which people can come in like Eric did and sit at these tables and figure it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I don't have that situation because to me, the only way you should ever get into this business is working on someone's team where they are making an investment in you and leads. And they are standing right over your shoulder and coaching you how to do all this stuff. Hand in hand. And yeah, you're going to pay a split to them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
You're going to split these deals 50-50 with whoever your team leader is. But that is how you learn this business. Going to a classroom and sitting there and thinking you're going to learn anything is Nope. Nope, he ain't learned anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
See, I don't love that either, man. I don't love that. And if you're listening to this and you got a business or you're thinking of running a business, you want to scale up, your best salespeople are almost never your best managers. It is a completely different skill set. And that is one of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is they tap their best salespeople and try to move them up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Bro, if this guy's killing sales, just work it out where you can make more money. Like you don't have to promote that person. Don't take, don't delegate out their best skillset.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Not going to tell him on here. Got to wait until Thursday. But this is a dude that has accomplished something that literally I'm going to guess, if I had to guess, I'm going to say 0.2% of all real estate, no, less than that. I'm going to say 0.2%. 0.094% of everybody that gets a real estate license achieves what this dude does year in and year out, and that is earn seven figures selling houses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
As I call them the glory years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
For those of you that are younger and don't understand what happened in 2008, the great financial crisis happened in 2007 here in Las Vegas was ground zero for the real estate market implosion. Property values dropped about 60% from where they were. We were the number one foreclosure market in the country for years. And people got killed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And a handful of us had those contracts to sell houses for banks. It did very well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah, it was all good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Because you pivoted to it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Dude, remember the real estate, okay. Remember the real estate book went from this to that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah, and here's the thing. If you're listening to this also and you're thinking, well, that's everything on social media. Dude, this is before social media. This was just- Way before. You're glad handing people becoming their life concierge, but you really focused in on one neighborhood here in Las Vegas. And I got to tell you, I, to this day, I'm doing this now for 20 years, whatever it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I've never seen anybody dominate a neighborhood the way that you dominate that one. it is, it is a textbook lesson in that. So let's walk through Eric Gordon takes over the fountains. Yeah, dude, this is, this is one-on-one right here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's always so hard when they look and they go, yeah, okay, whatever, buddy. The mouth is saying yes, the eyes are saying, okay. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Now, some of you guys may watch Million Dollar Listing and you say, oh, these dudes are selling the average sales price of a house in Beverly Hills is $3.85 million. Every time they sell one, they're making 80 grand, 90 grand. You only got to sell 10 of them and there you are. Keep in mind, yeah, my man sells a bunch of expensive houses, but our average sales price here in Vegas is like 500K.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours. And all of this stuff is baking soda free and paraben free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It was just- And again, pre-internet. Pre-internet. Pre-internet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
This information wasn't readily available if they wanted to know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's a lot of work to get to where we are. But this is a guy that's been doing it for a long, long time. And I wanted to get him to come on today and share some of his secrets to success with you, whether in real estate or not. These are business lessons, man. Life lessons are going to get you where you want to be. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Eric Gordon. Thanks, John.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah. Michael's doing five to 10 for Cartha.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
But you spent two and a half years becoming part of the fabric of that community. I did. Without even living there. Nope. Took two and a half years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Very good, buddy. Nice to be here. That's a quality intro. Quality intro. A quality intro, man. I love it. I love it. So, dude, you know, the hardest thing about doing a podcast with somebody that is one of my great friends is you never want to talk about... it's like we can sit here and tell inside jokes that get real old for people. So it's real difficult.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
All you need is one thing because now you're going to show everybody, hey, I sold this house, not even on the MLS, off market in 20-something days.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's so funny that you say that is that if you are a real estate agent, this is something you need to do. You need to learn from this. And it's something that I'm starting to do now is rather than just send out the just solds or whatever else. Right. Like you have to send that stuff out. It's fine. But on the cure, like I just sold a house up the hill.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Up the hill from us is very expensive real estate when I say up the hill. We just sold a house up the hill. And we did it really, really quickly. And it was a strange situation where it was a home. The builder's still building homes up there. So you're competing with the builder on custom spec. The streets aren't even really done yet where this house was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And I wound up selling it in about 20 days. And I did it because I geofenced it. the sales office for the new home builder. So every single person that walked into that office got pounded with my house online, right? And that's how we wound up selling it. And so we're making a video right now explaining that process. And then when we send out the just solds, they'll have the QR code.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Like they don't care that you just sold the house. Tell me how you did it. Tell me what you did that's different than everybody else that got the job done. And when we send that out, you click the QR code for more details on this house. It's going to be me talking about, this is what we were up against. This is what we did. And this is how it worked.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And people see that stuff and it's like, oh, that's good. So yeah, I love that you were selling the story of how you sold it, not just that you sold it. Because I think that's something that so many people are missing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So I think I think it's it's so interesting because when I met you, you were just dominating that neighborhood. You were so focused on just doing that that it was hyper focused on that. Sure. And then you came here to work with us. And when you first came over, you partnered up with another great agent we have here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And even though that partnership was short-lived, it was like a year, I thought you guys, I thought it was a good partnership for both of you for the time that you had it for that year. Because I thought that Anthony at the time was trying to break into another level. And you had the clout of that level working in the fountains.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
But what he did for you was got you thinking bigger than these 192 houses and got you out of that. And so for that year, you helped him level up to where he can do what he wants. And he got you out of that neighborhood. Absolutely.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And because now you guys are all over the place. I mean, you know, when you look at what you sell, you're selling in the The Ridges, you're selling, I mean, all over town. You're selling Summit. I mean, you're all over the place now. So how did you transition?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Now, obviously, you've got to make a transition a little bit from that neighborhood fabric that success, like that, like they always say that what got you here won't get you there, right? They always say that. And you had to make a transition from, I'm part of this community, the cannoli guy at the HOA, to scale into a bigger market. You can't be at every HOA meeting. You can't do what you did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I know so much about you, but they don't know anything. So first of all, you know, let's talk about being such a high achiever. You know, I always like to start off with the nature versus nurture kind of idea. So tell us about you as a kid and tell us about young Eric.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So what are the differences that you had to change in your business to scale that up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, you know, it's so interesting. You say the 50-50 with the relationship and with the marketing because you look at some of the marketing that some of these guys are putting out now. I mean, there's like full-blown magazines like Restoration Hardware that hit these houses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And if you don't have some relationships, you can't go... Some people think you just go all in on marketing and it's going to be enough. So... let's talk about the relationships. I guess I think, you know, we can, we can talk about what makes a good ad, but I think it's boring. What'd you send the mailboxes? I think it's more interesting.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
How do you make an impression on somebody when you meet them? Like how does Eric Gordon, when you, when you walk into one of the social events and you see somebody, how does Eric make an impression on somebody without looking like you're treating?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Is that something innate with you or is there other skills you've learned?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
See, I would say before I even ever heard the phrase matching and mirroring before I even knew that existed as a thing, my wife would always say, I can tell which one of your friends you're talking to on the phone by how you're talking. Oh yeah. Cause you just, I just do it. I think it's just one of those things when you're out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And let's say you're creating a relationship with somebody and you want this to be, to continue as a business. How do you be memorable for that person at the end of the interaction?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, I find that one of the things that some advice that I got from a mentor years ago, which was if you want to break into the higher end clientele, you can't try to compete. Like you're not going to meet somebody that has $500 million and try to flex with what you got. No way. Because they don't give a shit. Not at all. And I find it's so weird now when you see people doing that to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Because, you know, you're like, bro, like, I don't give a shit. Like, it's just really strange. So how do you connect? Do you connect with people the same way you like them to connect with you? Like, how do you, like, what do you want to get to when you talk to somebody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Dude, that's such an interesting point about not knowing what people's bills are. Because you probably had people call you that you thought were pretty successful. Oh, for sure. That all of a sudden are like, hey, dude, I'm a deep shit. I got to sell this house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Dude, we were watching, because they just re-released my season, The Apprentice, on Amazon, and we were watching it last night. Like, the kids had never seen it. The kids had never seen it. Really? Yeah, they just never watched it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah, they never watched it. Yeah, just never watched it. I'm always like, spoiler alert, I got fired. It's like, totally right. And it was so funny because it cut away to me talking, giving an interview and I'm sitting on the stoop. And I always say, I love that. It's my favorite moment of the whole show. And you don't even know why.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And it's because literally we were sitting there for like four hours doing this interview. And this little old lady kept popping up. We were just on a stoop in some neighborhood. She kept popping up. Eventually, the producer's like, ma'am, I'm really sorry. We're almost done. We're going to be here. This little sweet old lady opens the door and goes, you've been here four hours. Fuck off already.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I was like, I just met my first real New Yorker.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I'm going
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Throwing shit at us out the window, so. That's so funny. Well, let's wrap this up by saying, dude, it's like new person right now. It's like, I'm excited. I'm going to get a real estate license. What advice would you give for a new person starting out in this industry?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, brother, look, man, your success continues to keep us all at all. We are so happy to have you. I appreciate that. Bless for the information to share with everybody. And this year, just so everybody knows, you finished. I'm going to tell you on Thursday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's good enough. Well, dude, if you listen to this today, hopefully you learned a couple of things. Number one, I would say... Don't make excuses for your diversity. Turn that fuel into fire, man, because you can kind of get it done. Also, success in real estate lies in the knowledge of others. And by others, I don't mean people standing in front of a classroom.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
I mean people that are willing to take an investment in you. And talk about people taking an investment in you. Dude, rich people recognize people that hustle. So if you want to impress some rich people, hustle. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
What was the first hustle to make money as a kid? Oh, I don't know if I could say. Well, you know, I think the statute of limitations is over now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Because mom, I know you're a single mom. Single mom. But mom wound up working for the Reagans in the White House. She did. So she was off to Washington with you and your brother Garrett just kind of meandering to your own devices back in Long Island.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
During that time, was it like, you know, even though mom had a good job and was doing the best she could, I'm sure, was it like if Eric wants something that Eric wants, Eric's got to buy it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So when you first became an adult, quote unquote, as you would say, what was the first gig that you picked up like real where you're like, this is going to be my career?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So why'd you become a fireman?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, what's really interesting about that, right? Is because I always talk about places like Detroit, right? Where they're like, you're born and dad works at the plants. You're going to grow up and you're going to work at Ford. You're going to do this kind of the same thing, but it was just, there was no plant, but you're going to be a fireman or a policeman.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
That's just kind of what was expected of you growing up a little bit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So, what... Okay. So, you're... And again, you went from one career, which is kind of you get in... Being a fireman is kind of a lifetime career. A lot of people come to Vegas and they get in the casinos and it's very hard to get out, which is why you can go to the union properties and you'll ask for a cocktail and a lady with a walker will bring it to you sometimes. That's exactly right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, dude, I think that the casinos here, God bless them, man. It's the industry here in Vegas. But I think it's kind of like the Ford plant a little bit, right? It's like people always ask me like, well, why is Nevada, why is the education so crappy? Yeah. I'm like, there's so many people that live and work in this town in the hospitality industry.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
It's like, no, no, no, don't worry about school. You know, you just get a job with dad parking cars at the MGM, just like I've always done. And those are great jobs, and they make good money, but that's why. It's like I tell people, you know, everything about the world is upside down in Vegas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Like, you know, there's some girl right now in Topeka, Kansas, and she's in school for elementary education. And she's got a dream, buddy. I want to be a teacher. It's all I ever want to do. I want to be a teacher. And she graduates with her degree from the University of Kansas. And then she thinks she gets an offer. If you move to Vegas and become a teacher, we'll help you out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
We'll give you incentives. She's like, I'm going to go to Vegas and be a teacher. And then she comes to Vegas and she teaches one year and live in her dream. Summertime comes around. Exactly. And she meets Kim. And Kim is a bottle girl at Encore Beach Club making 300 grand a year, walking around with a sparkler and a bottle of Great Goose over it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
And then all of a sudden, guess who ain't a teacher anymore? That's exactly right. And that just happens so much. So I always find that interesting. Dude, you not only extrapolated yourself from one situation, which was the lifetime fireman job. Yeah. You extrapolate yourself from lifetime job number two, which was the casino, to really place a bet on yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Well, you got something you're using out of that college education.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Obviously, this is a paid advertiser, which is how we get started. to be able to do what we do for you guys. So check them out, smell fresher, stay drier, boost your confidence from head to toe, try Mando. And now, escaping the drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Yeah, that's an interesting dynamic. I mean, I kind of experienced some of that same dynamic growing up, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
Because when my parents got divorced, right, you know, it's like one of the things, if you're listening to this, if you live in a small southern town and you're a woman and you're thinking of getting divorced and your husband currently is a small town attorney in that town, don't get divorced in that town. You're not going to bode well for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Building an Empire from the Ground Up: Insights with Eric Gorton
So, you know, when my parents got divorced, we got the house in like the country club, which is, you know, the ritziest part of town. Sure. Dude, we were broke because my dad had like no child support at that settlement. And like my mom was really struggling. So I get it. And it creates a really weird dynamic in your head of like not being enough, overcompensating, doing those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? That sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando All Over Deodorant. Because this package they got is, man, I put it on the boy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, let's talk about this, man, because obviously such a big part of your history. And I don't want to just jump over Vysalis. I want to talk about that. Well, let's talk about that first. And then we'll talk about the overall concepts of how you do turnarounds. So how did you come into Vysalis?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
My first question about, I mean, obviously when you got involved, I mean, the place was negative and you left it $150 million.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I find the biggest thing holding people back and success in so many different businesses, they feel that they're lacking in something they don't have, be it knowledge, information, capital, whatever. and they just see it as an insurmountable thing that they can't go get this stuff. And the answer is all high performers just figure it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You didn't learn how to approach a VC in a classroom, correct?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Um, no such thing as the silent partner in the VC world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, let's talk about your system for turning companies around. Yeah. Like when you first walk in, let's, let's walk me through this. Let's say you just took over widget company X and you walk in, what are we doing? Um, Well, did I buy the company? Yeah, you just bought a company. So walk me through. Let's turn a fictional company around, you and I, right here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Are you looking for aptitude? Are you looking for attitude? Are you looking for, is the right person in the right seat or some combination of the three?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm looking at it. You're cutting like crazy. Elon Musk made that comment a couple of weeks ago. He said the reason that most companies fail is they don't cut enough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I think, you know, we made a shift in the last year with COO at one of our companies. And he went and just cut everything without sacrificing anything. service to our employees or our end use. It just, the company over years, you just, well, why do we use that vendor? Because you just always have. When's the last time we priced this? We just haven't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And you start pricing everything in your business. And the amount of money he was able to put back in our pockets in that first six months was really incredible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Right now, back again, back again for another, it says in the beginning, man, an episode of the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, ladies and gentlemen in the studio, with me is a guy, and this is a dude, man, that had a troubled youth, ran around with gangs, did a bunch of nonsense in the streets, but turned it around and became a multimillionaire.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So that you're trimming the fat that way. You're saying, what's the bare minimum of we can do to maintain our level of service?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Where the customer doesn't feel it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I think... A lot of the people listening to this show would be considered solopreneurs. I mean, they're not running scaled businesses. They're everyday work. They're still hustling in the business. They haven't made that graduation to CEO yet. And I would say the hardest thing to do when you're doing that process in your own business is buying your own time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I find that a lot of people struggle with that. Yeah. You know, yes, everybody says, oh, if you don't have a good assistant, you are the assistant. And I understand that. You can't get it out of your own way. But I also see a lot of solopreneurs that I work with that tend to throw money away at dumb things in the name of time. Like, well, it saves me time. Yeah, but does it? at that expense?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Like, what is your time really worth at this? I think you may have overvalued your time. How do you have those conversations?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
There's so many people that are here, you know, that are early in that process, not running a scaled business, not, you know, especially in real estate, which is what we do. So many people love to call themselves the CEO of their own little two-man shop, right? Like, dude, stop, just stop, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If you're not answering to a handful of investors of your business, please stop calling yourself the CEO. You've earned that, right? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
He is the former CEO and founder of Vysala Sciences. which is a company that went from basically being $6 million in debt when he showed up to $150 million in revenue within 16 months. So the dude knows how to turn it around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I think what people don't do is what you just said. The key to what you just said was documenting. So many people do not, like if you walk, I could walk into just, I could walk out this front door, walk into six different businesses and say, let me see your SOPs. And they would look at me like I was speaking Greek.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, dude, there's so, I mean, Scribe, there's so many programs now that will help you build great SOPs. And if you don't even, if you don't want to go that route, just tell Chad GBT, ask me a hundred questions about this process and help me build an SOP. Yeah. And watch what happens.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, I mean, just even sitting here with you now for 27 minutes, right? I've kind of got your personality pattern pretty much. You tell me. No, you're very high D, very high C. You're very analytical thinker. You're very mathematically based. Everything is in the math with you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I'm a math guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You're a math guy. Everything's in the math. So what traits do you think? Obviously, you've done it at extremely high level. So what traits do you think someone has to have to make them a very effective CEO?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
He's the best-selling author of the books Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain, a New York Times number one hardcover business bestseller, and Rock Bottom to Rockstar in 2016, a guide to achieving entrepreneurial success. Success! Good Lord, man. I'm struggling today. So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Ryan Blair. Ryan.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's, that's, that's my, uh, that's my bad habit. I sit in there, watch somebody talk about business and I'll go, I could do that. Yeah. Right. That's who you have belief. I could spend that up in like a week. You got us a black hole and you're like, Oh God, what am I doing? What am I doing? Stop, stop. What are you doing? Yeah, it's terrible. It's my toxic trait, if you will.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's my next question is, do you try to overcompensate your own inadequacies or do you backfill with other people?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
A, it's what's best for the business is to backfill with people to fill your inadequacies. Don't try to just say, I can overcome and be everything because nobody can be everything. But it's also advised to try to overcome by soaking up knowledge from the people that you backfill with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
um uh all the adversity that i've overcome yeah you know i gotta tell you i gotta tell you um we're coming up on our annual awards thing this is the first time i'm going to talk about this we're coming up on our annual awards deal and every year for we you know this is this just so you know i don't think you know anything about me a little bit a little bit right so yeah this is the number one real estate brokerage in vegas or somewhere almost anybody else as far as phone
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And you said you have 300 something, 400, 585, 585. Our biggest competitor has like 1500. So we're, we're battling out with somebody who's got a thousand more foot soldiers than we do. And we're still winning or close. We shouldn't be winning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I don't know if we'll still be winning by the time this comes out, but we normally, we normally, we like to be second, which is good because it means I can still have quality people here and it doesn't matter. But you know, This year, we do our little state of the union where we hand out awards to everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I always talk about the new tech we're going to add and the new stuff we're going to add and we're going to do this. And I had a situation happen where recently we lost our family pet. We lost our dog. Had to put him down. Two hours before a party I was having at my house. So I'm talking about a tough, tough night.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I think they took too much blood out of me this morning. I was stumbling there a little bit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Having to put, you know, literally, you know, we put him down and then 200 people showed up at my house. It was interesting. But a week and a half later, we're sitting there and a box shows up at our house and it's from chewy.com. Cause my wife gets all the dog's meds and all the bus up in my, I was like, Oh God, I forgot to cancel his stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And so she, you know, she calls him up and she goes, Hey, You know, our dog passed away. Is there any way I can return this? And immediately got an email from our account rep. And he said, look, you know, go donate it to a shelter. We're immediately going to, you know, immediately going to refund you. And we're so sorry about Barkley.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
You know, it's just heartfelt kind of email to my wife about how hard it was to lose. But five minutes later, she got another email from our old account rep. Oh, my gosh. I just heard about Barkley. That's so terrible. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. And my wife's like, look at this. Like, this is crazy. And I'm like, this is like the greatest customer service I've ever seen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It was. Yeah. So for you to listen to this, I had to go do my every three month blood work so my wife can keep me alive forever today. And, yeah, I think they took too much because, man, that was a little struggle.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm already thinking I would never do anything with any pet company ever again other than Chewy. And then later that night, they send flowers to the house. Like, bro. So, you know, I thought about as you get bigger and you scale and business and business and business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
The thing that moves the needle the most with all of the things that we do here and all the effort and all of the customer service, it's those magic moments like that that make your company... Really part of the fabric of the community with not just your clients, but also your employees. So I tasked all of our people here. I said, dude, this is all we are doing this year. I love it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I'm not adding anything else. I'm not adding anything else. Every single person that works for me in management or whatever else, they are tasked now with finding a magic moment for one of our people every week. I don't care. And we're going to compete every week, and I want to hear what they were, and I want to hear what we did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And it just has to be something that we did for some of our people every week, every single week, in all of our companies. And that's all I'm focused on. And I think it's so hard. when you think the way that both, cause I'm very, I'm very, the truth is in the math. I say that every time somebody asks me a question, that's my standard answer. Well, the truth is in the math.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I need to look at the math. That's my standard answer. I like that. And it's so hard when you think that way that you get away from some of that stuff. So what do you do to instill that type of culture? And obviously you do with this success.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
His book, the Zappos book was phenomenal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I thought I was having a stroke halfway through that. I didn't know it was good. It's because I was fasted. I'm now drinking my protein as we do this interview. So if you hear me gulping, that's what it is. But, dude, Ryan, man, obviously, you know, you've got so many different levels of things you've done in your life. But I'm always curious when you have somebody that's an entrepreneur.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's, that's, that is our objective amongst all of our brands this year is we're going to care more than anybody else does.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, I think too, I think if you're going to be a very effective CEO, you got to love what you do every day. And there's a lot of days in those number days that you're just like, another day, another day, another dollar, just looking at P&Ls, looking at balance sheets, looking at this, looking at that. And it's just another day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I get to it. As you probably can attest to this, we are gentlemen of a certain age. When you reach a certain age, your friends start to die. When they start to die, it's like, and there's no candlelight vigil for them around the lake. It's just like, yeah, dude didn't really eat that good and didn't take care of himself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And unfortunately, I just lost my seventh, what I would consider at one point of my life, either a best friend or in that tight circle of three. I just lost my seventh one. Wow. So I said I was going to honor those guys. So I actually went and got my Memento Mori dog tags with all their initials on the back of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And every time something comes up that I don't want to do, I'm like, these dudes would give anything to be doing this right now. Anything to be doing this right now. So yeah, finding that why, and so many people have to do things. I don't have to do anything. I get to do everything I do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
that reaches those high levels of success. And if you've listened to the program before, you probably know we always kind of like to start with that nature versus nurture argument. So tell me about young Ryan. Tell me about you, man. Where did you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Let me ask you this, because you're coming from like that weed for snakes. Weird trade, by the way. But you're trading weed for snakes and you're in a room with like John Wooden and all these guys. So was there ever a time in your life when you suffered through imposter syndrome or was that do you have you always had this innate level of confidence in yourself?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Ignorance is bliss sometimes, kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours. And all of this stuff is baking soda free and paraben free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, that's good. I want to talk a little bit now because obviously, you know, you run now. Your faith-based entrepreneurial coaching, you run that. So let's talk a little bit about your faith, because obviously it's very important to you. At what point did you find that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
How important, so when you say, look, obviously faith-based is God belief. We get that. But are there elements of purpose-drivenness that there's giving back into the community for this stuff? I mean, is there elements of that involved in these?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So wait, dad was an engineer. So he's a professional guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Let me ask you this. So maybe, maybe you are, I'm not right. There are, there are, there are days when I'm just off, right. When I'm just like, man, I'm just not at a place to like, I pray my phone doesn't ring today. Like, I mean, we have a lot of people that work for us and I'm just like, please don't call me today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Cause I don't want to snap at somebody and I want to be like, why aren't you just figuring this out? Why are you calling me? Like there are days, not a lot of them. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty even keel, but I have those days, man. So how do you get up to serve for others when you just don't feel like getting up at all?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So you normally hear those stories from terrible situations of socioeconomic hardship.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
We were talking about biohacking before. I mean, I track everything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, I do the ground. I try to get off the blue screens two hours before. I get on the grounding mat. I'll run it down to about 8 megahertz, so it's that low megahertz to kind of chill you out. and it's been, you know, it's a good, but I was going to actually, my next one was going to be the eight sleep. Cause a buddy of mine just said that thing is, that's my next one too.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
But I'm going to, I'm going to try that, which is great. And it's so interesting that you were talking about the input output, you know, variables for yourself. Cause I was talking about, I look at marriage that way. People ask me like, what's the secret of good marriage? I'm like, dude, it's like bank account. You make deposits with draws and you better not ever be overdrawing your wife.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's how you do it. You know, sometimes you, you know, Why does your wife let you stay out after the fight till late sometimes with the boys? It's because I show up for her all the time. And so I always make way more deposits than I make withdrawals. But it's interesting. I never thought about that with myself. Like, am I feeding myself enough of what I need?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Like you should have a note in your Apple notes that says like, like what, like all of just a list of all those things you can do quick, how long they, how long they take. So you don't have to think about it. When you hit that spot, you're just like, yeah, I got 20 minutes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, just because everybody was doing it in the 80s is kind of how it was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. I, you know, it's so, it's so hard to balance out the social media aspect of everybody's got to do everything you do. And let me go give to the homeless. I'm just like, well, I just want other people to be inspired by what I'm doing. Yeah, I agree. It's better if you leave the camera off. Yeah. I think there's only one thing we do all year where we turn the cameras on.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It's when we go pay off the layaways for Christmas. That's like the only thing that we ever say, this is what we're doing because we want more people to come next year. Right. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What's your fit. Cause obviously we're not publicizing. I'm just curious what your favorite thing is you do. Do you have one little thing that you do consistently that is your favorite thing to do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Dude, it's so important to teach the kids that. Probably my favorite thing I do all year is around Christmas for the 23 days.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
of or 20 24 days sometimes i sometimes we get the 24th depends how busy we are but it's always the 23 days every day uh we'll give away 100 bucks yeah just randomly yeah just that's great just really just and i do i always want to do it with my kids as much as possible just so they can just see just here you know which is great i love i love doing that a leader like yourself by the way there's somebody that that needs you you could call up and just pour life into
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Well, it's so funny. I had something happen the other day that's never happened. Unless I was speaking somewhere in an obvious place, right? Because then people always come up and talk to you after. But I bought kind of an audacious car. And I'll say it's audacious, but I've always wanted the car, so I bought the car. I can afford the car. I bought the damn car, right? And it's for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It's not for anyone else. But there's a benefit to the car because it's now happened twice. I've had two younger age...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
No, I am saying I appreciate this car because it allows me to give back, not because it's generating me anything different.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I love that. Honestly, it's my favorite part of the car. I love the car, but it's my favorite part of it so far. Yeah, that's awesome. Because it just, you don't, I'm just, I'm at the sandwich place, right? And it happens there. And it's an inspiration.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What advice would you give if somebody was that 18 to 24 year old struggling, trying to figure it out?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I'll say this about that too, right? Because I had somebody say to me not too long ago that works for me. And the kid said, he's a great kid. He's doing a great job. And he said to me, he goes, well, I don't know if you know this or not, but you're my mentor. That's what he said.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And I got to tell you, if you want somebody to take an interest in you, I don't know how you can hear that as someone that has achieved relative success and not feel an instant responsibility. Because, man, I felt this instant responsibility for this kid's success in a different way than I did just because he works for us. I was immediately like, oh, I got to make sure this kid wins.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If I'm his mentor, now I'm responsible for what happens to him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Look, it's kind of like signing the girlfriend, boyfriend label maybe a little bit. Don't be, not on the first date. Don't be too aggressive with it. But once somebody's helped you a little bit, feel free to tell them, hey man, just so you know, you're my mentor. Or hey ma'am, whatever it is, you're my mentor, whatever it is. And I think the response that you're going to get from that person is,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Man, it was a lot. It was like, whoa. It does create a sense.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
But I think it's, I think it to a certain extent though, if, if somebody shows me enough gumption, the fact that they just want to learn and then they're, and then you can't be an asshole. Anytime somebody is an asshole with me, I'm out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
If you start, what should I do? And I tell them and they do the polar opposite. I'm like, okay, you don't need me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's the question. It's like, okay, would you work in somebody's garden for $10,000 an hour? Yeah. Yeah, okay, great. Well, this dude's going to give you $10,000 worth of knowledge. Go help him pull some weeds. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's Mr. Miyagi stuff right there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah. Let's go work up there. All right. Well, dude, Brian, thank you so much for coming in, bro. I want to keep you on schedule. I know you got a flight. Thank you. Uh, if they want to find you, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Brother, it was good to have you through. You're welcome back anytime you want to come back and we'll see you again. I mean, look, I think if you listen to this today, as with so many of the high level people we come through, the key to your future success normally lies on the other side of your ability to number one, ask for help, but number two, be worthy of it. We'll see you next week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So I asked what your first hustle was, but I guess it was giving bags of weed for skateboards.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Did you know that this was illegal? I mean, did the... the weight of that sink in at you at that time?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So, so what point, so obviously you start this at 11. Yeah. This is, you said everybody went to jail.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
I have a buddy of mine. I have a buddy of mine literally that half of his, like he's got relatives in the DEA and then he's married to a Latino woman and she has relatives in the cartel. So that's always an interesting mixing of folks when they need to mix them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
All right. So growing up in this, did you ever get in trouble?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Like serious trouble?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And this was just the group of guys you're running with? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
What, so did he offer to mentor you right away? It was just kind of, okay, did he stay with your mom for long-term? Who was with him longer?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So, you know, it's so important, I think, especially at any point of your life, if you want to get to that next level to find people that will mentor you. And now I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. So have you given back to others in that same way, or is that the biggest joy of what you do now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
So at what point, because like most great senior entrepreneurs, like I like to say, are chronically unemployable. You just can't work for somebody else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
In my previous life, right, I was a partner at a tech firm called Pattern Recognition. At the time, it's so funny now, tech is such an interesting business to be in. And because very rarely do you land on what your original core mission was, right? You just never land on it. So there was a program at the time, this may ring a bell for you, but they had a software called Marimba.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
It was essentially where you could manage endpoints remotely. Oh, yeah. So instead of having to go into a company and drop, you know, a thousand new Windows CDs into the computer. See, information kids used to come on these silver shiny discs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Yeah, you had to manually put them in. And what this software did was allow us to manage a lot of endpoints remotely. And it was really just for big companies because it was very expensive. But we convinced Marimba to let us sell it to mid and small sized businesses as, you know, under a different umbrella. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And anyway, uh, you know, we were doing that and randomly one of our texts was like, Hey, you know, uh, the, the Clay County school board in Florida wants us, wants help with this inspection software, you know, just on Palm pilots where these guys can go into buildings and it pulls up the previous inspection and then they do this and it makes purchase orders stupid. Right. Can we do it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
And we're like, I mean, I guess, yeah, but it's going to generate some money. We'll do it. everything shifted into that business. And it's just so funny. We let this, we worked so hard to get this relationship with Marimba. We ended up letting it go very quickly and went all in on these inspection softwares that turned into like fire inspection and private jet inspection, all this stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
That's great. So as a tribute to your ability to pivot. Well, so the question becomes with this, cause I think there's a lot of your story that you're gifted with that. So I'm curious, the reason I tell that story is not for any self-indulgence, but it's because I want to hear like, what was your core mission of your original tech firm and where did you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair
Let's not, don't run over that. How'd you buy a company? How'd you do it at 24?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Resilience and Networking: Bek Lover's Journey from Finance to Podcasting Success
We will not go silently into the night.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Resilience and Networking: Bek Lover's Journey from Finance to Podcasting Success
Cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Resilience and Networking: Bek Lover's Journey from Finance to Podcasting Success
We will not go silently into the night.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? I know, that sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando All Over Deodorant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
If everybody settles except for China, would we still consider that a trade war?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
You'd conclude that China becomes an outlier to the problem?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Okay. All right, fair. Because I think it seems like everybody puts so much emphasis on China's reaction to what happens here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah. Yeah, they did. But down 10% was their market down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
let's get back to the retail investors here because obviously when traditionally speaking when when the market falls like this the money runs to bonds which then drop the yields on bonds and for what i do obviously real estate we're so intimately tied to that 10-year treasury bond uh which fell under four percent but then bounced yesterday back over four percent which i thought was really strange um what's your thought there
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Okay. Because obviously for what we want to do, and this is where your kind of crossover of knowledge becomes so interesting to me, how do you think this affects the real estate market? Where are we going from here?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
No. Well, that's the thing. With the bond yield going down on Friday, we got to six and a half. But as soon as it came back, we bounced back up to six, seven, five.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
My magic number for that is five, five. I think when it hits five, five, there's an onslaught of pent up demand for people that needed to do something that wouldn't, you know, you're not going to swallow seven from three, but you'll swallow five, five, especially if the pain in your current living situation is great enough. You'll, you'll swallow that and make them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
So, With this going on, if you had to look back at the housing market now, is this a bet you would make for it or against it going into the spring, which is traditionally our busiest time?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah, he fired me on television once, but he hasn't called me recently either, so there you go. I get kind of what he's trying to do and I understand that could go very quickly. So how long do you think if there's no, you think that if there can't be movement here, let's say it's a stalemate and we really start to sting here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Do you think knowing what you know about him and seeing what you've seen that he starts to back off this? No way. He's all in on this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Is there one of the players that's out there that we're currently negotiating with that you think if they fall, all of them fall? Because the EU, I think, pretty strongly came to the table this week, if I'm not mistaken.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah. Well, they, I mean, they flat prohibit, you know, Ford motor company from selling their cars in certain parts of the world. Right. Yeah. We import cars. Yeah. It makes no sense. Um, Let's talk about the big short. Let's talk about that for a little bit. So let's go back in time. Obviously that was, I lived through that. I've been in this business a long time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Las Vegas was ground zero for the financial crisis.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah. Yeah. And accurate scenes. I mean, literally every stripper in this town on three houses just kind of how it was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Well, I have a question. Let's talk about the semantics of the movie first, before we talk about the actual situation. So what is it like when you're sitting there and they're like, okay, Steve Carell is going to play you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
And there's a chance your wife loves you both.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
So the scene in that movie, I think probably your character's most famous scene, and I think it was based on a real event, is when Ryan Gosling's talking about you coming to Vegas to the Mortgage Bankers Convention and you raise your hand and ask a question. Did that really happen? We'll walk us through the real scenario of what happened.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Back again, back again for another episode of, like it says in the opening, man, the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, we got something special, something special for you guys, because obviously there's a lot going on in the world today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
So. mean by the way danny danny literally crawled like under the chair oh i can imagine he would have i i can imagine he would have when that was going on let's talk about the moment in that moment when you saw that potentially happening what did you see in the markets at the time that you thought this might become something and has there been any parallels since in the real estate market um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
And we wanted to kind of, I'm sick of scrolling through social media and seeing all of these pocket economists that, you know, class of Wednesday that know exactly what's going on in the world because they happen to vote one way or another. And I decided to maybe bring you some good information today. So what I did was I went out and we scored a Wall Street legend. I mean, this is a guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Well, didn't Clinton also incentivize banks to do this? There's some policy that was made? Was it him that did that? It doesn't ring a bell. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Fair, fair.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
With the Jenga tower?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I mean, it was a great way to definitely talk about what was going to happen there. Do you see any parallels between that time and any of the real estate markets since?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
You know, the reason I asked that, it was kind of a loaded question. I figured you were going to say no, because being in the business that we're in, in real estate, you know, you're constantly talking to people that are pocket prognostic. You know, I'm just waiting for the market to crash. It's not going to happen again because I try to explain to people. equity doesn't go to foreclosure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
who saw it coming when nobody else did. You may know him as the real life inspiration for Steve Carell's character in The Big Short, and he famously bet against Wall Street in the 2008 housing crash and won massive. But he's more than that. He's a brutally honest guy in finance that calls it like he is, whether it's good or bad. And today we're going to talk about the good and bad of terrorists.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Somebody steps in to take that. Yeah. Somebody, somebody comes in to save that deal way before it hits foreclosure. It just equity never goes to the steps. And for some reason, people still in the residential world can't buy that. And I don't get it. So let me ask you this. If you were somebody right now, and again, self-serving for me, you're, you're great understander of the markets. If you,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Would you hold off on buying anything right now or what would you do? I mean, I'm done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
So where do you think all this cash is? Because there's a lot of investors doing the same thing. Are there just absolute war chests being built up by hedge funds?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
All right. Well, I want to ask about one more thing that has nothing to do with anything you might know about, but I just want to feel an opinion, which is this now in the last couple of weeks, it seems like Elon Musk and the Doge department wants to take aim at our elected officials for how does somebody that makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year become worth tens of millions of dollars?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
And, uh, Is that something that you feel needs to be looked into? Where are you with politicians that somehow become overnight millionaires in the stock market and they're the best traders on the street?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
No. Do you think that... What do you think, how much would our government change if we took the ability to trade out of our legislator's hands?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I'll get back to you. See, this is the podcast that makes you think, Steve. That's what I'm trying to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Which is good. Let me ask you this, because with the rise of AI, I just talked to Ari Meisel not too long ago, and we were talking about AI, and I actually asked him, do you think maybe there's some thinking within the White House about bringing manufacturing back to this country where AI is replacing low-level workers at just an alarming rate? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Do you think they're trying to bring manufacturing back in anticipation of having sort of a job shortage?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Well, so even in your industry, how is AI trading? How is AI changing what you guys do? It helps research. It helps.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show. This is Steve Eisman. Steve, how are you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Is it making your job harder because the speed of information is so much faster?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
A little poor, but a little poor today. Well, well, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. And I'm sure you've been busy commenting on all that's happening in the world today. And I do want to talk later a little bit about your experience with the big short, but obviously let's talk about the news of the day starting out. So let's jump right into it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
They just didn't understand how to look at it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Well, you know, it's funny because we were, I was just talking about this with somebody else where he were talking about how Wharton has become a Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Wharton grad, but we're talking about how Wharton has become this school for great operators. And more CEOs come out of Harvard than come out of Wharton. And I said, why do you think that is?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Because this package they got is, man, I put it on the boy. And I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
And they said, because I think Wharton's school of business is very linear thinking. It's very, this to this must equal this. Whereas they felt that at Harvard, it taught more open-mindedness in a way to interpret the data.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
It's because this person was saying there's science in the numbers, there's science in the math, but there's also got to be art and nuance to the interpretation, which is what makes big moves in the market, big moves in business. Is that something that you guys would say?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I was not aware there was a war between you and the University of Pennsylvania when we started that question.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I was not aware. Is it public knowledge?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
All right. Well, chat dbt did not return that for us. They hear war. So you might need to update your model to that, but now I'm going to go look it up. I'm going to go find it. You should look it up. I'm going to do that. Well, Steve, thanks so much. If they want to find you, if they want to connect more with you, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Perfect. We look forward to listening to that. And let me ask you one more question before we go on. Sure. Because I think this is one of the biggest problems with the world right now. And I want to know your process for this. How do you decide? where you get your information? Because there's so much of it out there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
How do you decide this person's qualified, not qualified, this is a good source, that's a bad source?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Cool. All right. Well, thanks so much. All right, guys, man, I hope that helped you today. And you actually have some information when you're sitting around the dining table with your mother who knows more about it than you do. You have some quality information from the man that probably knows more than all of us. But remember, man, I think if anything else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
What is your perspective on what's going on and where we're going to land?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Be careful where you get your information because if you just start repeating something that's nonsense, it makes you look like nonsensical as well. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Go learn to code. Go learn to code, I think was the- Go learn to code at age 50. Yeah, there you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I know that a lot of naysayers say, well, why wouldn't he not negotiate before? Oh, that's ridiculous. Well, I think the best quote I saw was a Kissinger quote who said, you negotiate once the tanks are rolling. Exactly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah, you have to show power. You have to show power prior to anything happening. So you knew he was going to flex a little bit and get this done. Now, I think that of a lot of the people that are making the most noise, who is the most susceptible to fall first in this show of power for the United States? Which countries do you think get in line the fastest?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Depends on who's talking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
It comes with a solid stick deodorant, cream tube deodorant, two free products of your choice, like a mini body wash or deodorant wipes. You get free shipping and has a special offer for our listeners. New customers get $5 off a starter pack with our exclusive code. That means that you're getting 40% off of this starter pack. Just use the code Gafford when you go to ShopMando.com.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I think of all of them out there, the Chinese are probably the hardest to predict what they will do. Of everybody, I would say. Completely. I think Mexico and Canada have to just resolve this as quickly as possible because they're going to feel it quickly and miserably.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
You can't swallow that. My next question is, today I guess it was Apple and Nike announced they're already starting to increase prices based on the tariffs. So is there any way their supply chains are already being interrupted based on inventory on hands to do this? Or do you see these major corporations never wasting a good crisis to try and increase profits? What do you see happening there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Do you think it's happened this quick, though? Do you think it's happened this quick? That I don't know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
let me ask you this one of the seemingly like you said the towns that were decimated uh by nafta by the auto you know industry moving to mexico all of these things happening how how feasible do you see how feasible do you think it is for the united states to really move mass manufacturing back to the states how feasible is that that's a great question i think it's feasible it's going to take time i think one of the things that will i'm guessing will help
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Yeah, it is. It is. But don't you think that some of the reason that manufacturing left in the first place was organized labor in this country just put such a chokehold on manufacturing, making the cost of labor so expensive that it forced this? Or was it really just about corporate bottom line?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
Do you think they're going to have to make concessions to get manufacturing back?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
That's user code Gafford. It's ShopMando.com. You're going to get 40% off. So support our show. Let them know that we sent you. Obviously, this is a paid advertiser, which is how we get started. to be able to do what we do for you guys. So check them out, smell fresher, stay drier, boost your confidence from head to toe, try Mando. And now, escaping the drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
I know. It's just, it's so funny to think that all of this kind of comes down to a handful of people acting rationally as they should.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
What do you think the best case scenario is for timeline for this to somewhat get resolved? And the worst case scenario is? What would you say?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
What do you think about it? That is quick. Yeah, that's fast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
How far, so if it goes two to three months, do you think your average American is going to experience pain? Will we have time to experience pain there? Or will it just kind of resolve before we got to massive interruptions in supply chain?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
You're the smartest guy in the room. That is way above my pay grade. You know what? In your defense, that's how you maintain the reputation as one of the smartest guys in the room is you don't talk about things you don't necessarily know. I actually was. I don't know. I don't know. All right. Well, as a sharp investor, right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From the Big Short to Tariffs: Steve Eisman on Trade Wars and Globalization
As someone that invests, obviously you're a wall street legend is somebody that is a sharp investor. How are you looking to take this situation and make it a positive for investors?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Okay, so what does the manager say? Does he even talk to you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
That's what they called it. It was a magical thing. You know, when you can pull off a soul patch, it was such a magical time, dude. It really was, just in life in general.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
No walkout. You got this kid. Just here's the ball. Go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
All right. So your legs are shaking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And that was it. So now you're like, after this, I'm okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I'm okay. Yeah. Who were the guys throughout your career that would come to the plate that you're like, oh shit, this guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
That's one way to not have a good hit on you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Speaking of hitting people, anybody ever charge at you on the mound?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
When you could roll down the street with literally like a caterpillar crawling across the bottom of your lip. People thought this was stylish. It was it was a look. It was a look for sure, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Do they tell you that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
They were like, okay, risky. Welcome to Chicago. You're going to fit in a Southside dress.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Oh, that's funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Where was the, where was your favorite place? You got to play. What was the best place?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
hmm st louis was great dude i love dude i used to live those fans are great if you know st louis at all if you know the town at all a little bit all right so when i lived in st louis i lived in a part of town called soulard which is right by the stadium okay it's right where the budweiser plant is oh yeah so like when you say plant it's not like the smokestacks and like you're talking about a brick like palace right this place looks like and the clydesdales would run in front of my house every
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
oh my gosh yeah so i could walk out of my house in the clydesdales down the street it was great and we could walk to bush stadium and dude what a great place to watch baseball for visiting players because i was obviously never played for them but those fans are unbelievable they know the game and it's it's it's a lot of fun playing there i love there was a comedian once it was talking about if you're an alcoholic there's no worse place in the world to go than bush stadium because like they don't like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So let's talk about you growing up, dude, because obviously, man, you know, to reach the heights that you did play in pro sports, man, or playing sports in general, there has to be a lot of of going into that. So where did you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Like seventh inning stretch is not taking me out the ball game. It's the Budweiser theme song. It's just all about the beer, which is nuts. But yeah, that was a great atmosphere is great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. St. Louis almost got killed by the mob there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
No, it's a good deal. If you want to hear it, I almost got killed by the mob in St. Louis. So here's the story, right? So this is when I'm working for Hooters of America as a young, strapping, 20-something-year-old person, which there's no better job at those days than running Hooters if you were a young, strapping, 20-something-year-old male.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And anyway, so I had gotten transferred from where I was in Manchester to South County, which is another store that I took over. And my girlfriend at the time, because you couldn't work in the same store with your girlfriend, had been working at South County. And South County in St. Louis is kind of notorious for a little mobbed up. The mob is a real thing there, right? And so this old guy...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
We'll just call him Jay because that was his name. I'm not going to say his last name because who knows he might have relatives and somehow they'll listen to this shit. But no, this dude Jay was an old guy. He was like 60s. He was going every day and see my girlfriend, right? Loved her. And then when I got transferred down there, she had to go to a different store. He didn't like that, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So he started going up to the other store where she went. He's like, God, you got to get rid of this bum. Come back down. I'll take care of you, blah, blah, blah, blah. She's telling me this old monster is telling her all this shit. Right? So I'm like, all right. It's like my first week there. And I'm sitting there and I see him coming and sit down like, oh, okay. All right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I know this dude is, but I'm going to kind of avoid him because that's just, I figure he doesn't want to talk to me. I'm just going to be, do my job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So I'm doing my job. And, uh, the, uh,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
he sits down and i walk by him at some point he grabs me by the arm like fucking grabs me like not like like excuse me but like like man man handles right a little bit and i'm like whoa and i look over and he's like fuck i've been here for i've been here for an hour you don't stop by and say hello to me you show me no respect you disrespect me like this blah blah blah blah and i'm like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
whoa i'm like jay i'm really sorry i was under the impression you want to talk to me i was just trying to give you some space and do your thing right i'm just trying to just do my job here that's all i have no disrespect right i was just trying to be nice so i get out of that and i go in the back and the restaurant was like a v-shaped right where the kitchen was in the middle and then the restaurant went this way and then went this way and the door was over here yeah so in the kitchens here in the middle like a baseball field right yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So I'm in the office and I come out of the office and I walk into the kitchen. I look up and now his sons are in the restaurant, right? Like four of them. And these are dudes that let's just say they don't care about going to jail. And they, dude, it's like six o'clock on a Tuesday. This is not like midnight.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's like families in the restaurant, like little kids coloring on eating hamburgers or whatever. And these dudes lose their shit. And they start going, you disrespect our father. You disrespect our father. We're going to stick your fucking head in the fire. And they start coming, right? And I'm like, oh, my God. So I'm in the middle of the kitchen between two dudes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And luckily that my cooks were there were bouncers. They were huge dudes. They were bouncers part-time at a bar in the land called Boomers. So they were huge. So they were kind of protecting me. I'm standing in the middle of them. And these dudes are coming into the kitchen. And I'm like, they're like throwing pictures at me and like, we're going to stick your foot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I'm like, and all I could say was call 911, call 911, call 911. The cops show up, load all of them up and take them away. I call my boss who is from St. Louis and very aware of who these people were. And she goes, I said, this just happened. And she's like, you can't go back to the restaurant. She's like, I'll call you back. Dude, they moved me to Atlanta the next day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
They're like, no, no, no, no, no. My boss called like our boss. I was like, you don't understand. Like, this is not, this is real. This dude cannot stay in St. Louis. He's got to go tomorrow. And I moved to say, I moved to Atlanta the next day. Oh my God.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So yeah, almost got killed by the mafia in St. Louis. Never heard anything since then. No, not till now. And somebody says, you know, that fucking who this guy, I heard his podcast. I heard the podcast. I know where he's at.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. That's a part of my older days, but segue into nowhere. So. when you were playing in the major leagues, was there anybody that you just, I mean, they just would come to the plate and you're like this dude, like, like I'm just going to stick it right at this dude's crawl.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You were like this guy, here comes this guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Who was the best teammate you ever had?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What made him a good teammate?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What was it like when you'd get settled in a place? What's it like to get the call? I mean, look, unless the mafia is killing you, you have to go. Was there a time when you got that call and you were like, oh, man, I don't want to do that? But you got to do it anyway. Oh, to go into the game? No, when you get traded.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Where did that internal belief come from?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So you went from, let's see, you started with the, no. Cleveland.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What was it about those teams that you want to play?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What did you think of Kansas City?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. It's got to be tough, you know, because I did it to a certain extent, right? And I'm curious what your experience was with it. It's different because you're famous and you're a ball player and everybody wants to be close to you and be friends with you and all that shit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But how do you reconcile like you constantly move into a new place and then all of a sudden like all these people are coming at you and you're like, how do you disseminate? How would you disseminate like who's real and who's just hanging out because I play ball?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Was there a time when, When, like, cause obviously you go from, you go from dad's at Boeing on, on the line of moms, a waitress too. I mean, I, you know, you, you started making some pretty good money really quickly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So what was the, so what was the mind, what was the mind shift like of where you go from no success, like financially, like struggling, probably not struggling, probably medical middle class.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Right. To being a multimillionaire. Yeah. Right. So obviously you've done very well long-term. You're not, you know, you're not hawking autographs. or whatever on the Saturdays. So what was that like? And how did you set yourself up to make sure that you were never going to be broke?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
See, I find that interesting because like probably very similar to like Detroit, right? Because I lived in Detroit for a while. And it seems like in that part of the world, it's like... dad works at Ford, you go to high school, you marry your high school girlfriend, and then you get a job right next to dad on the line, right? Was there a similar, was that kind of with Boeing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
That's when the wife was like, yeah, probably for a couple of years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What was the dumbest thing you bought?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Just just appreciating. That's like crazy. Did somebody at some point grab you and say, hey, risky, like, hey, man, we got to get a plan for some of this. And yeah, because you don't want to be broke two years out of the majors.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So how many of them wind up broke? Did they just not listen to these guys?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. Um, yeah, but here's the thing you'll want for nothing. Your kids won't want for nothing for the rest of their lives. It's fine. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Who was the worst dude you were ever around with money? Like you just knew like, bro, this guy's going to be like five seconds from now, just how they lived.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You don't have to name names. Just tell me a terrible story when you were like, bro, what are you doing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Okay, good. That's fine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But he got to pay off the credit card.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I was like, there was something funny. I said it to one of my buddies yesterday. Someone was like, uh, it was a meme on, on Instagram or whatever. And it was just this chick. And she said, me getting ready to tell my husband that somebody, or me telling my husband that some dude flirted with me at the restaurant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And he just shows a text message from the says, yeah, show him last month's credit card bill. I'll never talk to you again. That's so true. Well, what's worse too, man, is it's just, you know, the people you came up with there, there's this, that obligation amongst so many people to financially take care of way too many people, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Was that kind of the plan?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
If you could go back and give, let's, let's call him 22 year old, just up to the big league, Dave risky, some advice. Yeah. Now you're old, grizzled Dave Riskey, sans soul patch. What would you say to, what would you tell young Dave Riskey?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
No, no, but was that, but a lot of your friends, I'm sure, is that what happened to them?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's so funny. I had a conversation with a buddy of mine was in town this weekend that I was out with all weekend that just sold his company for $128 million. I mean, it's massive clip.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And this is a dude that was a dishwasher 11 years ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Literally washing dishes in a restaurant 11 years ago. So it was coming from $129 million.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Great story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But We're talking about, you know, I'm just like, you're going to go, you're going to go, what are you going to do? Right. Cause like, I just, you know, my big question was cause he came to Vegas and I said, how much you could play? You're like, what, what do you play now? Right. I mean, how much could, cause you know, gambling's only kind of fun if it really kind of matters a little bit. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So they fell into that same thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's kind of, and he's like, nah, I'm just going to play 25 bucks a hand. That's it. And that's, and he did dude. And he did, that's all he played. And it was funny, but we were talking about all the stuff, you know, the, the Gucci, the Rolex, all that shit. And he's like, well, who's that for? Not for me. I don't give a shit. It's funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
My buddy Bradley said, I don't wear a Rolex to tell me what time it is. I wear a Rolex to tell you what time it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So was it rebelling against that life or is it just something you just wanted more as a kid? Like what was it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah, and at some point, though, when you get enough money, you don't need to tell anybody else what time it is because you just don't give a shit anymore. No, for sure. Yeah. Which is, which is funny. So let's move on, man, because you know, look, he had a great career in the majors and it was a very impressive career to be there that long.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And especially when you're starting from like, I mean, you were beyond Mr. Relevant. You were literally in the intern draft.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Like, yeah. What do you guys think? I don't know. Ask mom, mom, risky. I mean, yeah. Risky. It's a risk. I like it. Okay. Yeah. Risky. For sure. Yeah. It's crazy. But you now have gone the other way because like going from having dad that, you know, discouraged you and discourage your dreams. You now have two kids playing D1 baseball at very prestigious schools. Good spots. Are still D1s? No. Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Both of them are still there. Both of them still. I can remember the other one already went in the draft or not. Okay. So let's talk about that. So you get, you get your sons. Did you always want them to like, did you always want to play baseball? Did you let them choose that path? Like how did that work out?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So for all of the people, so, so I guess the question becomes, how do you know? Cause like I, again, baseball's crazy here. My, my, my son played all sports as well in Vegas and baseball in particular in Vegas was crazy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's really crazy. Like when he's like five, people are like, who's this hitting coach? I'm like, he's five. Right. Like at this point, we're on operation. Don't look like a jackass is my main objective out here. That's about it. But it's that serious out here. So at what point do you think... Like if I'm talking to other parents out there, where do you cross the line of lunacy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Like what skill sets are you looking for where you're like, okay, this kid can maybe play. I mean, there was a coach of a club team. Like we all know that everybody thinks their kid's better than they are.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I don't think you need to mention that. I think everybody knows that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
They walked in with a high expectation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Well, let's be honest. And somebody needs to hear this. But if your kid is the 10-year-old hitting home runs, he's probably going to be the super fat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
can we agree with that i mean can we can we agree statistically that's normally where that lands right he's the super fat kid yeah and he can't run to first base and he's just bigger and stronger than everybody at that age right he just happened to be bigger and bigger stronger so step one don't have an opinion until they're ninth grade i like that just enjoy your kids enjoy your kids be a cheerleader on the side you know what i mean just be a cheerleader of your kids and just enjoy them
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. Dude, it's so... I can remember my son playing sports as a small, small kid. And it was always like, you know... Soccer was always like the vibrating football sets. It was just like a mob of little four-year-olds chasing the ball around, but it was always funny, right? I can remember the beast on our team was this Samoan girl named Chloe, like at four.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
If Chloe showed up, we were going to have a good day because she'd just run over everybody. It was great. And then that was always good. Football was kind of a little bit of a hodgepodge, but dude, going to those... The first year of kid pitch baseball, that's a long day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
That's a long day. And even then, here in Vegas, you had kids with $500 bats. It's like, bro, you're going to see three good pitches all season.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Ball 12, ball 14, ball 18. Yeah, it's a long day. So step one, wait until they're going to have any type of opinion. So let's say now you've got a kid that you think is pretty good. What makes a kid pretty good? If you just had to say, now granted, each position is a little different, but I would think that there's some underlying theme amongst all of these kids. What makes a kid look pretty good?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Wow. So dad told you to hang it up at 18?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Now, there are a bunch of facilities here in town that teach that literally that's all they specialize in is movement for all sports.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
When you were growing up, because baseball is so crazy, especially here in Las Vegas. Were you one of those kids growing up that was like you had a hitting coach when you were four, any of that shit?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And and yeah, dude, I mean, so if they if they move well and you can see that they're athletic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. Stay in school, buddy. Keep studying.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I love those videos of the guy that walks out to the little league mound. I'm sure you've seen the coach. He's like, are you sure you're not left-handed?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Oh man. So, but, but doing that, let me ask you this. Cause like the club ball versus traditional Italy, right? Uh, what is the advantage of the club ball versus cause do that stuff. And we played club lacrosse and it was all encompassing. Yeah. I mean, it was just, it was every day, every weekend, every something. Is that good for a kid? I don't think so.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You know what I mean? You could have paid for it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You could have paid for it. The thing I find so interesting about so much of those club sports is they're really all-star teams. And if you're playing a sport, and I don't know how much of this baseball plays into, because a lot of it is really an individual, you know, being good at your individual position, being able to play in that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But, you know, my experience with lacrosse was, it was funny, you know, my son came up on that eighth grade, you know, it was, it was, it was a rec team, but we played club tournaments and these were kids that played together all the time. And it started playing when they were very young coming up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And we would go to these all-star tournaments and just house these teams of the best kids from Washington state, the best kids from California. And they're like, this is a rec team.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And you're like, yeah, but they just play together all the time. Every day. They don't, they don't play on eight different teams with nine different guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So they know what they're going to do is that continuity. I think, I think was a lot of it. So yeah,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And because you're developing a whole other, Oh my gosh, you're developing so much more. Well, it's funny. There was that story. Like when Michael Jordan went from playing basketball to playing baseball, his trainer was like, we have to train completely different because we have an entirely different set of muscle groups. We have to, we have to work on that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And one thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You just, that are dormant with what you do now. And so, yeah, that's probably true. So when you get to high school, right? How important is the selection of the high school team? How important is that? This is as far as getting scholarships. I mean, how important is it to make sure your kid is on the right high school team?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So the high school is not even that important.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Because it's different muscle sets and different all of that stuff when you play a different sport. So dad tells you, hang it up. It makes you want to do more. So in that moment, what was the decision making like for, for you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Because they're working.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So where is summer ball? How do people get their kids into that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So how did you get them connected with those teams?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Word gets out pretty quick if a kid's that exceptional.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Because again, I think for most people, I think that dad who's getting the hitting coach for the five-year-old, I think it's not necessarily his goal right away is to get that kid drafted out of high school into the majors. He's trying to get him into college.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I think that's what most of us as good parents want for our kids is for them to get into a good school.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Can't play shortstop if you can't hit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I'm just thinking about what I think is Bill Burr said. It's like you want to push your kids like Michael Jackson. You want to push them just far enough to get the Thriller album, but not so far that they molest kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
there's a line you gotta have right there somewhere like i wanted them to be tough you know what i mean and and competitive and tough yeah um and they are but i just i did it was a little overboard with my oldest son what what tell me about a conversation you would have with one of your kids i mean 11 12 that's kid right stuff i'm talking about tell me that conversation at 17 18 when they're like dad i think i might want to quit
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What's the conversation like?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Dude, you know, it's so funny. And that's why sports are so great for kids. You know, if your kids aren't playing sports, even if they have no gift whatsoever, get them in something. Because if...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
you know i listen to you know i i speak a lot i'm out i do these things and you know there's other speakers and they have these horrendous terrible stories these backstories i don't have that shit right my kids will never have this horrendous didn't know where the next meal was coming from story right so as parents we've got to set them up for life because life is going to present them with some adversity for sure and i think sports is the best manufactured adversity you can give your kids
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And it's so true. And it's like literally my son yesterday was talking about something that he does for me here. He works here at the company and something he does that does involve some failure. Right. It involves some rejection. You know, people do slam the door in his face a little bit for something, a certain task. Yes. Right. And he said, man, I just don't know if I'm cut out for that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And I said, dude, that's adversity that you need to lean into that. The heart is where you need to lean because eventually it will get easier. And I said, how many times have you heard me say this? When I'll just literally say, I'm not leaving today until I get one win. I just need one win today. That means that literally everything else I touched today did not go my way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But I'm not getting out of this chair until I get a win. Because that's how you overcome adversity. And I think through sports, I think it's such a good plan for kids to learn that. And it's so great that your kids never got to a point as young adults where it was like the adversity was so great that they wanted to walk away from it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start. Right now, back again, back again for another episode. Like it says in the opening, man, the podcast gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, man, it's not just about getting you where you want to be. Because I got a baller in the studio today. Literal terms, baller.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
i think they're softer at everything or maybe everything but you have to understand dude i mean look kids today will never understand the pain of your father saying you got to go do something in the yard on saturday morning when that's the only time you had to watch cartoons like if i miss this i'm done for a week i can't pull it up on demand right you know dude i walk in yesterday my daughter's got door dash what are you doing i know like what why are you door dad like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Go to the store.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And how long did you spend there? Two years. Two years. Was it all about baseball, or did you actually make it to class?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Dude, for sure. And I think, you know, that's always my biggest concern too. And I tell people, everybody that comes through here, it's hyper wealthy. I'm always like, okay, tell me how to not raise worthless kids. Because that is my biggest, dude, you asked me what my biggest fear in life is. It's not dying. It's not anything else. It's raising worthless kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And I think we're doing a really good job, man. My kids are awesome. But at the same time, yeah, dude, you want them to just be like, Hey, we're going to fly to, you know, we're going to, you know, for yourself sometimes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But like not everybody, it gets to fly on Emirates first class to Paris when they're 14, that doesn't always happen. And so what I do, what I do is when we do shit like that is I always make sure I tell them exactly how much everything costs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You know, one of my favorite thing conversations we ever had was at some point, you know, my son was like 13 and I guess he was just trying to be grounded or whatever he was trying to be. And he's like, you know, I don't need a big giant house like this. I go, really? You don't, you don't need a big giant. No, I just, this is a lot of house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I don't like when I'm, when I'm grown, I just want a house like our old house. And I said, really? Our old house. Okay. So let's pull it up and see what it just sold for. Our old house has just sold for like 1.1 million. I'm like, you're going to need a minimum salary of $187,000 to afford that house on a 40% DTI. How's that working out for you? Teach? And he's like, what? I'm like, yeah, no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
the offers start coming in for folks how do you guide your sons through that process because i mean obviously now it's a whole new thing with nil and all this other stuff i mean how do you guide your sons through that process how much input did you have on the offers that they got dealing with the coaches how much input did you have i had a lot of input with it um obviously i'm respected more because i i was in the game right by this by these baseball coaches so i
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So did you find a mentor there that was, like, where was the, where's the Merlin in your hero's quest? Where's the Obi-Wan Kenobi? Who was that guy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Um, but you're also trying to get an education in case. Cause I mean, like I said, it doesn't happen for everybody. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
If that happens, you got to show up at his commencement like wearing overalls and no shirt. Like, you're the first one to get a degree. Daddy's proud of you, boy. Proud of you. Back in the holler. What?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah, dude, it's funny, man. I think that's, you got to have the fallback there. Even though, you know, these days it's- It is different now. Well, there's such the argument, bro, and I hate it because you got all the, you know, the internet hustle culture, right? Which I'm all about, dude. You want to hustle, that's fine. But I hate these dudes. And there's this whole-
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
this whole tribe of influencers through the hustle culture that are just college is stupid. You know, don't go to college is a waste of money. You need to get in the hustle, blah, blah, blah. And none of these assholes have college degrees.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So dude, it's like, like you can tell me something stupid if you've done it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Right. But if you've never done it and you're just trying to justify your existence. Right. Because you haven't done it. That's fine. Like I didn't graduate from college. I went to college and I quit because I felt the institution had nothing further to offer me for what I was studying. And, but, but at the same time, you know, I would never tell anybody that's stupid.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Right. Because I, I don't, I didn't finish it. I don't know. So, and I think college is such a good place to learn how to be an adult, if nothing else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
One like that, you know, you've got one son at Utah and the other one's at USC.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Right? Dude, those connections that he's making at USC.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
That is worth its weight in gold. Dude, for those of you who are listening to us on the East Coast, you've got to understand, USC is like the financial mafia on the West Coast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Those folks all run together and it is a fraternity of sorts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. We're, we're going to see, uh, taking hate and we're going, we're doing all the California schools in, uh, two weeks. We're going to do UCLA, USC, uh, Stanford in three days. Oh, that's awesome. Because those are the three schools. Yeah. He's narrowed down to on California.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Obviously not athletic scholarship. We don't have that. We didn't get that gene, but he got the brains, I guess, from his mom. So we'll lean into that. We'll lean into that one. Well, what do you think the biggest mistakes our parents make when trying to get their kid's scholarship? As far as on scholarships through athletics.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. Well, dude, man, good talk, brother.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
If they, if they did, if they want to find you more, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I really do a bunch. Don't do a lot. Don't do a lot. This is where I'm going to make Dave make a course. I'm going to make him make a course to help parents get their kids into D1 schools. I think the information that you have in this arena is invaluable, and I think it's just something people should have, so.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Like, well, you know, look, I think if we've learned anything from today, like if you can take anything away from today, it's even if somebody played 10 years in the big leagues was an elite level athlete for the majority of their life. you can host a podcast and still hit a golf ball 40 yards farther than they can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Because I do it pretty consistently, I'd like to say, where he actually accused me of being on steroids last time he played. Yeah, you hit it like 400 yards. I know, I'm not on steroids, but thanks for asking. That's all we need to do. Anyway, guys, listen, man, I hope you got a bunch out of this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
If you have kids today, man, you know, they can be great, but you got to give them an opportunity to do so. And so can you. Give yourself a chance. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What, What did he see that made him think that you'd be a better pitcher than a shortstop?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. So you switched over to being a pitcher. How long did that transition take? Because that's difficult, yeah?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
With pitching, I imagine the mental part of it is so hard. How much of it's between the ears and how much of it's in the shoulder?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
The whole time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's just not that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So when you're in college, you're a starter. And then at what point do you decide to go in the draft?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What is that? Okay, so let's talk about that, dude. Because you see that on TV, right? You see that in the NFL draft where you see those poor bastards that make the trip to wherever it is and they're sitting in the green room and the phone don't ring, buddy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
This is a dude, this is a cat, that spent 11 years in the major leagues. One of the best relief pitchers that was ever to do it. Had probably the best soul patch easily in the game from back in the day. And more importantly, I think the interesting part of a story now, and what I would want to hear as a parent, what I'm interested in, is this dude now has two kids now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Maybe he can pitch. I don't know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Okay, so you may not even know this, but is there anybody that was picked after you that had any type of a career?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I mean, that is insane.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And so the GM that picks you there looks like a genius.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But at 18, it's like, here's the, here's the thing, right? Like you see, like, I think I just turned 19 then. But like, look, I have no frame of references because obviously nobody's ever recruited me to too much of anything. Really?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
But no, but you watch like Moneyball, right, where he talks about, you know, in the movie anyway, you know, Billy Beane's experience where he's like, you know, being mind fucked essentially by the scouts when he was a young kid. And that's real. That happens.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So dude, taking that, you know, it's funny. One of the things that I love to say is you got two choices when things negativity happens to you in your life, man, it can either be fuel or it can be, it can go in the trunk or it can go in the engine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
You're either going to be baggage you're lugging around or you can use it as gas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's like, oh, I can't do this. Okay. That's fine. Screw you. That's it. So you make it to the majors. It took two years in the minors?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
What was your first contract?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
$820?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
And keep in mind, even though the soul patch was popular then, this ain't that long ago. It's just not a good payment deal. That was 1997. Holy shit. Okay, so you're making $800. And what third world city are you playing in?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Okay, all right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It's God's country. Oh, yeah, it was fun.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So you're playing in Kenston, North Carolina. You stayed there the whole time?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
that are playing D1 level sports. And I want to talk about how you raise a champion, man, today, because this dude's got it cold. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the studio. This is Dave Riske. Dave.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Those are your minor league stops. So Buffalo. And then what's the day like you get the call?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Okay. So here's a, you may not even know this, but is there anybody that was picked after you that had any type of a career? And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So Anaheim was who called you out?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So that's the first major league baseball field.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So when you were in the minor leagues, just to go back just a little bit, did you have like that salty old, like gristled veteran that had been to the majors? It was like, kid, let me tell you what it's like.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. It must be hard when you're up there and you get sent down. That's something that never really happened to you. No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
It didn't really happen. So you get the call. You go to Anaheim. You're in Anaheim. You walk out on the field that first. Did you play the first night?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Hey, man. No, no, but the soul patch was for sure. You had the best soul patch in baseball. I'm going to give you that one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
I'm running it out to the bullpen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So you literally just littered the entire field with candy your first time out. Oh, man. So the first night you didn't. But it's nerve wracking. I'm sure. Yeah, I'm sure. Who was the first other than Dave Justice who was kind enough to help you finish your Halloween fest, I guess, in left field? Who was the first player that kind of took in the big leagues that kind of took you under their wing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Yeah. Right, sir. Everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
Finley was so good to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Major Leaguer to D1 Dad: David Riske's Journey of Success
So when's the first night you get to play?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Oh dude, I have nutritionists. I have my, my, my chat GPT. I have a nutritionist on there that knows my macros and everything I want to eat. It's like I used to track all my macros on my fitness pound stuff. Now I just take pictures of what I'm eating and it automatically tracks the macros.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
not to uh stay in the job that that gave you no bereavement time which is a little crazy to me decided not to stay in the job um what was the first choice or what what's your decision process now i was trying to open up a restaurant i wanted to open up i started with the capriotis uh but there was no allocation for any locations here in las vegas left at that time
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
That's a little closer to the starting line than the finish line and get a little bit different perspective for the, you, if you're out there listening and thinking, I want to start a business. And even if it's not a home services business, if you're just getting started in business, I wanted to hear kind of some of the lessons. Cause this dude's doing it. Well, man, he is gone.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
You felt the wheels starting to kind of sink into the sand. I had to do something. Yeah. Right. I got to get some, I get some Ford emotion.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Okay. Well, hang on, let's back up. So let's learn, let's learn a lesson from this. So, you hired your buddy to teach you how to clean carpets. Yep. But cleaning carpets had nothing to do with running a business. Right. So you'd have been better off hiring his boss to teach you how to run a business. For sure. Cause the, honestly, the cleaning carpets, you could probably watch a YouTube video.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Well, here's the thing, though. People don't understand that they think the process or the service or the product is so important. And they don't understand that understanding how to market it, understanding how to run a P&L and understanding how to actually make money and cash flow of business. That's the value of the knowledge. The product or process can be applied to anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah. Because he can always just clean carpets. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
really fast to take in something that you would hear and say, that's a little silly, into a real businessman that's doing well. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Robert Einstadt. Thanks for having me. How are you, buddy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Property preservation is what you're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And all right, we'll stop for a second because this is another good lesson, right? When you're trying to scale a business, you can go deep or you can go wide. Right. And what that means is to go, let's say you have one thing that you do, you do, let's just call it a painting. You're a painter, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
You can either go out and find five, you know, if you're doing a thousand jobs a year painting, right? The only way to scale is to go out and find 2000 jobs a year painting, or you can find out what your customers that you're doing paint for what they also need.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And then you can add other trades and other, and you can start doing bolt-ons that can help them, your existing customer base become a one-stop shop. For me, the best way to do that, I don't know what you did, but for me, the best way to do that is to find other people that are already doing that business and then say, Hey, look, I'll bring business to you. we'll split the fee.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
He's Iron City in German, we just learned. That's what we learned. He is the proprietor of Property Pros, which is a pressure washing business. And I know you're thinking, this dude's out doing people's driveways. Is that where it started?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
We'll split the cost. I'll become the marketing arm. And then when you take over and you become 50% of their total business, well, then you say, Hey, look, let's become partners.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So we're taking the lumps first. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Well, let's take a look. So you were doing all this stuff because you went, you started going wide with everything that you could do. And did you start, here's a problem a lot of people have, is they like to take all of their income and dump it in one big bucket. Yeah. And then all of their expenses and dump them one big bucket when they do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
No, you went right for the big stuff, right out of the box.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So they don't understand what's actually working and where they're actually getting their money. They don't understand like every facet of your business has got to make money. And if it doesn't, you got to get rid of it. And so the problem is people, you know, start dumping all of, all of the revenue from all these different little services into one bucket.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And then they don't realize that they're losing money because of this, this, this, and you could cut back, uh, Get rid of three of these things, save all of this time, and still be as profitable or more profitable with less headaches. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
They started compartmentalizing revenue, didn't they?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Well, you were, you were, you were failing successfully as I like to say. Failing forward. Yeah. Like, yeah, I'm failing successfully, which I've done in quite a few businesses myself. So I get that. That's cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So when you really drill down now on pressure washing is this is the big, the best bang for the buck of everything you were doing, which obviously having a good accountant and compartmentalizing these things helped you see that. Yep. So you had, you started just with gas stations and now you're like, I need to grow this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So you started that. Well, let's go back up a little bit because, you know, most great entrepreneurs are, I like to think, the nature versus nurture. And most of them are made not born. It is what it is. So tell me about you growing up, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Everything is just relationships. Shaking hands and kissing babies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
See, does everyone know that? That owns commercial property? No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Dude, I would make my marketing pieces for you. Just brainstorming. Seriously, my marketing pieces would look exactly like the service of a lawsuit. Yeah. That's exactly what it would look like. And it would say like someone slip and fell your coefficient or whatever it is on your sidewalks is X or whatever you said it was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And now here's a lawsuit either suing you for a million dollars at the bottom of it. I just say, or you could avoid all of this by having us pressure wash your sidewalks. Cause literally that'd be like, holy shit. And now they're reading it. And then they get, they might be mad at you. I don't know, but it would definitely get me to read, read whatever you sent me in the mail.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So now, but now in that small time, right, just since you zeroed in on pressure washing, now it's been four years. Yep. You guys are north of seven figures in sales every year. Yeah. Yeah. And relatively still small crew. Yep. So what's the plan going forward? How do you scale it? How do you scale from here?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Here's the question. Like, I'm just trying to think of all the ways that if it was me, how do I market my, how do I market my.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah. Well, I'm saying, but the commercial, like I, like I would maybe have a dude, I would maybe have the name of my company with a stencil with my phone number. And I'd find a really dirty like parking lot or sidewalks in a shopping center. And I would just lay the stencil down on the sidewalk and just.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
yeah we've done that just pressure wash it clean out a thing how how how expensive is the equipment to test if that's if the sidewalks are slippery uh the tripometer is about 10 grand i mean but insurance adjusters are usually the ones that have it yeah but i'm saying i know but what if you had it and you could like hey man here's a serious risk if somebody falls out here you're gonna get sued because here's your numbers like i'll give you a free test yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
The free test of the Tripometer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
No, dude, this is what we do in here, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
See, because now I'm thinking I'll get a Tripometer. I'll send out there and I'll start sending you leads. And then when I buy leads, we've got 50% of your business. Oh, TRIB. Yeah. Tripometer. Yeah. It sounds better. Well, that's why I say this isn't really what it should be. So now I'm thinking, see, this is my problem.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
This, this conversation right here, somebody asked me that day, they said, uh, cause I I've made a commitment to myself to not go to any of my mastermind groups between now and when my book comes out. Why?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Because conversations just like this, because now you're thinking about buying a tribometer and going out and just generating leads for a pressure washing business instead of what I would need to be doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Because this is how my brain works.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
See, I don't need to do that because I need to focus on what I'm doing here. See, this is just so distracting. This is how my brain works. I'm just like, dude, there's a lot of money in this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Well, dude, and it's something that, like, okay, for example, a friend of mine, a buddy of mine, Todd Haskell. Todd, if you're listening, how you doing? Old friend of mine from back in the day from the restaurant business. Recently, and this dude was a lifer in the restaurant business, and I was so happy to see that he had quit, finally got out of it. He was a lifer at, like, managing restaurants.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
i knew him a million years ago when i worked in corporate restaurants and he finally got out of the business and started a pressure washing business and he's just doing residential and i thought to myself man that's great and how how rewarding that must be for him after having to deal with a boss his whole life to now he gets to take care of him and do whatever he wants to do and i guarantee just from watching him online he's making more money than he was making running restaurants
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Guaranteed. Probably just in residential. So, you know, it's so AI will never replace what you do. Nope. Just won't happen. You don't have to worry about chat GBT taking over the old power washing space, which is awesome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Well, I always say if you don't want to quit at least once a week and go work at McDonald's, you're not entrepreneuring hard enough. Yeah, dude. But here's the thing. Okay, I'm going to hit you with the Kent Clothier-ism. Here it comes. You ready? What would happen to your business
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
If you just left, walked out the door for six months and didn't call, didn't do anything, just left for six months, what would happen to your business? Continue to operate. That's what I'm talking about. Absolutely. So you have a company, not a job. A lot of people that own businesses think they own companies when really all they're doing is they're their own boss on a job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
It would continue to grow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So you, you made some key hires over the last little bit. Who are the key hires?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
How'd you find them?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And that's it, it was five grand to get this done. And the amount of time that you, and dude, the amount of time you have to spend with that is insane. And getting the right person in the right seat is so important. Nothing will sink your business faster than having the wrong people in the wrong seat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
But let me say, I wanna shift gears a little bit now, because you and I have a similar kind of issue that we deal with, very different, but the same, and both challenging in itself. Which is for those of you guys that don't know this about me, I suffer from something called Trimogenia Neurology.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
It is a neurological disease where for periods of give or take six weeks, don't know when they start, don't know when they stop, just shows up. Takes off. Effectively, if the wind blows on the left side of my face, it feels like a taser is touching me. I literally am getting electrocuted on the left side of my face. They call what I have the suicide ailment is what they call it is the name for it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So, yeah, it sucks. And recently, Robert, I know last year we talked about it, but you got diagnosed with a neurological disorder as well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, because we were on the boat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, it was right before.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
No, no, no. Well, no. I mean, the point being is this is, you know, again, it's about what you choose and having this stuff that pops up. You know, you can use it as fuel or you can use it as luggage. And it just depends on what it's going to go on the trunk or the tank.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah. Because you just got to keep going. Yeah. I mean, life's going to hand you a bunch of weird things, man. You just got to keep pushing through it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah. It's definitely an interesting thing. But at the same time, even when it's going on, I don't call in. I'm still here. I'm still working. I write down. I have a note on my phone that explains what's going on. So when I'm out in public and it hits me and I just have to stop for a second and I just show people the note on my phone. Can you not talk?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Oh, dude, when it hits me, like for that 45 seconds, you can't do anything. You're being electrocuted. That's crazy. Yeah. So the fact that I can barely get my phone out of my hand, it hurts like really bad.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
The first time it happened? Yeah. Were you in a meeting or something? Oh, no, dude. I woke up and I woke up. I rubbed my left eye and got shot out of the bed. Like I just licked, like I ripped the cord out of the lamp and licked it. What? Yeah. I thought I had a stroke. I'm like, did I just have a stroke? Like, cause you don't know, right? It's just so weird.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So I immediately Googled, touched my face, got electrocuted and it came right up. I knew what I had before I got diagnosed in 15 seconds. So did you go see a neurologist? Oh dude. So many neurologists. So many. Yeah. So many. And now for me, luckily there's a surgery they can do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
So if it sparks up again, they're going to cut a, they're going to cut a quarter size hole out of my skull behind my ear and then go in and essentially just kind of wrap duct tape around that nerve. is an easy way to say it. So it doesn't happen anymore. And I've already met with the surgeon and he was very calm about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And then towards the end of the day, if I like need to hit a certain like level of stuff, I take a picture of what's in my fridge and I take a picture of my pantry and it tells me what to eat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, I'd had a hoodie, I had to wear a hoodie to every game and I'd hold it down trying to keep the wind off my face. I had to hold it down over my face trying to keep the wind off me. I'm glad you're doing better now. Yeah, I'm good right now. Life is good now, I was well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
But dude, the message is, I think the reason I wanted to talk about that is so many people again, man, you're either looking for an excuse to succeed or excuse to fail. And I think through the course of your life, you've always found a reason to succeed and nothing is going to stop you no matter what it is. And I think there's some magic in that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I think if more people had that, there'd be a lot happier people on this earth.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Are you somebody that has written goals? Do you write your goals out? Do you do that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I'll give you a freebie. It's one of my favorite uses for ChatGBT. I have everybody on my team do this. You know, people used to make vision boards where they get all these magazines and they cut bullshit. Yeah, that ain't exact enough. Dude, you can tell ChatGBT to create an image of exactly what you want. Like, exactly what you want. The right color, the right this, the right this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
It can put you in it. It can do whatever. And then you have those images. If you go to the gym at my house, I've got a whole wall of...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
visualizations of things that i want to come true and in a bunch of like i take them off because a lot of them do right because every morning as i'm on the treadmill i'm looking at those things and i'm feeling like what it's like if they're actually have already happened right but that is like one of my favorite uses so even if you're not like a big goal right or outer dude use that bro especially if you're visual and you like to visualize that use chat gbt and just like hey this is what i'm trying to achieve chat gbt is starting to be a game changer for me
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Bro, I like crazy. I use it every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Oh dude, I have nutritionists. I have my, my, my chat GPT. I have a nutritionist on there that knows my macros and everything I want to eat. It's like I used to track all my macros on my fitness pound stuff. Now I just take pictures of what I'm eating and it automatically tracks the macros.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, it's terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And then towards the end of the day, if I like need to hit a certain like level of stuff, I take a picture of what's in my fridge and I take a picture of my pantry and it tells me what to eat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
what yes dude it's magic and then like so in that nutritionist thing is also does my workout so i'll take like progress pictures of myself in the mirror from the front side say based on my progress pictures alter my workout to improve the areas i need to work do that so chat gbt is my trainer it is my nutritionist it's everything
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Did you have to do a bunch of prompts for that? No, I just told it you're my nutritionist. And like literally the first time I said, like, you know, I've liked, I'd like to scale with like all of the stuff on it, like BMI and fat percentage and all that stuff that shows you the visualizations of everything in your body with the scale. And I just put all of that data into it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I said, you know, I'm 53 year old dude. I'm six, four. And here you go. Here's my weight. And here's all this. Here's my BMI. Here's my fat. And I want to, this is where I want to go. Give me a diet. They'll get this on a workout plan. I get there and I give it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
yeah but okay that is a key though like you have to give it all of the details yeah dude yeah you can't just say but dude you can take a picture of yourself and say i want to have a perfect physique based on what you see what do i need to do that's crazy people people don't see that's the thing that people aren't using enough with chad gpt is they're not uploading images into it they're not turning the camera on that's where the magic is dude we were a carbone
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I took a picture of a half-eaten plate of spicy rigatoni, and I was like, oh, I forgot to track this. And it was like, oh, you're at Carbone. Uh-uh. Yes, dude. It knew where I was. I think that's off my phone knowing where I was. But it knew where I was. It knew that was spicy rigatoni. It looked on their website, found the nutritional content for it, and then logged it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I, I did, I did something similar with life coach thing. I said, ask me to, I said, I want to find blind spots in my life of where I can improve. Yeah. Ask me 200 questions in every aspect of my life, like 15 each in four different aspects of my life and figure out where I can improve. And dude, it asked me 200 questions about family, fitness, faith, uh, and, and business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And it spit out a manual of what I need to work on. Wow. Like an 80 page PDF. Dude, I have loaded data from our company into it. Like all of our sales data, everything into it. Um, I load our PNLs in where, you know, analyze this, your, your job as COO, tell me where I'm leaking. Tell me I'm doing this. I mean, if you're not using that for everything you do, you're nuts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
If I have a difficult situation with an employee, I'll say, here's my situation. What should I do? Oh, yeah. You know, because.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
It's wild. Do you have any kind of fear? No, I don't. In the space that I'm in, I don't. In real estate in general, I do not have it. I mean, with ChatGPT. Like it taking over the world?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Because here's the thing. What could somebody really do with that data? What could they really do with the data? You know, I think if anything, the fear should be from, I think you're already seeing, if I was India, I'd be very worried. Pakistan would be very worried because all the outsourcers are done. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're just data entry outsourcers. You're cooked.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I wonder how VAs are doing. You're cooked. They're all cooked. I have old VAs that I used for years, like constantly emailing me. Sir, please, do you have any work? Because now I've just automated so much of what they used to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
with gbts or with the automations you can run within google that network when the google sheets everything else i've just automated so much of it that i don't need i don't need him anymore i mean dude my my brother-in-law is um is in the software business and full systems that it used to take him months to spin up for people he can spin up now in a matter of a couple weeks with no help it's crazy because he's just telling it it's just spitting the code out like crazy like now it comes it's
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
wild what uh what what businesses like top five businesses do you think that ai is not going to affect not going to affect um well i can tell my kids all the time right like the number one thing i try to teach my kids is by the time they are adults and i'm talking about 30 right my kids are 17 and 15. by the time they're in their 30s
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
The skill set that will be most in demand in this world is the ability to look another human being in the eye and connect with them on a visceral level. If you can do that, because their whole generation is heads and thumbs. They're all like this, right? The ability to communicate with another person and reach them is still going to be in very high demand. But like real estate, like what we do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And this is not a shot at the, at people that are listening to this and say, well, that's not true. Why? You know, like you look at what orbits did to the travel industry. Like people kind of stopped going to travel agents as much. I still love a good travel agent. And especially if I'm planning an elaborate trip, I love a good travel agent. So they just can't be replaced.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
But that industry as a whole got, got, got condensed because of orbits. And those, those, those, you know, travel websites, um, The reason that I don't think real estate will ever get replaced like that, like Zillow trying to create an end-to-end, seamlessly agentless transaction, it'll never happen. And here's why.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Because the majority of people on this earth, when they're making the largest single financial transaction of their lives, they still need somebody there to tell them it's okay. Most people. They want somebody to say, this is the right move. Yes, there's a certain fraction of the population that can do this without real estate. I understand that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
But a lot of people still like somebody to say, this is the right move. Like, I don't know shit about crypto. but I know a handful of dudes that know everything about it. And if I'm gonna trade some crypto, I want them to tell me it's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
No, which is fine. But here's what you have to understand. Chat GBT again at this current iteration, and it may become cyborgs. I don't know, but it does not have the ability to look at other human in the eye and connect on a visceral level. True. Whereas I can look across the table at a first time home buyer that's scared to death. Am I doing the right thing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And because of my heart, I know it's the right thing because I've done this 5,000 times. I can tell them, guys, this is what you need to do. And they believe me at their core and everything is okay. Until a computer can replace that interaction, I'm not worried about it. I think it makes good people better at their jobs, and it will eliminate the people that suck.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
That's a lot for a kid to take in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I think as much as it can do for law, I think as much as it can do for contracts and everything else, I still think a good lawyer is worth his weight in salt. I think medicine, you're always going to need people to say this is okay, even though I think you're going to watch the advancements in medicine go up. in the next couple of years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Dude, my good buddy Nick sent me a thing yesterday and it was a company where now it's full genetic testing and they can create an AI replicant of you in cyberspace from your genetic testing and then based on, they'll do your blood work every six weeks and then they can say this perfect version of you should be aging at this rate Versus the real you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And then they can make changes in your genomes with peptides based on what's going on. And it's like five or six grand a year. And my response, no, I think the full service is like 12 grand a year. And my response back to him was in three years, this is going to be 49 bucks a month.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Like that's how fast this is going. It's quantum leaps. You know, you see, I think you're going to see, I think you'll see cures for some of this stuff. Hopefully things like ALS, hopefully things like MS. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Nope. You're losing me here, buddy. I don't know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Thank you. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Is that never really your thing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I can tell you, I'll try anything like that. Like I'm, I'm game. I'm your huckleberry friend now because dude, I believe that all of the things that we've been putting in our body and the environment is trying to kill us every day. Oh yeah. Firmly believe that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Now it's 400, 300. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
inspirational to somebody that's out there that's trying to start a business, man. You can just do it, man. Just try, especially when you're young, right? Because even if you fail, you got plenty of time to figure it out and try again.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, exactly. What's the worst that can happen? You stay exactly where you are. And with that note, we'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, dude. I tell my kids all the time. my kids don't have a lot of trouble at school, but every now and again, you'll have somebody that does, you know, kids are terrible. All of your anti bullying stuff, like school, not working. Kids are still terrible. They will always be terrible. They're just terrible. And when my kids deal with something, that's just dumb. I always tell them like, well,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
here's the truest thing over here. The people that are giving you the most grief, this is the highlight of their life. They're like 17 years old and this is it. Like they're the ones 30 years from now, are they gonna be going to every high school reunion? Reliving the glory days, baby. It's gonna be like, yeah. Uh, so don't worry about it. Right. Coming up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
I use it every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
If that's something that's happening to your kids, just always remind them of that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
What has nothing to do with you. It has to do with their shortcomings is what it is. Nobody ever tries to, uh, nobody ever hates down. You know what I mean? They always try to pull the people they perceive above them down. So that's how it works. Um, what was the first hustle for money, man? Uh, selling weed was, uh,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah. You know, see, I'm trying to teach my kids about credit a little bit different way than that. They all, my, my kids carry credit cards and you know, they charge all the stuff they want through the course of the month, but on the first of the month they have to pay for it. And, uh, and yeah, if you're short, I'd use some 25% interest or whatever. They're short.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And they, you know, you would pay 25% interest a couple of times before they're like, damn, this sucks. So now it's very much within their means of what they earn.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Back again, back again for another episode of the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to go. And man, you know, it's kind of in vogue right now. And I keep hearing a lot of it. And it's thanks to people like Cody Sanchez that are talking about buying businesses and doing these things. And there is so much money in home-based businesses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Um, Okay. Let's talk about this. So, so you obviously didn't excel in, in high school. So there was no college was not necessarily on the horizon for you. So what did you, so did you always go out and just right into the carpet cleaning or do you have a couple of terrible jobs where you're terrible?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
The flight lines where?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I'm talking about not home-based businesses necessarily. Home services businesses is what I meant to say. Home-based would be like selling Amway. Home services businesses. Is there so much money? So I said to myself, I want to have somebody home service owner. I've had some some of the greats on through here. Tommy Mello has been through here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Dude, it's so interesting because you hear that story. There's a lot of tragedy in that from the time you were 17 and this terrible stuff you saw and now you're 21 and dead. So many people, man, would just have gone in the tank at that point. You hear these stories like, well, this is the reason, all of these reasons, all of these, the story is why I'm a complete screw up, right? You hear this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
This is the justification for my behavior in being a drug addict and being a self-sabotaging behavior that just gets me nowhere. So what is the difference between in you, you think, that made you take that and use it as fuel instead of as luggage? It's just perspective, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
No, dude. Hey man, whatever works. It's so funny. I say it all the time, but here, man, it's like, you know, you hear things in, in like, I'll say things even here in the podcast. And I'll think, man, that was really profound. And then like every now and again, I'll tell you a funny story. Every now and again, I'll run into the person that said it first. Yeah. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I'll think like like I just because it's just if you're a student of life and other people and you listen to what people say and you try to get the most information that you can to better yourself and those around you, there's going to be bleed over of thought process. And you can't remember where you heard everything. But I had Ari Mizell on here. And a couple of weeks ago, Ari's great dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
He's a, he is the master at efficiency. He's like the efficiency master, literally wrote the book on it. And apparently I'd read, I'd read that book at some point because I was like, here's what I like to do, Ari. I like to, you know, I turned all of the notifications off on all of the apps on my cell phone. So I'm not distracted during the day. And he's like, Oh really? Where'd you hear that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
you know, just some of the greats have been through, but I wanted to get, you know, it's kind of hard if you're starting out to listen to a dude like Tommy Mello, that's banging out, you know, $200 million. And I said, let's get somebody that's doing extremely well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I'm like, I don't know. Maybe I thought I was like, or maybe it was chapter three of my book. And I was like, holy shit. That's funny. But it is. It's true. So listen, I say this. Never apologize for spreading good information, regardless if you don't recall the source. Never apologize. Always remain a student, man. That's like... Yeah, dude. Never apologize for that. That's good stuff. So...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Yeah, but again, man, so many people would have used your story and spiraled the wrong way. And you chose to say, okay, look, I'm gonna make something out of this. And- That's the key though. Yeah. Chose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
Now that we're quoting other people, the movie Young Guns, dude, as stupid as this is, I always remember there's a scene in Young Guns where Kiefer Sutherland's talking about, talking to somebody, your past is like a paper book novel. When you're done with it, you throw it away and buy a new one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Profit of Pressure Washing with Robert Eisenstadt
And I think that philosophy of being able to choose what happens next and not wallow in what happened before is really a difference maker for a lot of people, which is amazing. So back to your story, you decided not to
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
you're a younger kid right and you want to impress somebody that's much older than you just be tenacious in the pursuit of whatever you're trying to get with them yeah just put in the fucking work that's how they that's how you do what most people won't do it well that's how you show you're serious showing up every day yeah just prove it's just it's just proving them
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
What's up, brother? I'm so glad you're here. Much like so many of my friends, I see a random Instagram post. They're like, I'm laid over on my way to Vegas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
But cause you went from, you went from hemorrhaging money to all of a sudden I've got no more debt and I just got, I'm sitting on this cash and now I can breathe.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Are you, cause like, I know that there's now you could, you could potentially cross collateralize that entire portfolio. You can't really do that here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
No, but I'm saying you could pull a line against it by cross-collateralizing the entire portfolio.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Did you become infinitely more bankable by doing that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
It's a different play.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And you're done. So now, but, but you shifted, you shifted asset class now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
So now you're just buying storage. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. Cause you, cause you, I think you told me at one point you were, you were clearing like seven figure wins on that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
As it works out, as it does that. But dude, your level of mental toughness is...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Let's talk about that. Because obviously, every market is different for how you get to work with the city and the county and whatever else to get things entitled. For those of you who listen and don't know what we're talking about, when you buy a piece of dirt, you don't just get to automatically build whatever you want on it. The city has a little say-so in that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And then you've got to kind of get your plans together and you put them through city council and zoning and planning and all of these things. And then eventually they stamp off and say, yes, you can do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And you can take a piece of land that might be zoned for, let's just say light residential or, or, or light density where there's not a lot of houses can be, but if you can get the zoning on that flipped to commercial or industrial or something else, multifamily, it makes that land infinitely more valuable. So you kind of,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
can create incredible value in land for people just by understanding how to deal with political red tape.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. Right. So how, so is all of this stuff you're doing in the same market?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
unbelievable to me just the stuff you're able to push yourself through and the transformation you made in your body and your mindset and all of that stuff is amazing so let's back up because i want to get through all of this because you know this is one of those definitely is the hero made or is the hero born you know what i'm saying because you got some you got some mental toughness this next level so tell me let's tell them well i'm going to interview you like i know nothing about you which sometimes is harder than it is because you know what
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
So how in the world are you figuring out how to navigate all of that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
the question is when you're doing this, you're not closing on the land. You're, you're doing long escrows contingent on the, on the entitlements.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. It's just such an interesting way that to make money in real estate. Everybody, everybody thinks, you know, real estate is multifamily or buying houses. They don't realize that you can literally, if you're just good at dealing with the city. Yeah. You can have a serious real estate career and make some serious money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
You're such a savage in the fact that you do this in all these different municipalities. Because if you think about it, even like here, right? Like if you drive around in Vegas and you look at a lot of the shopping centers and stuff, there's the same name on them. And I play golf with that dude, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Like, I mean, and I know that that guy can get anything entitled in Vegas because he's been doing it here for like 50 years, right? So he just, he can get anything done. But to think that you can just roll in as an outsider and just pull these projects off is just, is wild to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Well, that's wild. Okay, listen. that's the, that's the how Brady got rich flipping real estate part of the story. But I want to get, I want to get to the real stuff. Cause this is the stuff that just makes my fricking mind explode. When you're like, Oh yeah, I'm gonna run an ultra marathon. I'm like, Oh, what's that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
You're like, I mean, I won't let you talk about what this, some of this stuff is. So let's talk about your journey from fat, drunk and stupid. I threw the stupid.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Nothing worse than a podcast full of inside jokes. But tell me about the upbringing. Where'd you grow up? Tell me about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
All right. Let's go from, let's go from fat, drunk and stupid to a dude that can run a hundred miles at one time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Okay, so here's my question, dude. How much more did you weigh at that time?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Right. I thought you were much bigger. I never understood how you went from being kind of overweight. Yeah. Don't you have bad knees?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
That's why I'm so jealous.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
big ass calendar in my house. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
It's funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Welcome back to the program, everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I want to talk about that real quick. What's harder? Was the 50-miler harder than the 2902? Because the 2902 was serious mind. For the people that I know that have done it, I said it's just because it's so slow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Okay. I was going to say, cause I'm from a shithole town in North Florida where they have a forestry school.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
It's a more, way more mental, like slow. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah, it's because this is just what we do. It's normal. It's just who we are. Yeah. It's what we do. So what's the craziest thing you did? So what was harder, the ultra miler or the 100 miler?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
you know, what is it? He goes, well, your, your toenails come off. Yeah. And he goes, he goes, he goes, it gets to a point where it's not, it doesn't hurt anymore. Yeah. Yeah. There's no more hurt. It's just the same hurt. Yeah. And if you can just get to that place where you hit the same hurt and you just understand this is just what it's going to be and accept that you can do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Well, let's talk. So let's walk through that, man. So as you start running, where was this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
How do you fight the, cause you gotta have a voice in you saying, quit, quit, go sit down, go sit. Like, what is that voice of your head saying to you? And what are you saying back?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Is that the one where Kent's wife came out to crew you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
You signed up for Moab? Yeah. We didn't talk about that. I'm like, Oh gosh.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Dude, let's talk about that for a minute, right? Because that's already telling me that you're just determined and can do what you want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I like your odds.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. That's like you running from right here to my house in orange County.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
40 miles from here to my house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I know, but back again, what do you think about the way you grew up made you that way?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
your general stress levels or how you dealt with stress before and after like these experiences, how would you compare those two things?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Well, I was going to say, because when you put your body through so much stress like that and you stretch what is possible for you to do, I mean, I got to believe what used to really bother you maybe five years ago is just like, what the fuck? Yeah. It's not even a blip on the radar now. Yeah, totally.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Um, but, but even your ability to deal with risk must be much through it. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Well, I know that now you've taken your passion for this stuff. And, dude, you're all in, bro. There's no question. You're all in. And you want to share it with other people, so you did this. And this is not where this turns into an infomercial. I know what you're thinking. Don't think that way. This is good stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And it's kind of like the, it's funny as you're sitting here describing that, all I could think about was average Joe's gym versus like the good, the purple Cobras and dodgeball. You're like, hey man, you missed a day. It's okay. Come back tomorrow and double up. You'll be all right. You're going to fall down a little bit and that's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
See, I found a very, when my parents got divorced at an early age, I figured the hustle out or if I needed something, I would go ask both of them for it and get the money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I'm not kicking you to the woods because you didn't, you know, get that 45 minute run at three o'clock in the morning this today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Every day it does.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Well, dude, I love it, man. You're, you're, you are literally one of the strongest mentally people I know that can push yourself to this stuff. And I, I'm rooting for you. This Moab thing. I think that is insanity. And dude, you're, you're one of my craziest friends for the best possible reason.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I love it. Well, dude, if you listen to that today in, uh, Listen, push yourself, do hard things because the harder the things that you do, the easier everything else in your life will be. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
So, okay. So you're, you're hustling and doing that. which is great. You go off to forestry school at 17 and you're doing that. And you go to the facts, the resume thing over and over and over, you know? So let's go back to that moment. The first time you fax it to them, just nobody calls. Yeah. Nobody calls. I mean, for months, bro. And you just kept faxing to them every week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Like it says in the opening, man, the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be and today in studio. Man, you think doing things is hard. You think if you're a person that can't quite finish things, you can't push through, you find you have some mental weakness. Now this dude, and I always like to say when people come through, I'm like, there's a friend of mine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
You know, it's funny. One of the best agents that I ever hired here at the company was somebody, this person came to the office and said, I want to work for you. Brand new agent. I said, I hire brand new agents. It's not what I do. You got to be experienced. Come here. Okay. Thank you very much. Came back the next day. Hey, I said, I want to work for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I'm going to come here every day until you hire me. And literally after like three days, I was like, dude, if this chick is, if she's going to come here like this every day, she's going to be successful. And to this day now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
probably 10 years later since that thing she crushes man she's still here she does great yeah it's it's just consistency and i mean i it took me a long time to actually pull this lesson out but i think i think too though man is because because i think our generation right that that you look at kids you're like oh you're entitled this and that blah blah so if you want to prove something if you're listening to this and you're a younger kid right and you want to impress somebody that's much older than you just be tenacious in the pursuit of whatever you're trying to get with them yeah just put in the fucking work
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Showing up every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Ari Rastegar was on the podcast once that said that one of his best mentors in his life, the only thing he asked him was, can I walk you to and from work every day? Just talk to you. Yeah. Like, I was like, you want to show up? He goes, I never asked him if he was going to be there the next day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I never knew there were long periods of time where he wouldn't show up because he was gone or on vacation or traveling or whatever, blah, blah. But when he would come back, I'm standing in a stoop waiting on him to walk him around every day. It's unbelievable. And how many people are willing to do that anymore? Yeah. They're just not willing to do that stuff. It's wild. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
So you're working for the power company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
That's going. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
And that was not safe work, too. That's a little dangerous.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
You still have to put in for vacation. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
This dude legitimately is a friend of mine. Like I've known this guy for a couple of years now and I just never marvel at The things that he done, the feats that he finishes. He is not only a massive dude in the self-storage industry, and we'll talk about some of that, but this is a guy that just says, you know what I want to do today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
The curse of the entrepreneur. That's my curse. Like, dude, I met this guy and he does this thing and he's got all this money and he's not that smart. I swear, I can totally do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
I think I'm going to run 100 miles at once, at the same time, in the same direction. Oh, I'm a dude that wants to run an ultramarathon just because I want to do it. I mean, the stuff that he does to himself and just has this mental strength to him that We got to learn something today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the studio. This is Brady McDonald. What's up? Brady, what's up, dude?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. So how are you getting multiple mortgages?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah. Did anything you have cashflow at that point? No, bro.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
What did Kent tell you now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Did he call you names?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Brady McDonald's Journey: From Real Estate Challenges to Ultra-Marathon Resilience
Yeah, and I think it's so funny, man, how many people chase those bad investments like that. Like, I'll just, oh, dude, I just got to make it this month, and then we'll make it next month, and next month. It's like, bro, sometimes just cut bait.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Did you just spill water all over yourself? All right, now you almost got to watch this. Dude, we go Joe Rogan style. I don't cut this thing up. We just go straight as it is. So yeah, he just spilled his bottle of water in his lap, which is, you know, hey man, it's a first. Oh my God. It's a first. Three years doing this, that's a first. I feel good now. You should. You should.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Oh, you went. I went counterclockwise. You're going to finish drinking around the world with Mexico? You're drinking tequila? Well, no. No, no. Because you got to go tequila. No, you've done that wrong. No, no, no. Yeah, you go tequila. Then you go an easy Norwegian beer. Then you go German beer. True. Then you get into your Sockies and whatnot around the backside.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And then you're finishing with those pints. With big pints from Canada. You can't start with a pint. You can't finish with tequila.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Legally, technically, I'm banned from Epcot. Oh, shut up. Legally and technically, I'm banned from Epcot. We were there one night. So you should have taken Canada first is what I'm hearing? Well, I've never told this story, especially on the air, but I'll tell it now because here it is. I've got to hear this. This is not how to have money and success. This is the exact opposite of this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Back in my younger days when things were a little crazier, my buddy Ryan said, hey man, you know what we should do? We should swim out to swim out to the ball. Oh, shut up. You did not get in the lagoon. We got in the lagoon. No, you didn't. Yes, we did. Right over the wall. Into the lagoon. They got duck boats out there. They caught us in the lagoon in the duck boats. Oh, my God.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
The duck boats took us to the underground world of Disney. You know, the underground. Yeah, of course. Oh, yeah. Oh, this is a real place. Oh, yeah. And they straight trespassed us. Oh, actually for life? Like done?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I'm going to tell you when I have my kids 20 years later, whatever it is, we go back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And we're going to kind of go through how he did that. And I think it's a business that like, look, don't go rip him off. But I'm just saying this should get your wheels turning for something you could bootstrap up, which is very cool. And I hate to do this because it's French and I've already butchered it. In my mind, I've already butchered it. I've already screwed up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
All right. So you may know a really good friend of mine that actually, I'm going to give you some bad news. If you do, you know, my cues.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
The bad news is Mike was one of my dear friends. He passed away. Oh, no way. Yeah, which is terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I'll show you a picture. Everybody in Orlando knows you. I was going to say, it sounds like he's been around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So this was, that's my cues.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
98, 99.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah. Forever. There you go. All right. That's cool. That's actually really cool. So Disney, we learned everything, which was good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Oh yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
No, no, no. I'm sure. Dude, I used to love the, the, the girls that they would bring in to work. The different pavilions would always wind up at house of blues on Sunday nights for sin night. Nope. Nope. That was a spot for sure. A lot of time in that place, buddy. Bring back the memories of the time in that place.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
That was our regular.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Oh my God.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I don't know. Who knows?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So, guys, we're just going to say welcome. He's going to say his last name. I'm going to say his first name. Welcome to the studio. This is Tim. Gordagne. Gordagne. Gordagne. Not bad. Gordania. Gordania. Yeah, just as I was talking, I'm like, man, I've never heard of this name. Tim, welcome, buddy. How are you doing, Steve? Thank you, by the way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You forgot where you were when you said move to Toronto.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So yeah, again, dude, thank you so much for giving me this. And before we get too far into the building of the business, I want people to understand what this is because I thought it was cool. So what is the key to the city of which, if you're watching this on YouTube, I am holding on the screen and you can see. Super fresh. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah. So you, okay. So you get it done. Now here's the thing. You have no proof of concept. You have an idea. Yep. Talk to me about approaching the places you approach first.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So now, you know, you're in Toronto, Ontario, and then you are in Vegas now. What made you, obviously, look, it's the entertainment capital of the world, but was it a daunting idea to come to Vegas and start this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It was cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I like that face. I mean, look, I don't, like I said, when I opened this show today, I said, man, people bring me shit all the time. I get stuff all the time. And very rarely do I say, this is kind of a cool story and let's talk about it. Let's talk about the business of the business. Sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Make sure you like subscribe and all of those things does help us keep doing this, doing this thing. But explain to me what this is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Which is, so obviously you just go to the, you go to the facilities, you show them, now you have proof of concepts from other markets, which is good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Look at that. Because now, okay, so now. And we get the best of the locals. So now you can cross market destination locations, which is really smart because now you can say, not only am I gonna bring this, but now when all of these people come to Vegas, they're gonna have a reason to come to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Because now the next person who does it won't feel so bad. You've trailblazed that for the next person, which is good. It could have been worse. It could have been a beer. And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah, for sure. Did you just have prototypes back and forth or did you actually go?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
issues have failed three that were reported to us and it was the key just wasn't in the package yeah so that was interesting that was that was rare well let's let's talk about problems in the business because i mean how do you how do you do quality control with a location so you ever get a call from somebody says like dude i took this key in this place to slide across the bar and they looked at me the guy was nuts
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah, but I mean, with all the turnover in all these places, how do you continue to educate the staffs in these restaurants to take care of people at that level?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Do you have, or have you built an affiliate program within like the bar, within like the employees that work at these places? Not yet. That's definitely, that's definitely on the, that's the biz right there. That's the big one. That would be, cause dude, think about it. Somebody walks into a bar, they slide this to the bartender.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I'm all about, well, I'm all about, look, if you want the people, if you want people to help you, you know, build your brand and do right by your clients, help them, help them. You affiliate. I love affiliate.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah. That's awesome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
That's awesome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So you mentioned you have staff, right? How many people on staff right now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
When you were building this and you were growing in other markets, did you have a scaling plan? Did you understand, like, okay, I need to backfill me here. I need this employee. I need that employee. Sort of. Are you winging it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
No, no, no. So, so as, as we're talking like, just sorry, this is, this is really, if you're listening to this, this is really how I have business meetings. Like this is really like, this is more of a, more of a business meeting or podcast today. Cause this is really it. Cause I'm just really interested in this. So. There's only one of you, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You can't, it's, it's impossible for you to play leap, to play leapfrog, lily pad, lily pad, lily pad. That's my biggest issue. Why would you not do joint venture partnerships in other, in other cities where you have like, listen, we have, we have the IP, we have it all. We have proof of concept that you can walk in and get this done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I will do a JV with you in this market and, and do 50 50 because it seems to me, especially with the traveling benefit, like, The more lily pads you have, the better off you'll be. And you can almost use the Disney model where you bring them in and make them stay here for a certain amount of time to train with you and really understand the business. Yep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah. I mean, this thing, like people, it's not like a card. I mean, this is, if you're watching this, this is like a, I mean, it's a metal ticket. heavy brass key that's all embossed and engraved. It's got a chip in it so they can scan it. And it's like a heavy thing. I mean, it's like a legit thing. Pure copper, actually. Yeah, it's pure copper. Pure copper.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It ain't a hard sell to get somebody to come to Vegas for three months. Or Toronto. Yeah, exactly. Or Vegas and Toronto.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Okay, fair, fair, fair. That's fine, that's fine. I have to shout out to Toronto. Toronto beats Vegas in the summer. Dude, I'm the guy that runs Orange County as much as I can in the summertime. I get it, I get it. But yeah, I would say, listen, man, let's set up JVs in these other markets with people that have a hospitality background.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I mean, find a local promoter that's been doing this small level because here's the thing. The one thing that you have, right? And if people are thinking this, oh, fuck, I could just rip this off and do it myself. Or I could just do this myself. I think the one thing that you have that would make this really difficult for anybody to do is that proof of concept. Yes. And I was wondering.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And polish. And as part of the story, how you got it done was that nine-year relationship prior in another business that you had that got you there. Of course. But I think this is going to be, it's like if somebody walked in and they're like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
They're cut in. They're cut in and they buy in. You don't want to call it franchise because then you have to file that. Yeah, I hate franchise. Well, you'd have to file the paperwork to call it franchise. So it's not. They're an actual joint venture partner of that particular LLC that's part of the mothership. It does this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So that's where it just grows. You go to heavy convention cities. You do this and then you pull off New Orleans, you pull off Atlanta, you pull off Miami, you pull off Tampa.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The reason, no, no, you're missing the point. Oh, maybe I did. The reason that you picked the conference, the reason you picked the conference markets is those are places where I have to go as a local from here all the time. True. So now I've, I'm always in Dallas. I'm always in, I gotta go to Dallas in 10 days. That's true. I'm always in, I gotta go to Miami.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I gotta go to Orlando. I have to go to Atlanta. I have to go to these places. For sure. For sure. So we're very tight at the airport there, by the way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It's coming. No, dude. For DFW, the new, what is it? Is it the new Chase Lounge? Oh, I thought it was the Delta. Maybe I missed something. I don't know. I can't remember which airport. I've gone to so many airports. I can't remember which one. I know. Dude, Chase has a new lounge for Sapphire that's just. Really? Dude, it's lights out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
okay it crushes the centurion oh i gotta check this out it crushes the chain yeah i don't know i don't remember where it was but yeah dude it's wild it's wildly better okay wildly better yeah that gets exciting man that's where i want to i want to see this grow for you know what it's in denver that's where it is it's okay okay denver
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Dude, well, so if things don't work out with this, and I turn to a meth head, I can start recycling this first. There you go. But yeah, but essentially the idea here is it's a subscription-based deal. So people join this social club. And when you walk in, it's not like not like discounts. It's like they just give you stuff. That's right. Which is pretty.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Denver's another one. Boston, New York, Miami.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Dude, I got to tell you, if I wasn't running like nine companies already, I'd be saying, dude, let's JV. Let's do this. Let's go. I love it. I mean, this is just seems like, I mean, again, do the math. And I mean, it's the bottom.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I was going to say like year one is probably tough, right? But year two, you have a 92% renewal. This is where the money can be made.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Well, I think definitely as part of the interview process through this JV thing would be, A, are you capitalized? You need somebody with a little bit of money. They got to put skin in the game. You can't just do sweat equity. Correct. Number one, but two, I would say like... Give me your 10 best relationships in the hospitality industry. Let me see what these pieces are.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And then you can vet those places and be like, okay, cool. I'd probably say 20. I wouldn't say 10. I was going to say 20 sounds better. If they don't have at least 20, then why am I even talking to you? This may not work. It's not going to work for you. You need to have at least 20. We said, I have relationships in all of these places, and I could probably put this to the table.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
you going onesies like this, right? Is, is great slow, but, but, but, but, but you're not getting the highest and best use of return on your time. It's true. Because if you were doing three markets at once, you can bring three people in to train at the same time. It's true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
No, but you got to remember this too, right? You got to remember this, right? Yeah. Even if, let's say you brought on 12 JV partners for a year. 12 JV partners. I'm going to launch 12 cities this year. Yep. Right? I'm going to do two runs of six people coming to town to learn the business. Right. And simultaneously, I'm going to launch six at a time. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
If three of them fail, if four of them fail, you still are twice the growth rate that you are now. It's true. But I don't want any failure. Oh, fuck, no. You got to break a couple eggs, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
wild and i went through the whole website last night and i was just looking at the zip and it's i mean it's a good restaurant it's around town if you know vegas places like jing and berries and eight over in a carver stick i mean places where people go you know sat fire where i i don't know but some people go go maybe go who goes there who goes there i definitely go there who knows but yeah it's places where people actually go it's not just like the junkiest of the junk it's good stuff
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Your route's quicker, I like it. You're doing incredibly well. I move so fast, dude. I like that. We move. I like that. But here's the thing. I've taken multiple seven-figure losses in my business career, right? Sure. Which I have. I've won a lot more than I've lost. Sure. But I move very fast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Because I just, for me, if I see anything that's there, if I have proof of concept, I know that it's proof of concept, I want to go as big and as fast as I can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It may get to a point where it can go like, okay, we'll talk about it offline. I did find a couple. I found a couple of things on the website last night. Cause I did get through this. Well, there's just a couple of things that you need to fix. And I did see a couple of things. So I will, I will digress with you there. I'll say that. That's a, that's a valid point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
There's a couple of things you may want to polish, but I just would love to see you go faster with partners. Dude, if you're listening, here's the deal. If you're listening to this right now, if you're out there,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
In Happyville, if you live in any of those major metropolitan cities that we just talked about, or a major metropolitan city that we didn't talk about, and you are a man, a woman about town. If you're in the beverage business, if you're a beverage rep, and you have personal relationships with all these places, dude, reach out. Hit my mansion. Tim, how are they going to find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
But I'm saying, no. But hit Tim up. But you want to reach out. Reach out to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I'm open. I'm open. I got you. Dude, I got you. I appreciate it. I love you. Because think about it. You have somebody who works for Diageo or one of the big beverage companies that is on premise with all of these bars and restaurants. Yep. That's a home run. They're already ready to go. They already know everybody. They've been standing on premise buying drinks for people. It's so funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I was talking about yesterday. I looked up an old buddy of mine, Davey Road from Florida. Okay. when Red Bull first came out. Oh, yeah. Actually from Atlanta is where Dave was. When Red Bull first came out, we were laughing about it because my buddy Dallas got the job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Well, he got the job in Orlando as the on-premise account manager, which meant you gave my buddy Dallas a credit card that he could go out to any nightclub in Orlando and buy open tabs for people as long as they're in Red Bull. Really bad idea. Worst job ever. It was wild. And it was like, look, man, and that's, he's, it was wild. You just turned him loose in downtown Orlando and it just.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
With a Red Bull corporate card. It was wild. Oh my God. It was wild.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
No, dude, of course. Well, what's funny is Davey Road, how I got to know him, He's the national premise major. He still is. I looked him up yesterday because I was just thinking about him. I'm like, I wonder if he still works for Red Bull. So I looked him up. I've got to get him on the show. That'd be an interesting show to have. There you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And a million years ago, before Red Bull was out, I was running a nightclub in Atlanta. And I'd heard about this drink that was taken over Europe. Red Bull and vodka. You could not buy it in the States. There was one like German food store, like European food store, like mini Whole Foods in Atlanta, and they sold it. One location in the entire city.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah, so one of our bartenders is a guy named Peter Pfaffenbichler. Pfaffenbichler, if you're listening, what's up? Oh my God. I thought my name was Hunter. No, no, he was Austrian or German or one of those things. I don't know what it was. But he's the one that told me about this. And I said, go to that store and buy a can of it. So he went and bought a can of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And right when they were running this big article of all the top nightclubs in Atlanta, like you had your own page, whatever. And so what's your signature drink? And I said, our signature drink is gray goose and Red Bull. It had a picture of the bottle and picture of the can. Clever. And I get a phone call from this guy, Davey road. He's like, where are you getting Red Bull?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And they just kind of, when you walk in, what do they do? What do you do? When I roll up with this key, is it like, because you said, you mentioned something that was kind of cool when you said it. You said just like John Wick. It is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And I'm like, who's this? And he goes, this is Davey road. I'm the national accounts manager for Red Bull. Where are you getting my product? It's not out. It's not out the bars yet. And I go, well, I know. I just want to be first.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And he started laughing and he goes, Okay, you're first. Respect. That's how I got it. Respect. Yeah, so. Oh, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we always kind of had a little bit of a bond.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
That's terrible for you. It's terrible for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
well dude look man that's a it's a great story of of building your company i think it's a great business i thank you man i'm gonna prod you to get these jvs going in other markets i appreciate that because i trust you you're a good businessman i love what you've done with simply vegas yeah i'm sitting here just i'm just dude i'm already thinking of people that i know in markets i say dude you got to get with this let's go this business go let's go and when you blow this up you know maybe there'll be something maybe throw a little something for me and if there's
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Oh, 100%. All right. So check it out, man. There's a mobile app too, by the way. And the mobile app, check it out. You can download it. And dude, I got to tell you, if you don't hear that story, that's bootstrapping something from nothing. No rent, no owning, no whatever. Just making it happen. Dude, if you've got a dream, you got to go get it. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah. Just because it's a good, it's good business for these places because they have people that, you know, this is not cheap to be a member of this. It's not. I mean, what's the cost to be a member here? $700 a year. 700 bucks a year. So, I mean, dude, it's not chump change.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
But classy. It's like a lot of people that aren't in business or marketing don't understand the concept of barrier to entry where... if it's just for everybody, then it's for nobody. You know what I mean?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So you're kind of trying, you gotta, it's kind of cost a little something because if then it has no value, but the idea that you can just roll up in places with this and get free stuff and people are like, why would they do that? It's because they're assuming that somebody that has, you know, willing to throw 700 bucks down just to have this cool key in their car or in their pocket as they go out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
that's somebody that's gonna spend more money than just walking in and getting free drinks. There's not gonna be like, let's go bar hopping with my key and just pound all these free beverages, right? It's like, okay, cool. Number one, you're people that spend money out. So you're gonna make a decision to go out. And you're looking for that type of thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Well, you know what's really interesting that I thought is just such a strange shift in American culture, which is Neil Patel put something on his page the other day that I thought was really interesting. What it said was it was a bar chart. It's talking about all the Google searches for everything, service, products, everything. Over the American culture over the last 15 years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And when the internet first came out, like whatever it was, and heavy search was there, 2007, 2008 started, the word free was like the number one searched thing on the internet. And then in the word value was best. Oh, really? Best was like way down here. And then they showed this chart of the two lines converging in 2017. In 2017, best became more searched than free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
welcome back to the program everybody like it says in the opening the podcast it gets you from where you're at to where you want to be and today in studio ladies and gents i got something kind of cool this is something that hit my desk yesterday and in the you know look people give me stuff all the time like i get stuff sent to me in the mail i get stuff dropped off i get all kinds of stuff and it's lovely when that happens like i'm always very flattered when people bring me stuff
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So people started looking for things of higher value and not necessarily the less cost. And those lines continue to diverge now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
2024.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
So for those of you at home that are quick with the old calculator here, if you can be quick with what you got, I think you can do the math of 2000 times 700, even handful of comps that you take out of there. I think you can probably do the math pretty quick. My man, Tim's doing pretty good for himself. That's terrible. All right. And essentially all he's doing is bringing people together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
He literally has manufactured a business out of thin air. Uber of hospitality. He has no employees. He has no rent. He has no cost of goods other than the cost of money. I have employees. You have employees. Okay, you got employees. All right. but I'm just saying I might die. You don't go, you're in the hospitality business, but you don't have a shift change.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You don't have to deal with, Oh shit, my bartender called out today. And so the bartender is me. You don't have to deal with, Oh, the price of eggs just shot to the roof. So now my cost of goods is terrible. That's right. Right. You essentially have become a partner with the best places in town with zero overhead and nothing but profit that is reliable and countable because of subscription based.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah, and the thing that I thought was interesting as I went through the site last night is it's not like dead nights. It's not like if you come in on a Tuesday night when they're hurting for business. I don't care if it's prime time Saturday night.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Well, let's, okay, so let's go back now. So let's walk through, because this is just you. You don't have any partners, right? No, just me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You have a team, but no, but, but this, you are, you are CEO, everything. This is founder. You are it. How old are you now? I just turned 47. You just turned 47. Okay, good, man. You're looking good for 47. I would assume you were way younger too. I'll take it. I'll take it. That's good stuff. So what's the background like? Where did you, where did you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I always like to go to the nature versus nurture for heavy entrepreneurs and talk about you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And then, you know, sometimes people bring me stuff and I start having a conversation with them and I realize, dude, this is a pretty cool business. And I really like what this person has built. I like what they did and I like, you know, what they've done. And I really think it was great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Is that a big manufacturing town where you're from? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
That was the hustle.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
yeah so he would take you you so that was the first hustle was selling hockey cards yeah so he put a lot of weight on my shoulders like you better be successful in business because i want to be in business oh my god fair so so so did you were you a guy that got good grades did you spill water on yourself all right now you almost got to watch this i don't cut this thing up we just go we go straight as it is so yeah he just spilled his bottle of water in his lap but
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You know what I mean? It's a first. Oh my God. It's a first. Three years doing this, that's a first. I feel good now. You should. You should. Because now the next person does it, it won't feel so bad. You've trailblazed that for the next person, which is good. It could have been worse. It could have been a beer. Yeah, it could have been. It could have been. Or a coffee.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Or a coffee would have been much worse.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
that was me and i never even you too dude that was me dude okay so i was i was the straight like b c student because literally i could get an a on any test but i never did my homework and you know and it was always this argument of with the teachers of what is the purpose of the homework is to learn the material if i can get an a on your test why do i need to do the homework i got it
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Oh no, dude, I was like, I was in grade school. It was like a cave with like chalk on the wall. Who knows? Oh shit. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
it was old school but no it was uh yeah dude same thing man yeah kill it when you crunched it at the last minute and you'll kill it yeah yeah dude and i gotta i gotta say thank god for my wife because my kid now it's the same but she just keeps her thumb on his ass so he's got a four six five four seven five now you want them to be better than us right
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Yeah, just because mom's got the thumb on him about the homework, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Well, yeah. I mean, it's a lot harder. It is definitely harder. It is definitely harder.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
And yesterday a guy walked into my office and handed me, presented me with something called the Las Vegas key to the city. And I was like, what is this? And I'm going to let him explain what it is because I thought it was cool. This is not an infomercial today because this is really just from talking to him for a little bit. It's a story about bootstrapping up a really cool business from scratch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
They really do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
The drink around the world. Did you ever do it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
Dude, so many. I lived in Orlando for years, right? Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
I lived, you know where 1792 Mills bends around Lake La Suana downtown? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I lived right on Lake La Suana. No way. Yes, I did. For years. Oh, dude, I didn't even know that. That's cool. I'm Floridian by birth. That's cool. I'm from Florida, but yeah. Oh, dude, I love that city. It's cool. Drinking around the world. For those of you who don't know. I highly recommend this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
It is the greatest thing to do at Disney World. So Disney World, if you've never been, Epcot has the World Pavilion. Starts with Mexico. Ends with England, I think.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Key to the City: Crafting a VIP Experience with Tim Gordanier
You're right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Yeah. So what was the idea? Who came up with the idea for the current company, the current iteration of what you guys are doing? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
What did your parents do that would cause you to be born an entrepreneur? Tell me about you growing up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
So when you say that you... When you say... you get paid for everything. So who's writing the check for this? Like who's actually paying? Obviously it's advertising, obviously, but is it the, is it individual advertisers or the people that actually own the services that are being used? Because then they're making money on advertising.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Yeah. It's kind of a digital affiliate program is essentially what it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
So, I mean, you guys currently have like 45 million users or something crazy right now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
I have an interesting question based on what's going on in the world right now, because this could be part of the equation, which is this. And you would kind of know, are your international users worth the same to your investors as U.S.? Do they value them more or less, international users versus your U.S.-based users?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Well, the reason I asked that was because, you know, I've said on this program since the tariff war started that, you know, the U.S. consumer is the best commodity on earth. If you look at big business, it's worth more than anything else on earth. Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Because the value that I was just curious if in your model with your advertisers, they said like, OK, if it's U.S., we'll pay more for it because the long term value of that is higher. Or if it's international, we're going to be a little less because we know we're probably going to get a little less.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
What prohibits Apple from slitting your throat?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Well, speaking of which, I mean, dude, you've run up a giant business. Let's go back a little bit and talk about how you scaled. Let's talk about operationally scaling. How many people do you have now? How many employees do you have now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
What's more important in your business model is I always call it offense and defense, right? Because you need... Like, offensive money would be generating new relationships and generating new revenue channels, and then defense would be the developers that are making sure your clients get a good experience or constantly improving. What is your mix on offense to defense on your spend?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Uh, you know, from one of those businesses, just simply arbitraging electronics from here to Brazil.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Well, I was going to say, because you've got to be in a place now where you're being approached at people that want to be part of what you're doing from an advertiser standpoint. Like you guys have got to be big enough now where, I mean, the inbound calls are probably greater than the outbound calls, I'm guessing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
But can't see, like one of the things I always talk about too, one of my favorite things to do is when we are going to get a new vertical, I simply find the best people that I can find in that vertical. And then I direct all of our existing, all of our existing client base to that vertical. And then when I can become more than 50% of revenue, wow. we become their partner is what we do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
So you can now do the same thing and acquire, like you can say, Hey, we'll push our people, your little product. And then if it's working, we can roll it. You can roll them up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
I think you're seeing that all over the place because it's like what Grant Cardone just did with Gary Brucka with the 10X thing. a little messy. Apparently that's now working out, but, but it's the same idea. It's the same concept. So let me ask you this. Let's change. Cause you got your people all over the place. You're remote.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Obviously you guys have a high standard for what you expect out of your people. How do you, how do you hold that standard and create a company culture when everybody is scattered? What do you do? How do you manage that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
I have a question, though. And this has got to be tough, man, as a founder that's making good business decisions. What is the temperature within your engineering departments with AI moving as fast as it is? Is there a little bit of fear? I don't know if you saw it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
There was a post that was going around Facebook yesterday, and damn it, I just forgot who wrote it, but it's a CEO of a major corporation, and he sent a letter out to all of his people. It was the CEO of Fiverr. You saw it. Oh, yeah, yeah, Fiverr. You saw it, where he's like, AI is coming for our job. It's coming for your job. It's coming for my job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Yeah, a buddy of mine, it's funny you're talking about music, a buddy of mine just developed a brilliant AI platform. And essentially what it is, is the AI, he got together with a bunch of the top songwriters in Nashville because he's one of them. And they all have AI bots of them. And you can go in the studio with them and write a song.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
And the cool thing about it is, is then that song can be used for anything licensed, but the songwriter gets credit for it, gets royalties for it as a producer. So literally my buddy, they launched it up. I talked to him the next day. He's like, I wrote 800 songs yesterday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
And yeah, it's really smart because he's like, yeah, my AI that knows my tones and how I like things and how I would mix things and how things would go, I wrote 800 songs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
That's what I need to do. Haze my children. So what's the future, man? Where do you see this going? What's on the horizon?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Back again for another episode of the podcast of, like it says in the opening, man, gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Well, dude, I love, I love it, man. And thanks for joining us. If you're ever in Vegas, you, uh, let me know, man. I'll like, I got you. I got you covered. Whatever you need.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
I'll take you somewhere where you can lose some of that money you've got. Well, guys, wrapping up today, man, the one thing that I would say you should have taken out of that is if you want to be incredibly valuable, not just – to yourself, but to other businesses, to what you're doing. Capture an audience and be able to move them around to different ecosystems. There's a lot of value in that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Whether you're promoting a party in a nightclub or bringing a million users from one app to another. Because if you do it enough times and you do it right, apparently you'll have enough money to walk around with a Gandalf beard. So that's it. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
beamed through the interwebs live into the studio i got a cat that has invented something pretty cool it is a uh and no it's not going to be an infomercial if you're thinking that that's not what we do we do not take paid placement on this show it's not how this works i just generally thought this was pretty cool and i want to talk to the guy about it so he is the ceo of a company called mode mobile where he has created a way his goal in life what he's trying to do is stop
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Well, I like to say that all great entrepreneurs are chronically unemployable. So that's not a surprising part of that story whatsoever. To be great at this, you just can't be able to work for somebody else. It's part of how it works. So you said you were doing this and then you branched into software. You said it's a long story. Good news is we got time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
So how did you make the, so that was the first pivot was into software?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
What was the functionality? What did it do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
the income disparity, the wage gap, by allowing you to take your cell phone and turn it into a tool that makes money. So let's talk to them. Let's see. Let's see. Let's get the ins and outs of that business and learn all about them. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Dan DeVayas. Dan, how are you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
Dude, you know what's funny? I'm going to tell you something funny about that particular story you just told, which is one of my best friends is the founder of a company called VShred, which you've probably seen on all of your social media. And his partner in that business is an English kid that he met exactly the same way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
I don't know if it was Fiverr. He just met this kid in England that was gifted with ad buying. And he was a kid. And he was just like, why don't you move to America? Let's take a shot at this. There you go. And here we are now. They have a billion-dollar company. So, yeah, pretty impressive what they were able to do. But just literally the exact same story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Exploring the Future of Smartphones and Income Generation with Dan Novaes
So I guess if you're listening to this, if you want to start a great business, you got to find a high school kid in England because this is the second time I've heard this story. It's literally the second time I've heard this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
nobody was talking about him five days ago yeah and now everybody's talking about him which i think is funny i think it's you know when ben shapiro's and they're saying the election was proof we don't want commercials like that that might be a little bit of a stretch but dude everybody's talking about this which is wild
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Is it? Yeah. See, I was going to move to Tacoma, Washington. I'm kidding. I would never.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So I don't think that... Well, I think the point that I'm trying to make is... If you're going into a job looking at it to take care of you for the rest of your life, probably not. But you need to look at that as a continuation of your education. Correct. What is this company doing right that I can learn that I can apply to something else?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, that's a joke. I wasn't really going to do that. But, oh, so you're in town this weekend, speaking at Todd Ault's event, Risk On 360. By the time you hear this, it will have gone, but you can hopefully check it out next year. And what capacity are you speaking for Todd? What are you talking about?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I agree with you. I think the difference is people all get lumped into entrepreneur saying you're an entrepreneur is the new, I'm a rockstar, which is it is. Yes. Right. But these guys that are running the, the, the, you know, the shit coin, the meme coin casinos.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
My differential, my line is, if you're not creating something, if you're playing a zero-sum game where the only way for you to win is somebody else to lose, which all of that is, you can't rake hard in crypto unless somebody loses. That's not entrepreneurship. That's speculating. You're gambling at that point. You're not building anything, which I get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And I think that having those jobs to learn how to build something is effective. But I also think that people make the mistake of thinking that – I love when people are like, oh, I want entrepreneurship. I want my own company so I can make my own hours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, let's move into the brand building. Let's talk about that because obviously it's so important. And when you started your podcast, was that the first thing you really started when you started your own brand? Was that the hinge point? Was that the first thing? Yeah. All right. So when you first started it, what were your goals for it? What did you think it was going to entail?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
yeah it's funny we started this show as it was me and two of my buddies yeah uh that you know we go to the bar hang out whatever it was people are like you shoot the shit you guys were like the people around us was like you guys are fucking hilarious and so when it was like dude we should just do a podcast and then it just started as a good you know reason to get together with two of my buddies in here just shoot the shit about nonsense and i miss those days because those shows were really funny so then you start to evolve so then you have to figure out okay um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
They just like what they're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, it's funny. What do they say? Like nine out of 10 podcasts never get past episode two or something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's insane.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So my, so, okay. So rule number one, I tell people this all the time. If you're going to do a podcast, don't tell anyone about it until you have seven episodes in the can. Cause if you, cause dude, if you don't have seven full episodes done, ready to go. Yeah. Chances of getting to the eighth one are very slim.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, it's funny. Sean, we talked about this before we came on. Sean's podcast, if you haven't checked it out, Digital Social Hour, great. And Sean's just a machine. Like the dude, I talked to him the other night, and he did 23 podcasts in one day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Because a lot of people do this once or twice and then they're like, I want to do a podcast and the lights come on. They're like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Not adding that out. That's going to stay there. Just like Joe Rogan, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I was trying not to sneeze, not like induce it more.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You just got to get rid of it, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. So let's say I'm Bill in Indiana. Yeah, I'm sorry, Bill. And Bill wants to create a podcast. So what should bills I'm curious what your expectations are for timeline to being able to make anything out of this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I was just like, I mean, look. I mean, it's hard enough for me to be interested in anything for like an hour. And so it's like, I just don't, I don't get how he does it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, what's worse is people don't understand. There's a marketing budget that goes with this. These things don't grow organically like you think they would.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You're not going to throw it up there and think that your mom's going to share it with her knitting group.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, you got to promote. It costs money to make this go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Or the business that you're in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
More importantly, I'll take it one step further. Because we're in the real estate business here. It's what we do. And I tell realtors all the time, if you're going to start a podcast... Go after your clients, your existing clients that have businesses and have them on to promote their businesses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Because so often, you know, I mean, you can walk out the front door of any business and hit a realtor with a seven iron in just about any direction. There's millions of us, right? But at the same time, if you're bringing someone on and trying to help their business, you you're not going to have to ask for their business when it comes time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I mean... I laugh because, yes, I mean, one of the main reasons for me doing this is to build the network, right? And there are times, and here's a fun fact for the old podcast, there's times when you sit with people for an hour, and at the end of the hour, you're like, I don't really like this person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You're a good moderator. You're a great moderator, Scott.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, the worst, man. Like... Here's the thing. So back to monetizing, like the way you monetize a podcast, in my view, if there's other ways you tell me, but obviously in building that you want to capture the audience best you can through a mailing list and all of those things, which is why we asked you guys to subscribe to the newsletter and all of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But then there's also, you know, if you're listening to this now on any of our great podcast partners, you're hearing ads. Obviously, we get paid for those as they come up. You're hearing that right now. And then there's, of course, when guests come on, they have something to sell. There's affiliate stuff. Sometimes we can make money that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And then there's the paid guest, which is the infotainment, which is part of this, right? Because you'll have people call up that really want to come on, that want to leverage your audience, and you've got to charge them sometimes. Come on. Scott did not pay to be here, by the way. Like Scott's business, he paid nothing to be here today. Just want to clarify that. But it happens occasionally.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of The Quiet Storm. No, it's not The Quiet Storm.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But the problem with the paid guests, and I'm guessing you have paid guests sometimes too, yes?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I hate them too, because here's why. Because it turns into an infomercial. Yeah. And there was a dude one time that my booker booked me and he was selling some really complicated water system, like some crazy water system for, I mean, state municipalities. And he paid to come on and I'm going through this and I'm like, dude, this is reading like a science manual. This is terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And at the end of it, I ended up saying, Hey man, I'm going to give you your money back because I'm not hearing this at all. Cause it just would be terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I'll give you all the footage you want and you can, you can have that. And there you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But isn't some of that like when Alex Jones was selling like the vitamins or whatever he was selling on?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But hell yeah, Joe Rogan's like with it and in shape and like a UFC dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So first of all, yeah, no, no, no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Doesn't go with the brand, Alex.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You want to sell a chunky bar?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
People read through it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I would never promote a product I don't use. And this next segment is brought to you by Vagisil. No, but you have to. And I think that's the issue is I think about a lot that scene from the social network when they're trying to sell ads on early Facebook. And they're like, no, we can't sell ads. We don't know what it is yet. Like there's such a fine line. of when and how you monetize.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
AG1 now, no longer. AG1, that's true. I know the CEO actually rebranded to AG1. they they do a lot of podcast ads did you know what's crazy the ceo of now ag1 do you know where i know her from no she's a hooters girl actually Oh, shit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
That's so funny. Yes, I did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, yeah. She's great. I'm not going to throw her name out. She doesn't want to have that out there. But she built an incredible company. She was at Cinnabon. No, no, no, no, no, no. She was the CEO at Cinnabon. Cinnabon got bought by Private Equity. And then Athletic Greens just hired her as CEO. She's not founder there. She just took it over to CEO. Okay, I don't know. For the rebrand.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I don't know the story. Yeah. Her name's Kat. She's great. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Now that I say that out loud, I probably should. Yeah. Right. That's very cool. I should. Yeah. But I mean, that's, yeah. So there you go. Take that. Everybody thinks scooters, waitresses, you know, never amount to anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, yeah, bottle service girls have to end up in real estate. They do end up in real estate. I think when you apply at the clubs, you just have to say on the bottom of it, yes, I agree to get a real estate license. Yes, I agree. I agree right now to get that license later. I mean, look, dude, if you can get somebody to buy a $3,000 bottle of vodka, hey, man, you could probably sell a house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You could probably sell a house. Oh, I forgot what we were talking about because now we're talking about bottle girls.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
See, that brings up such an interesting point, which is the real trust in the real audience. In any more, it's so difficult to gauge who's got a real audience. If you look at... I've had people hit us up to be on the podcast. I have a million followers on Instagram. And you look at a reel and it's got 800 views. So that's a good signal. Bro, those are all bots. It's not real.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And I think everybody went in this gold rush of followers back in the day to build these artificial audiences that don't resonate with them, that don't engage with them, that could care less.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah. And that concept...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I want to ask you something I struggle with. Okay. I struggle with this in content creation anymore. And have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy? No. All right. Idiocracy, it's a loop. You should watch this movie because it's pretty scary. Okay. It's a movie about Luke Wilson goes into the future. He travels to the future where he's frozen or something. I don't remember how he gets there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But America is so dumbed down. Like everybody is basically a blithering idiot. And he just happens, he's a normal dude and happens to go like a hundred years in the future. And he's the smartest guy on the, on earth. So funny because America has gotten so dumbed down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And when you watch us, it's kind of where we're headed, I think as a society, because here's one of the things that I grapple with, right? Which is, I just don't understand how certain things become as popular as they are because it's, Here I am. I'm doing my best to educate, to help, to encourage people to do great. And you're like, fuck, I'm busting this stuff out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I'm doing what I think is very smart, very intelligent content. And then the fucking Haktua girl who literally probably can't even spell Haktua, however you spell it, is dropping a podcast that probably gets more hits than I do in the first week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It makes no sense to me. How do you reconcile that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Superbowl to me is entertainment. You have the best athletes in the world performing at the highest level.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But the highest retweeted tweet two days ago was some kid I did not know existed called The Rizzler, who's five years old, that's on a wrestling show, and all he does is do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Like I want to slap my kids that they even think like, like, no, you don't understand. I'm like, you're right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I feel like I'm staying like the old man on the porch yelling at the moon right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I saw, you know, now that I think about it, I saw, I saw you did, but I keep testing them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You're extrapolating this for me. Yeah, I get it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Because something else I wrestle with, we talk about content creation, being omnipresent, being on all channels. Yeah. I think that the dopamine addiction is a real thing. I think that it's creating ADHD in our kids. It's creating things, which again, which is why I'm trying to actually, if I'm gonna create content, I actually want it to be valuable to somebody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, please, yeah, do it. You can have whatever you want, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Dude, I love that founder series you did. I saw one of these. Now that you say that, I saw one. Because to me, the greatest media thing that's been created in the last 20 years was the series that the History Channel did, The Men That Built America. Yeah. Fucking great. If you haven't seen that, dude, stop watching this right now and go watch that. Because that is like...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, I find when I prep folks, when I do this, like I told you when you showed up, I don't have a list of questions. There's nothing on the desk. If you're watching us on YouTube, I don't have questions because I find that when I used to do that, I would go through and even using chat GPT or whatever else, blah, blah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You're pulling the same stuff that everybody pulls and it becomes the same repetitive stuff. Yeah. And I've seen people come through here, and then I've seen them on other podcasts, and you can just tell they're on autopilot. Like, here's question A, and it's like, here's the answer for A. Here's question B. And it's the same thing over and over. So I don't do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But I found the best questions that I do. That's why I like authors, right? Because I can power through a book pretty quick, and I can find stuff in the book that interests me. that nobody else has probably taken the time to get through. So how do you prep for a guest?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You can see when people light up a little bit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Sounds like a conversation we just had there 49 minutes ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, I've had episodes of this show where people come on that are subject matter experts. Veena Jetty, great example. He's a friend of mine. Veena has a billion dollars in assets and multifamily under management in her portfolio. And we never talked about multifamily.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, so we never got to it. We talked about not raising worthless kids for literally an hour. That's what we talked about.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's a jaw-dropping America.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, let me ask you this because you create so much content, so much stuff. Too much sometimes, dude. Huh? Too much. Too much sometimes. Tell me about the imposter syndrome. You got to have it sometimes. I have the imposter syndrome all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Can we talk about that? I mean, we're going to come back to it. I didn't mean to cut you off. Finish your thought and we'll come back to that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to KG last night, my buddy Kevin Griffin, speaking the same way that he is. And we were at dinner and we're talking about, we were talking about, here's the funny thing, right? Kevin is the lead singer of Better Than Ezra. He's been on stage for 40 years, right? 30 years, whatever it is, been on stage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And he told me his first time he would have to do a speech, not sing with a speech. He goes, man, my throat sealed up. And I was like, holy shit. He goes, I completely fell apart on stage. I was never been that nervous in my life. And this is a guy that has been on stage a million times. And he just said, yeah, I did kind of work through it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But the point is, it's like, you're going to lose your virginity to a porn star while we film it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
No, because it's funny, because our drop's here. We do a guest a week, so the guest comes out on Tuesday, and on Thursday, we do the weekly drop, is what it's called. It's like a sub-podcast of this, which is exactly that. It's me, 10 or 15 minutes, and normally what it winds up being
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So I don't have to. Yeah. I think that, well, that's, that's one point. You don't have to look directly into the camera for it to be good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, because you feel like you're preaching.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Nobody wants to be told what to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
We'll call her Mary for today's purposes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
is through the course of doing this interview today you and i are going to hit on some sort of a subject at some point we'll figure it out eventually yeah then i'm going to think eventually what the fuck we're talking about but we're going to hit subject that i think deserves a little bit more delving into yeah or something will happen in the media cycle this week like i gotta tell you and we'll talk about this because i love this and this will probably be irrelevant because the media cycle is so fast by the time that comes up but i'll probably use these clips at a time
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Do you find that... Because here's the weird thing. I find that my... I find that the clips that we do with the podcast when I have a guest do better on Instagram. The solo pod stuff does better on TikTok. I don't know why.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, it's weird. I don't know why that is, but that stuff does better over there than...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And emulating them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Emulate. I love it, man. It's one of those things where we talked about fake it till you make it, which I'm not a fan of. I think people see through that shit. Emulating is not the same as imitating. There's two different things. If you become a carbon copy imitation of somebody that's doing successful or you're trying to, people see through that as imitating.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I'm not going to use the authentic, well, just shit, I said authentic. I hate that word on podcast. It's like the buzzword. It's not genuine. We'll use that. But emulating someone like you said, that's doing it a certain way is the smart way. That's the path.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, sometimes for my wife, nothing is bad.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But is that really true though? Because like, look at Gary Vee, you know nothing about that dude other than those garage sales, sports cards and the jets. Yeah. But what else do you know?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
No, because he puts out what he wants you to know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I'm definitely talking about the Jaguar thing this week, but not for the reason you think. Not for the reason you think. I think it's fucking brilliant. Everybody's hating on it. Okay, because you're going to appreciate this because you love to go granular with founders, right? As soon as I saw it, it reminded me of something instantly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Here's what I'm going to give you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah, but he's just so great. He's even said, I'm going to give you these three things. This is what you get. You get the jets. You get cards. You get, what is it? Garage sales. That's what you get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's so funny because my success really, the pinnacle of what made it was my appearance on reality television. That's what made me, right? Being on The Apprentice. And even though that was a crafted story, it was very crafted and very edited to tell a story that was entertaining and compelling. I get that. But you look at the difference now, you're right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
There's people who are like 24 hours a day. I mean, their house is just... What is it? A guy, Kai or whatever his name is?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
What's a good partnership?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
That's a good, I'm going to ask you this question because a lot of high entrepreneurs, like a lot of high level entrepreneurs are built a certain way when it comes to dealing with failure, stress, everything else. And for me, like I got to let it hit me. Like it's got to hit me. I need it to sting me for like one day, right? I need one day of staying on it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And like, I'll tell my wife, like, ah, this is the fucking sky is falling. Everything is blah, blah, blah. And I can let go of those emotions on a dime. Like, I'll just decide, as Mikey C-Rock said, does it go in the tank or the trunk? You know what I mean? I'll make that decision very quickly. does it become baggage or turn into fuel? And it's always fuel for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But my poor wife will carry that shit around, carry my purging of this anger for days. Is your wife, does she dump it off quick or does she carry it for you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
34. You're not going to remember this. Tell me what it is. In 1985, Coca-Cola had a genius idea. They were doing taste tests all around the United States. Coca-Cola was. And they were losing taste test to Pepsi. So they said, okay. And Pepsi was advertising this like crazy that like all these blind taste tests, people were choosing Pepsi. They were choosing Pepsi. They were choosing Pepsi.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Is she good for you, man?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
How long do you let it sting you when it hits? Give a couple, is it a day for you? A couple of days? Like what's the sting? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
day or two day or two yeah do you wallow in it a little bit no i oh i'm vertical i'm all the way in it for like a full day no i'm trying to think i've never thought about this before i'm just all the way in man for like it's like i'm an idiot this this is so stupid i don't know i i think that what happens is i wake up and i feel like shit and i realize that i'm gonna have to deal with this bullshit and then
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Who's the one doctor out there that said, you know what?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
There's one doctor out there. Dr. J, that's who says, yeah, the crack is better than anything else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Always.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I've said many times the answer to a lot of your problems is on the other end of a hard phone call.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
No, dude. Well, here's my thing, bro. I'm always reminded, if you're a well-traveled human, if you're like well-traveled, like deep and like, if you've been to like Cairo, like the not so nice parts of Cairo.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You and I, we don't have any real problems. We have no real problems. Those people got real problems. It just depends on your perspective.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. It's Escaping the Drift. And today, people in the studio, You know, again, awesome when you have a big event here in town. One of the advantages of living in Vegas is I can get these big speakers, man, that go to these big events and they come in here. So drop knowledge on you for like an hour.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Not about having to walk seven miles to get fresh water.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But they were being put on by Coca-Cola. No, no, no, no, no. Pepsi was doing this. So Coca-Cola comes out and says- Here's what we're doing. We're coming out with new Coke. We're changing our formulation for the first time in 100 years or whatever it was. We're going to add more. Well, I guess they took the cocaine out at some point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's a blessing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And only because I do want to talk about the importance of this because I was talking about it last night with Kevin, like I told you. But I want to talk about the value of that mailing list, how to build it, why there's value. I think it's so important.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's a CTA right there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
How often do you send the newsletter out?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
I mean like, and if you want time to listen here, just check it out. Exactly. Here was, here's my biggest takeaways from this. Exactly. Yeah. Smart. I'm behind on that, dude. I'm behind. I'm going to get caught up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, the 80s were a wild time. I don't know what to tell you. So they took the cocaine out at some point earlier than that. But they were going to add more sugar to it, right? So they added more sugar. And then they came out with new Coke. And everybody hated it. They fucking hated it. But everybody was talking about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
What are you using to manage your newsletter? Just like MailChimp or using like high level? What are you using?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Cool, there you go. Well, dude, man, just like that, an hour and 15 minutes has flown by. If they want to find you, how do they find you, bro?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, I appreciate it, man. When I'm in Miami, I'll come to your studio. Anytime you're back in Vegas, you're always welcome back here, man. Listen, if you just spent an hour and 15 minutes where this was, hopefully you did. I got to understand, dude, your personal brand is so important to everything you do in life and you have total control over it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Whether you choose to share your entire life, every second on Twitter, every second on this startup podcast, whatever it is, you got to start doing it now. See you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And then after about six months of this disaster of new Coke, they formulated and came back out with Coke Classic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So now you could get the old stuff again. And dude, the sales went through the roof. So think about it. Before two days ago or three days ago, whenever it was, and this disaster ad came out, who was talking about Jaguar? No one. No one. Who's talking about him now? Everyone. Everyone.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
So now you have this opportunity for Jaguar to ride this disaster of, because, you know, they say it doesn't matter if we're talking good or talking bad is when they stop talking, you got a problem. And they had stopped talking about Jaguar.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But I think you're going to start seeing now, if I'm Jaguar, what I do is I take this disaster of a campaign and this new thing, and I start bringing back the classic stuff. I think within a year, you're going to start to see, let's go back to the XK. Let's bring out a new XK to celebrate our heritage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You just delete. Okay, so here we are. Gary Vee does this all the time. For sure, 100% of the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
It's like those gambling hotlines back in the day where you would pay like $100 and you would call and half the callers would get this game and half the callers would get the other way. So 50% of the time you're always right and you just keep working. You can look like a fucking genius, dude. Yeah. That was, dude, that was the hustle. So, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
But anyway, so that's what's going to happen is you're going to see Jaguar use this negative press. They're going to revert back to the classic Jaguar everything, and they're going to be sort of relevant again. That's what I would do because they had to do something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Nobody was talking about him five days ago. And now everybody's talking about him, which I think is funny. I think it's. You know, when Ben Shapiro's in there saying the election was proof we don't want commercials like that, that might be a little bit of a stretch. But, dude, everybody's talking about this, which is wild. I mean, it'll be interesting to see how long it dominates the news cycle.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And in studio today, we got a cat. Kind of a big deal. I'll say he is the host of the success factory podcast has a massive newsletter, massive online following has done incredible things in the world of business from having large exits to to continue to be an investor of things. And this is a dude that definitely has some tips. It's going to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Because, I mean, nothing dominates the news cycle very long.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Well, let's back up, dude, because obviously... I like to get the origin story on everybody that's highly successful that comes through here. Because I like to know, it's a science experiment. Is it nature? Is it nurture? What happened to you? So tell me about early you, dude. Give me the early you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
You don't see big pensions being flown around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Outside of government employees and who knows how long that's going to last now with the new dose.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
No, I agree. I think my views of the W2 employee and all of that stuff are very similar, though, to my views on college. Right. I don't give this blanket like this is a bad thing. I don't give it a blank. Like people say, oh, you know, all the college is stupid guys. College is a scam. All that stuff. I don't subscribe to that because I don't either.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Because I genuinely believe that, number one, college is a scam if you go get a liberal arts degree in indigenous people studies on the impact it has on theater. Yeah, you're an idiot. You got scammed. You're going to be a barista. I get that. You get a school for a finance or accounting degree. You're learning the language of business. There's something to that. You go get a law degree.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Ladies and gents, welcome to the studio. This is Scott Clary.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
There's something to that. You become a doctor. There's something to that. It depends on what you get there. But more than that, I think it's a great place
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
to teach you how to grow to teach you how to grow up it's where you learn to be an adult yeah if anything else it's where you really learn to be an adult and i think it's so funny because i was talking the other day about this where i went to an event in in orange county and it was a bunch of pro athletes and a bunch of money managers and private office people and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
How's it going, John? Dude, how are you, man?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Eric red was up there who was a professional basketball player and he was with meta world peace and they were doing a panel. And he said, how many of you guys are getting ready to retire from whatever league you're in? Or you think you're going to be out of your league soon?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
Cause there was a bunch of athletes there and a bunch of hands went up and he's like, the first thing you need to get is a fucking shrink. He's like, because from the day that somebody first told you you were special, whatever you do sports wise, you stopped growing as a person. So if that was 13 and, You're 13 right now with millions of dollars, which is why you're all going to be fucking broke.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Mastering Content Creation and Entrepreneurship: Insights with Scott D. Clary
And I think we're seeing that a little bit in the new economy, the modern economy, the crypto slot machine that is running all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? I know, that sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando All Over Deodorant. Because this package they got us, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yes, I don't think people fully grasp that concept until something happens either to you or to somebody that's close to you. A friend of mine that we're in business with, his wife, they were in Hawaii and his wife was pregnant and they were just there on vacation and she had a complication where she couldn't fly. And so all of a sudden you got six months left on this pregnancy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Your business is here and she can't leave the island. I mean, she can't go on an airplane. So he just figured it out how to run his business from Hawaii. And now I'm pretty sure they go back there for several months every year just because they figured it out. And I think, you know, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, of course, and And I just think people have to get there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Now that obviously led you to writing your first book, right? Which I want to talk a little bit about it. The first book was the art of, that was the first book, right? Art of, uh, that was the first one. So obviously that book, like you said, well, you know what? I want to go back a little bit further because you, you glossed over something that I love, which was, we talked about, uh, biohacking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So what were the things that you did to get ahead of your Crohn's disease? That's the first question. And the second question is, what do you still do today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
What do you still do today? Are you still adding new stuff to the protocol? What is the Ari Meisel biohacking protocol? That's what I want to hear.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
As much as you can eat. I'm going to go home. All right, tell me about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
back again back again for another episode of like it says in the opening man the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be and today piped in live from the interwebs now that we have our interwebs fixed we have somebody that is really a master of time this is the guy that entrepreneurs that are drowning in task and drowning in all kinds of chaos call this is the guy that they call when they need help
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So let me get this straight. Cause, cause I use my fitness pal, which can be cumbersome sometimes. And I find that the macros can be off a little bit. So yeah, you just created GPT and said, you're my, you're going to log on my macros and just log into that one particular GPT and say, here's what I just ate. I mean, are you giving it the exact, are you just taking pictures?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
That's what you're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Not dude, man. And I, but I guess that's your whole thing, right? So, but, but outside of like food and supplements, are you doing it? Like, is there a hyperbaric chambers or your cold plunger, any of that stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Do you wear, do you wear, were you wear a tracker to track your sleep? Are you doing all this stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. I think everything checking your blood, I get my blood and I upload it to chat GPT immediately. I learned that, um, 10 X health was scaling. Right. And obviously Gary Brekka has had a major falling out with them. And I, I lived through that. Like I understand why he had a falling out because I signed up for 10 X health and And, you know, I did the blood work and it came back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
He is the founder of the Less Doing Movement. He is the author of The Replaceable Founder, The Idea of Execution, The Art of Doing Less. He's helped thousands of business owners work smarter, not harder. And he turned his personal battle with Crohn's disease into the blueprint for ultimate efficiency. And now for you today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And the way that it kind of laid it out on the sheet, like I basically Google doctored myself and gave myself liver cancer based on these results. I was freaking out. And right. Because I'm like, because they're like, well, a doctor's going to talk to you in three weeks. And I'm like, what do you mean three weeks? This thing says I have liver cancer, which it doesn't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It was just some nonsense that happened in my blood work. But now whenever I get my blood, I get every three months, I go right to ChatGBT. I don't wait to have the doctor review it. It goes over everything, tells me if I need to adjust my supplements, and tells me if I'm taking too much of anything. It's great. It's wonderful.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I imagine that ChatGBT has just taken whatever AI you're using, has taken so many of the concepts in your methodology over the years and just turbocharged them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Well, I had a guy reach out to me that I had used as an outsourcer previously in India. And he was like, Hey, do you have any work? And I was like, dude, same story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I'm like, man, you know, art goes out to you, but you should probably learn to do something else because I think, I think there's a large segment of the Indian economy, Pakistan economy, that part of the world, Bangladesh, the Philippines, that's, it's going to be hard hit by this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Well, I know we're taking kind of a hard left turn into the unknown now, but I mean, do you kind of watch some of the stuff you can do with chat GBT and do you lay a, do you ever lay awake in bed and think, what are people going to do? Like, Aren't every, is it literally every time you, something comes in your brain, you're killing a job? Because I know that's the way I think about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
He's going to show you how to optimize, automate, and outsource everything. If you are somebody that is trapped by your business and don't have enough time, this today, folks, is going to be the podcast to you. Welcome to the program. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Ari Maizel. Ari, how are you, man?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I'm like, oh my gosh, we're going to get to a point where what are people going to do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
No, it completely is. And I wonder, part of the tariff push is bringing manufacturing back to the States, not even though most of those plants, as they're building them into the new world, will be automated plants, but they're still going to need bodies to run them. Do you think there's a thought in our government of, wow, look at all of these people that are not going to have jobs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
We need to do something to create an economy at scale where they can work.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
No, I appreciate it. So for those of you guys listening, Ari was nice enough to come back again. We had a major technical difficulty that crashed this entire thing about 30 minutes in, and he is taking time to spend with us again. So thank you once again for your understanding, Ari. I appreciate you, man. I do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Maybe I'm just watching too much Black Mirror lately. I'll watch it on reruns of Black Mirror. The dystopian future is upon us, Ari. It's terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It's a possibility. I mean, it is. It's a possibility. Well, let's try to help some people that are still living and working today, shall we, instead of depressing everybody with our podcast. Now, you're so big on optimization. In that first book, I basically optimize, automate, and outsource. How should you go about finding things to optimize? Like, walk me through...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
your data point analysis of your daily work date of your daily work life to identify things that you can do that with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Well, you know what I found is, and I challenged the people that work for me to do this a lot, which is in that process of going through your day, how much actual work do you actually do? Because especially being in real estate, right? We have a very large real estate company and realtors are famous for this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It's like, oh, I get up in the morning and I come to the office and then I have a cup of coffee and then I talk about my weekend and then I got to go on social media because we got to do that. And then I do this. It's like, and then, you know, by the time this, and it's two 30, I got to go pick up the kids. And then I kind of drop them off. And then I come back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It's like most realtors actually do an hour's worth of real work in an eight hour day, but yet they've positioned themselves to feel like they've had this long day. oh, I went to this meeting, I sat in this class, I did this. But activities that will actually bring you dollars, they're only spending maybe an hour of actual work a day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I know. So let's talk a little bit. Let's start out. I always like to start out with the nature versus nurture part of what we do. So somebody that is as high functioning as you are, tell me about early Ari, young Ari. What do you think burned that India?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So, I mean, do you find that in other industries or is it just really sales? I mean, where do you find that loss of just time?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I'm not just singling out realtors for that. That's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
You're overwhelmed with the thought of all the things you should be doing that you're not doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Well, after you wrote the first book, now it's just so interesting to see how the world has changed so much, but the concepts remain the same from 2016 when the first book came out to this, because the second book I think was idea to execution. Is that right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Now, I feel like you started to shift more thinking from everyday use into being more specific with founders, CEOs, that type of stuff. It can be user-maintenant with that. Was there something that happened in your life that created that out of necessity, or what happened there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I put it on the boy, and I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally, you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours. And all of this stuff is baking soda-free and paraben-free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. I can, I mean, you can definitely see that kind of shift through the way that your writing was. And even with the most recent book now, the replaceable founder, I think, I think you've gone from like, like you've gone from your everyday employee to the person running the business to now CEO founder level. And it's almost like that trilogy is now complete in that book. You just go ahead.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Well, let's talk about that. What are the eight traits that make a thousand-year-old company? You don't get to throw that out there without me digging deep. Come on, man. That's solid.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
That's what they play.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Oh, God. And in Japan, that guy was probably wearing one of those signs and getting publicly humiliated for whatever they do with their business culture.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Because I think when we build a business, I think everybody wants their business to be around forever. But I think, again… Do you think… Yes. I think your first business, yes. And I can tell you this because I think your first business, when you build it, it's like your first child, right? You want it to be there forever. You want to have it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I think subsequently, when you start opening businesses, you're like, okay, we need to set this up right now to sell. Like we need to, we're building this to sell because that's what you need to do when the market is right. And I think, I think that's the evolution, but that very first one, man, I think people, so maybe I think they just want to keep it for as long as they can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I think people probably wait too long to get out of them too, which causes some problems. Yeah. Could they have sold off that Japanese company earlier and still made money or do they wait too long to the end? Now, granted, you'd be going for 800, however many, you know, hundreds of years, 1400 years. So the odds are probably in your favor to stick it out through another bad turn.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But probably, you know, they should have liquidated a little faster. Yeah. Now, my question is this. So I want to talk specifically about chat GBT and the impact that it's making on your methodologies in those things. I mean, I. So many people are like, oh, I use it to write my Twitter posts. It's like, no, you don't understand.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Tell me what you think is the most powerful thing people can do with ChatGBT right now. Because technically speaking, they could ask it to be you and help them find inefficiencies in their business based on your writings, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
What was the first company you started when you were 12?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I know that about you. Yeah, I'm similar. But unfortunately, the stuff that I tend to memorize is every line from the movie Point Break and nothing pretty much else of value.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I don't even know why. I don't know why. I have no idea. Anyway. It's like such a good, but also such a piece of shit movie, too, at the same time. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. All right. That's good. At least now you know I'm honest. Yeah, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I have found with me, as much as it speeds things up, it also tends to slow things down. Because like if somebody sends me, like, for example, I'm working with some guys that are really good Substack AI developers and built an outbound system.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
sales rep for me, built an outbound, I trained it, our scripts, our objections, our everything on calling through old leads for our agents, just trying to re-engage with old leads. He can make 10,000 calls a day, trained by me, really, really good. I mean, to the point where when they were testing it, I had it call me and I said, what other features look for in a house?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
And I'm like, well, I need a five bedrooms, four bath, and the kids are getting ready to leave for college. So me and the wife are going to need a sex dungeon. And the AI replied back to that. The AI replied, okay, five betters for Beth. And apparently you and the wife are looking for some private time. Hey, no judgment. That's what it responded. And it was shocking that it said that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Like of everything else that happened during the call, that to me was the most profound. But these guys had sent me an NDA just to start getting this process working where normally I just would have breezed through it and been like, okay, no problem. And sent it back, sent it back. But instead I've sent it through and it was like, well, you know, I sent it to chat GPT.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
What are the pitfalls for me in this NDA? And it was like, well, it's pretty standard with tech firms, but we don't like the feedback where they can essentially take everything that you're giving them back as feedback and use it to create products to sell to other people. And I was like, okay. So I pushed back on the feedback part of the NDA and the guys were like, yeah, no problem.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
We took, we'll take it out. So yes, as it's speeding things up, it's also kind of slowing things down because I'm like, well, wait a second. Something that I wouldn't even thought of before is now front of mind.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
No, no, no, no. I'm going to write it down though. What is it? Goodness.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. Great. Way better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
It's shocking. So I just, I'm guessing it's going to be interesting to see what we have. I'm going to lean hopefully into your positive thought that we'll just need more things and the world will adapt and not the dystopian future that Black Mirror has presented to us where we're all being hunted down by robot dogs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Because we're just, yeah, I mean, that's the day that we don't want is for you to be like, you know what? We don't really need you people. I don't know what you do. I don't know what you bring to the table here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yes, I have. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The cyborg, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
More exciting than sitting at a desk, I guess is how it is. All right. Well, Ari, if they want to find you, want to learn more about all of your great systems, if they want to work with you, man, how do they find you, man?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I have one last question that I'm just curious about because I really don't know the answer to it. I can't seem to find the answer when I looked, which is this. So I became exposed to all of these kind of philosophies by reading Tim Ferriss' book, The 4-Hour Workweek. It was the first exposure I had to this. And I know you and Tim are friends.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So my question is this, which kind of came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it Tim leaning on your ideas, you leaning a little bit back on Tim, or you guys coming together because you both had a similar idea path?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So being that you've always kind of had that entrepreneur dream, have you ever had a job? Are you a guy that – have you ever worked for somebody else?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Very different. Well, cool. Well, I love it, man. Thank Ari. Thank you again for taking time to talk with us, man. I appreciate you so much. The second time, this was indeed better than the first. I'm so grateful for your time, buddy. I appreciate it. My pleasure. All right. We'll wrap it up today, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
If you just listened to that, if you are somebody out there that feels like you can never get anything done, dude, I mean, there's so many methods out there to help you change that from chat GBT to just picking up one of Ari's books. I mean, if you want to go next level with some serious coaching, reach out to him. There are solutions available. You're just not taking advantage of them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah. I always like to say that people that function very highly as entrepreneurs are what I like to call chronically unemployable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Would you say that's you for sure?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Here's the question about that, because I know which way I lean coming out of that same situation, but do you find that you took away from the bosses that you had? into your companies? Do you think you took more positive things of what they did or did you see things that they did that you perceived as negative that you're like, I'm never gonna do that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Would you say there's anybody from that young time of your life that stands out as a mentor that you can say, this was the person that I kind of modeled after?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah, I think the Commodore 64 kind of summed up my childhood, which was, you know, everybody was getting the Commodore 64, but my mom was on a budget. So we got the VIC-20, which was like the model down. Yeah, there it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Yeah, yeah. So we had like the VIC-20, which was like, and all your friends, you know, look down their nose at you like, oh, you can't get the 64 bit. You can only get the 20. Yeah, that was the story in my life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I know, you're like, you're hating up at him. You're like, no, it doesn't work. Oh my gosh. So at what point, now you went to Wharton, which, you know, we talked about a little bit on the last podcast that we'll never see the light of day. To me, that's like the Super Bowl of business. And it is, I know you didn't take it as that much of a compliment.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I guess us normies looking from the outside in, we see it that way. How did that experience kind of change you, shape you? And what was the value you got out of that?
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The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Right. Well, you know, it's really interesting that you say that because I think people think so linear in opportunities like that, like graduate top of your class, then get a job at Goldman. Like that's the linear way to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
But you probably, your recommendation from the dean thanking you or the president of the university was probably worth as much as a 4.0 would have been to real world executives.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Sure. Yeah. Cause they don't remember him. So the teacher obviously recognized that you had a, It's odd that you're teaching a class that's based in math and science effectively, but you also understand there's an art to it. The art side of it is where the real success comes from.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Because I like to think that the people that are really successful in business depend on those that think linear for data that helps them give them data points and make decisions. But at the end of the day, there's always kind of a nuance that runs between the numbers that if you can't see that, you're not going to get there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
How does that actually affect the real world? Let me ask you this. Now, obviously, when did you get diagnosed with Crohn's disease? Because that kind of started this whole journey that you're on now. When did that happen?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
So you're 23. And for those that don't understand what Crohn's disease is and don't want to Google it, how did you know you had it? How was it affecting you? What was it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Obviously, this is a paid advertiser, which is how we get paid. to be able to do what we do for you guys. So check them out. Smell fresher. Stay drier. Boost your confidence from head to toe. Try Mando. And now, escaping the drift. And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
Oh, God. Yeah. I had a bout once with diverticulitis once, and I've heard that it's similar to that. So to have what I had just, you know, flukishly one time, to have that as a repetitive thing, I can't even imagine, dude. That's dreadful. Yeah. Dreadful thing. But how did that change the trajectory you were on into where you are now? Obviously, that was a catalyst.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Role of AI in Productivity with Ari Meisel
I know you've talked about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You know, when you talk about scaling in that way, it's interesting, a couple of things. Number one, you talked about the pricing matrix. You know, Neil Patel said, put something up the other day I thought was really interesting. And it was showing the Google searches over time. And there was a one line on one data set where it showed searches for the word free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then another data set searches for the word best in all things, products and services. And in 2018, I mean, when the Internet first came out, free was like way up here and best was way down here. And then those lines slowly converged at about 2018. And now best is by far dominant over free when you search.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So I think that a lot of people that have products or services are terrified of pricing themselves out of the market with whatever they do. But I think you saw that as almost a necessity. So if you're coaching somebody that has a product, business, or service, how do you get them over that hump?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
So obviously with such young success, man, I like to, as the parent of somewhat, you know, as teenagers, you know, my biggest fear is always raising worthless kids. So I always, I always like to start these conversations out with super successful people, the nature versus nurture idea, you know? So tell me about you growing up, man. Tell me about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
How important, obviously it's incredibly important. I'm not going to ask, I'm going to ask a different question than I was going to say, because what I was going to say was dumb and redundant. I was going to say, how important is innovation in business today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. I see what the point that I was going to make is you were talking earlier about we're talking about education versus experience. And then you add innovation to that. Like, for example, I have an employee, one of our one of our companies. And this came out of this person's mouth, which was they said, I can do what this other salesperson can do. And I have 20 years experience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Now, the business that we were referring to in that moment that we were having this conversation has pivoted tremendously a lot. It was the equivalent of somebody saying, well, I've been using a rotary telephone for 30 years. I know how to dial the rotary telephone like nobody's business. Well, nobody uses a rotary telephone anymore. So the years of experience become irrelevant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It's the quality of what that business does now and how adept you are at doing that now. So when I say innovation, I don't necessarily – I wasn't necessarily referring to coming up with the next best mousetrap. I was saying being able to identify what is the mousetrap and being on top of it. So I love the – like rip off and duplicate is easily the best business method.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I like to think that a lot of people try to do what we do here in our market and they can't. We're just – And a little plug for me real quick. Yeah, we're officially number one in the market now here, which is great. Very happy with that. So there you go. Congratulations, Simply Vegas, for hitting number one in the market yesterday. So I'm very, very happy with that little development.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But yeah, I think... what I mean is I think people gets, they don't, they stop learning, right? Just cause they're not in college. I know we're going kind of going back and forth between growth and innovation and companies and education still, but I think all of it's kind of intertwined in a weird way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Cause I think that I think as a company or as an employee or as anybody, education is so key and staying on top of the trends that are there. So when you're, when you're dealing with your companies you're in, Are you looking for different trends in the business and are you trying to adapt to new customer demand?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. I think it's so funny you say that because one of the pitfalls of people now in the workforce, I think, is they get to understand people get hired for a job and they think this is my job. It becomes my identity. But their boss, the CEO, their supervisor, whoever it may be, is looking to put the right people in the right seats all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And now with the speed of innovation, the speed of change, the speed of customer demand, it's almost become like musical chairs. And people get too married to wanting to sit in the seat they were hired for. I had somebody that works for me the other day say, I just want to do what I was hired for. And I immediately was like, that doesn't exist anymore. We don't need that anymore.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
My dad, remember your dad, like you had one year minimum on the resume because they'll screw up your resume.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yep. I tell my kids all the time, if you just can stay focused and develop the ability to connect with other humans in person, right? Because so many of their friends are just, you know, head down to the phone and they just, the interpersonal skills and empathy are just out the window. There's no EQ on these kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I'm like, if you can do that, you will run over just generations of people because of, like you said, the flexibility that they seem to almost crave in the new generation versus that stability of, well, I just want to do what I got hired for. And I just want to do this. And I don't, I want everything to just stay the same when it just can't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It, you know, people always talk about, you know, cause I'm a member of several high level masterminds and I spend a lot of money and really just the conversations are different, right? If you're always in the same room, listen to the same people, right? You're never gonna be in the same place, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And there's so many people, and I remember I talk about this a lot when I lived in Detroit, lived there for a while in my early 20s. It was very difficult to make friends there because the people that lived in Detroit at the time, You married your high school girlfriend. You bought a house, three houses down from dad. You got a job at the Ford plant on the line next to him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Wash, rinse, replace, generation, generation, generation, generation. They don't want to know anybody new. And I see so much of that mentality in people that just seek comfort. And I just don't think, what are your thoughts on, are we living in an age where it is safe at any time to seek comfort?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the program. And today, man, today, we got a banger.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Hungary. Yeah. My grandparents moved here from Budapest.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, no. My mother in Cleveland, my father in North Florida.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
My mother, they picked up and moved to Florida, and then me, and I've been all over the place.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Real quick, did you go to college? Was college something you did?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
One of my good friends, Brent Pivick, is doing something amazing right now. If you're listening to this, follow him on Instagram because it's an amazing thing that he's done. Sold his house in LA, sold everything in LA, took his kids, took his wife, 52 countries in 52 weeks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Just going around the world, living and watching it, watching it. And they're not just going and like, here's our Airbnb. I mean, everywhere they go, they're doing it. They're doing it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. Same thing. You got to carry it on your back. That's all we're carrying. That's it. That's what we're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
One of my favorite quotes, and I don't remember who said it, but somebody said, I've never met a well-traveled racist.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I always tell anybody that wants to bitch about our particular country and situation, just go walk around downtown Cairo a little bit and just take a peep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It's wild. Downtown Cairo is a wild place just to go from A to B is definitely a crazy place. Let's talk about some of your other stuff, right? I do want to talk about Vivid Vision. Let's talk about that first because that book, again, I've talked about it so much and the importance of having that. And I literally did a podcast yesterday. I don't know if you know him. You may.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
If you go to Joe's thing, you may know him. One of my good friends, Steve Sims. Do you know Steve? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yes, I was supposed to go to that. I was supposed to go to that. I was supposed to go to that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I had the day he did it, my wife got in a car wreck and I had to cancel last minute and see if anybody wanted my spot. I couldn't make it. But anyway, then you know, Steve, you know what he's dealing with probably. He's fighting cancer right now and it's an uphill battle. And he had done a piece yesterday and I do a solo pod every Tuesday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
where it's just me, and I'm sorry, every Thursday, the solo pod, and then this one with guests comes out on Tuesday. And Steve did that post the other day where he talked about losing his identity through chemo, where his identity was really based in, I drink old fashions, I ride motorcycles, and I have a goatee.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And now, unfortunately, my goatee has fallen out, and I can't drink, and I can't ride a motorcycle. So I've got to kind of reframe who I am to myself. And so I literally just two days ago did something on developing core values and understanding what you're doing. And I think...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Your Vivid Vision book takes, in all of the stuff I do, my business planning course, all of that stuff that I have that I do with people that work for us, you take the vision setting part of it so far beyond anything that anybody else has ever done. So please talk about that. I don't want to try to put color on it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You know, I think something you said that I really want to really want to drive home is nothing you said about your personal vivid vision for yourself. Nothing you said has anything to do with an external force that could change your life. For example, there's no like I am the best architect at ABC Smith Company because ABC Smith Company could go out of business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And if you tie your identity to what you do, you're going to have a problem. Everything you said was really things that you can control or you can control the perception of for the most part. You're not tying that vivid that that your vivid vision for yourself to anyone else. Right. It's just things that you can control. And I think that is so clutch in that stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, what's, what's funny is part of the, part of those little things can have such a profound effect on other people for what, like what you just said, like part of my vivid vision, if you will, was, you know, my mom is, is 80 years old and I'm like, you know, when I would go over there, I would say like, you know, it's like, oh, that I called the doctor and my knee hurts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And now my, my shoulder hurts. And now, and I like, finally I was like, I just, I can't do the doctors anymore. So I put on my little vision board of things I want to accomplish. I want to learn everything there is to know about my family history. So I told my mom, this is what I want to do. This is part of what I'm trying to get. I'm a guy that knows everything about our family.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I really don't know a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I have. But for me, greatest city on the earth. Greatest city on the earth. Because A, if you're listening to this and you've never been there and you don't understand why it's great, I'm going to give you three great reasons to go to Budapest. Number one, it is gorgeous. This is like a commercial for Budapest. Today's episode is brought to you by the Hungarian government. There you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Number one, it's the most beautiful city. They call it the Paris of... Eastern Europe, number one. Number two, it is on its own currency. No Euro. It's on the forint, which is its own currency, which goes forever against the American dollar. So you can do some really elaborate, amazing things that don't cost a lot of money. And number three, the Hungarian people love Americans.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
They love Americans there. I have never been treated as traveling more warmly than I was by the Hungarian people. And this was even before, like... You know, I said, you know, my grandparents moved here, you know, in the 40s, and I have a lot of Hungarian blood in me. Before I even talked about it, they were just so warm and so nice. But I will say this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
It was funny because that was one of the first places when I started world traveling I went. And talk about getting your eyes opened on a trip. We just happened to be there during Hungarian Independence Day. And I'm like, sweet, this is going to be great. It's going to be a blast. We're here for Independence Day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And then you realize they haven't been independent very long, haven't been free very long. And there are a lot of people that had parents killed by the communists. And that's where my dad got stood against the wall and shot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And it was they did what's called the Million Man March, where there was a million people that marched through down what is essentially the Champs-Élysées of Budapest to what they call Heroes Square. And it's a million people and it's dead silent. like dead silent for a mile. You do this walk with all these people. Wow. That's when you're like, that's when you're like, that's cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Maybe, maybe, maybe Independence Day isn't about hot dogs and fireworks. No, it's not about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Has he made connections at university that you think will carry him through his life?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That's like the Anthony Bourdain, like you want to go deep, not wide. I want to get in this one. Take me to a neighborhood. If I lived here, where would I go get a pint at 4 o'clock? Like where would I go get the best sandwich?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
That for me is what I'm after.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I want to talk about this because you have written so many books. You've written so many. When did you realize that, because you don't do this much work unless it's a joy for you, unless you find genuine joy and passion in it. When did you decide that, man, maybe I really want to write?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Of course. It's in my office. Yeah, of course.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
How often when you walk in to coach big companies, CEOs, whatever it is you do, do you find that that's a huge problem where people are just not operating in alignment with their core values?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Let's talk about those guys. Not to help Fortune 100. Let's talk about the come up guys. Yeah. Let's talk about the come up guys then.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
How often has that been a problem with them?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Where they're not operating with their core values. You walk in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
How happy are your people? Then how happy is your customer? Then what's your profitability?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I'm curious what you say about this, because I have my opinion on it. Obviously, we use EOS to operate all of our businesses. We're very big with that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
As far as the system to do it. It's a great methodology. We love it. How do you, because this is such a problem for a lot of people that have a handful of employees, when they get into the space of, I would rather be friends than boss, and how do you effectively manage that? and give like, how do you effectively manage and give criticism and make better and still maintain employee happiness?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I want to hear what your thoughts are.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I think that's a lot of leaders that I have dealt with in the past of trying to coach or whatever. The problem they've had is they're more concerned about what their employees think about them. Correct. And the quality of work product that comes out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, we're at college visit age, right? And I've got, my son is incredibly talented when it comes to education. He's just got it. And he's got a 4.65 GPA.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
let's talk about personality traits that help you or harm you. Let's, let's play a game. Okay. I'm going to put you in a room with, you don't know anything about their education. You don't know it. You don't know how smart they are. You don't know anything. We're strictly looking for personality traits. Put you in a room.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You're at, you have, you got five people in there, all shades, shapes, colors, sexes, whatever. You got to pick the one that you got to bet on is going to be the best CEO entrepreneur. What personality traits are you looking for?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Love it. All right. Well, one last question and I'm gonna let you go. If you could give advice to anybody, the best short piece of advice to level you up, what would it be?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Oh, you're 59. So we're the same thing. So we're at that age that when our friends die, they're in a candlelight vigil. There's no letting balloons go at the park. They're just like, ah, man, I can see that guy didn't do whatever. But I just had literally my eighth person that at one point I would consider a best friend or top two of a solid network of guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I just had the eighth one pass away recently. Yeah. So my wife was very thoughtful. I got this, which is I have a Memento Mori dog tag. It has all of their initials on the back. And every time I don't want to do something, I rub this and I think, man, these guys would give anything to do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And any time I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't do that because it's a little crazy, I rub this and think these guys would give anything to do that. I'd do it anyways.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
He's taking AP level. He's taking college level courses in high school, which is how you do that. And for me, my opinion on it is, number one, he's kind of built a little bit for academia. Now, granted, we're not going to go study the studies of past civilizations that get you nowhere. For me, if you're going to go to college, get a finance degree.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. I've got to go home. Apparently the state of California, by the time this airs, it'll be done and handled so they can't do anything about it. But apparently the state of California has made certain perfumes illegal in California and the one that Claire wears is on that list. So he's FedExing this perfume to my house today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You know, I just, I just had speaking of that and just the conversation that we just had. And then when you just had with Steve, while we're doing this, all I can think of is somewhere out there, somewhere, there's probably somebody struggling to get through life. And was literally sitting 12 feet away from you and Simon Sinek in a house having late night conversations about business and life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And they were 12, 20 feet away from it and had no idea.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
All those things. Well, speaking of speaking to cool people, if they want to find you, how do they find you, Cam? How can they connect with you more?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Perfect. I love it. Well, dude, thank you so much. This was such a treat for me, man. It was lovely to meet you. And I'm sure we will be in a room together at some point. I'm just sure that's going to happen somehow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Thanks so much, guys. If you didn't get anything from that, man, there's look, I'll admit there's tons of stuff wrong with me. But if you didn't get anything from that, there's something wrong with you. And I cannot recommend enough going and reading Cam's book. It is incredible. Go buy that thing. Go get it. Plug into him. Because remember, man, nobody's coming to save you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You got to do it for yourself. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And if you want to get a law degree, get a law degree. Because with that combination, you can literally be anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, absolutely not. That is a way that is a waste because it, but I want him to go like we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Are those your grades?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I love, dude, well, see, again, I'm a guy that went barely to college, did not finish for much of the same reason you did because, you know, at 20 years old, I owned part of a college bar and I was in school for hospitality and I was like... I'll never forget the day when I was like, I'm done, which was a teacher. We're talking about how to pay liquor tax in Florida and how to pay beverage tax.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And they were like, for every quarter barrel, you have to pay this much in liquor tax. And I was like, raise my hand. I'm like, you can write off a gallon for spilling foam for every quarter barrel. They're like, you can't do that. I'm like, I just did it. Like, like I'm already doing this. And so, you know, but with my son is that's when I decided the institution had nothing further off for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And I mean, this is a dude that we have going on today. This guy, he wrote a book that I loved. And when I got the opportunity to have him on the show, I was like, wait a second, is that the same guy that, yeah, it is the same guy. And I was so happy to see that it was. His book, Vivid Vision, is a book that I've talked about on this podcast before.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
But with my son, it's like, look, if you can get into somewhere like Stanford, if you can get into one of those high level schools where you're going to make generational type championships, then yes, go. God bless. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, we're not going to LSU to drink beer for four years and root for a national championship in football. That's not what we're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Did you help him with his first apprenticeship? Is that something you kind of knew some people and connected? I have helped my son in that. I've done the same thing with them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Is there an age you think, because I think the cool thing about the modern digital era a little bit is there's no age anymore. Is there an age where you think you can't get an opportunity like that? Like you're too old to go ask for that opportunity? Remember that movie? There was a movie with Vince Vaughn where they went and worked at Google as interns?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
We've talked about it numerous times about how to establish. And really, it's so immensely important when it comes to getting you where you want to go. He has been called the CEO whisperer for his ability to get businesses to double profits in less than three years. He is... Just, he's done all kinds of stuff. He was the COO at 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, I think if you look at Tim, I would also argue... Well, no one really... Tools for Titans, the interview process for Tools for Titans, he got an MBA.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Or you had just started fraternity, so you go to your test file, which is where I spent a lot of my time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
No, you just go to the paper file at your fraternity house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I need a paper on this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I can see that. It's interesting you were just talking about about now the educational system be disrupted, because I saw an interesting comment this morning, and I don't know who said it. It was on the background. I saw it as a clip. And they were talking about that the American society broke the promise to the blue-collar workers when the housing bust went boom in 2008-9, when it crashed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You broke that. As long as you just go to the coal mines, go to the factories, do this, we're going to take care of everything. And then they let them fail. And that's ding. And now what you're seeing is America is almost allowing that to happen to white collar employees because they're like, look, yes, you pay for this MBA, you pay for this, blah, blah, blah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
And all of a sudden I have this machine that's better, smarter, faster that I can replace you with for 20 bucks an hour.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, it's interesting, you know, you said we were talking about MBAs not being able to find work, right? So you as somebody that was the CEO of a major company, because 1-800-GOT-JUNK, that's a massive company and you were COO, among other things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
He has had built $200 million companies before the age of 35. This is a guy that definitely knows how to get you from where you are to where you want to be. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Cameron Harreld. Cameron, how are you, buddy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Well, at what point, when you're looking at potential, you know, staffing needs, talk about education versus experience and how you would weigh those scales.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
I say that's exponential growth.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I said as somebody that has hired top-level talent companies, what's the scale look like with education experience?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
You have to get a coach to teach you how to be fast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah. Just break the one that was there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, it's funny. I was on The Apprentice. I was on Donald Trump's reality show. And my season was the one where they did street smarts versus book smarts. And I think it was to shine a light on that very thing to see who was better and how it worked. There you go. It's interesting to me when you're talking about building those companies from zero to 3,000, being able to scale up in that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Unleashing Entrepreneurial Success with Cameron Herold: Vision, Leadership, and Personal Growth
Yeah, I was so excited when you were coming on, man, that we could do this today. And because I know that what you've done in your life, you had such a great amount of success at an early age and you spent, now we're spending so much of your life trying to help others get to that same place. And that is such the message of what we're trying to do here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah, if you don't lose a million once in your life, you ain't trying.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
People that aren't on that road or aren't on that mission, they just can't get their head around it. Like they're like, they look at everybody that does stuff that you do. It's all dudes and egomaniac. It's just all ego driven, blah, blah. And they don't understand that. It's like, no, dude, I just, I really, I got mine. I'm good. I did me right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And now I can help other people by doing this stuff and they don't, they don't get it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Tanner Iskra, day one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
That market cornered, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Man, I didn't chew the NeuroGum today. That's showing up easy after a heavy carb lunch, isn't it? Good Lord. So, dude, let's talk about... So, for those people that don't know you, let's talk a little bit about your background. Obviously, you're very, very successful at what you do. Where did you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Let's talk about this, because I like to get either the, you know, the villain or hero origin story, if you will. Where'd you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Dude, that's the Dan Fleischman superpower, right? Dan is a friend, and he's always said, my phone is my superpower. Because no matter what you need, dude, that guy has got somebody on his phone that can do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
capital they need help with connecting some i mean it's amazing what platform are you using for your cold outreach um we use flow chat okay yeah i don't have a team that like works it dude if you haven't seen it and this is literally that's why the scotsman you just met looks frazzled today because he's been in it 12 hours a day figuring this out but go high level just just launched ai across all of their stuff and dude it's 97 for voice i mean just oh yeah it's
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
wild yeah how cheap that is like i saw russell was doing like his last click funnels live deal i'm like i wonder why he's stopping it then i see this i'm like oh yeah because russell's gonna ride off into the sunset if i'm russ oh yeah oh yeah high level is just on steroids yeah well here's the thing though so with speaking of ai there's still got to be some human connection and touch to it right yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah, not the Grateful Dead mushrooms.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
So when you started that one, how did you, obviously the strategy you just talked about, but here you are. So this is the decision you made to start this. So- What was the story arc of that? Was it podcast and then agency? Was it agency? What was the progression?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Well, let's talk about, and again, I never want these things to turn into infomercials, dude, but I do want people to kind of understand what they do when they work with you. So if I'm somebody that calls you, let's say I call you up and I say, hey, dude, I want to build my brand. I want you to give me a podcast. What is my expectation? What would I expect as somebody that does that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
No, it's such a, it's such a fine line for you though, because do you guys turn people down? I mean, because you can't dilute. Cause obviously if you started sending me a bunch of garbage, I'd be like, bro, what are you doing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
department that you just interject you just plug into your company yeah and then we do all the reach out and get you on shows so you can show up and perform so when you started the business did you have a scaling plan like did you start out and say okay like it's just just me today but when i get to this point like i need to make this higher i need to make that higher or just organically as you're going through it i scaled the mortgage business so at
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
That is the biggest gripe that I literally just had a meeting here with all of our team leaders, like all the people running businesses inside of our business. And I'm like, how many of you guys have a loom library of all of your processes? And they're like, maybe two of them. I'm like... So every time you bring on new agent, you're literally starting from zero with your time and training that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
question you obviously had to become if you're the oldest you you immediately went into sort of caregiver mode of your younger your younger siblings i'm assuming right yeah so at what point would you say if you had to put an age on it were you forced to grow up
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah. The guy that booked you was 16 years old. That's my kid.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
That's the way we hire. And the cool thing about doing something that nobody's really done, which is what you did, was you're not going out to try to find some grizzled industry vet that has all these problems. You're just trying to hire the smartest people you can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah, dude. I quit hiring industry-specific people for a lot of our companies, and I just try to hire the smartest people we can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the book, dude, because I love this. Even the title of the book, Rocket Fuel, how to turn your failures into fuel. And it's so funny, dude, because. I literally yesterday had a situation where my daughter faced some adversity through a sport that she plays. And, you know, my daughter is very much me. My son is very affable. He's very much my wife. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
My daughter's hell on wheels. And my wife's like, you're going to go talk to her. I go, no, because it won't do any good for me to talk to her right now because she's it's got to sting her today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Today's got to sting. She's going to let it go. But tomorrow she's going to get the dude. This is gasoline. It can either burn you up. or you can put it in the tank for rocket fuel. That's exactly what I said. It was funny. And then I get you out to see the name of your book. I'm like, Oh, there you go. Yeah, there it is. Perfect topic today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
So, yeah, I mean, what, what, what, why did you want to write a book about that message?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah, dude. It's like, look, I don't have like. I don't have the terrible backstory. I mean, straight middle class, whatever. I mean, my father was an attorney. My parents got divorced very young. And my dad... That's part... Yeah, my dad banged my mom out bad in a divorce.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
If you're listening to this and you're married to a Southern lawyer in a small Southern town, don't get divorced in that Southern town. It's not going to go well for you. So, yeah, I mean, we were...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
for us it was kind of a weird deal right because we lived in the most expensive neighborhood right because my we had the house my dad left the house but yeah we were broke so like all of my friends that lived all around us all had things could all do whatever and my mom was always struggling right just struggling so it created this really weird dynamic and it's probably led into like earlier when i said i was so worried but other people were going to think about me when they found out probably that's a that's a yeah that's a trauma situation sure or not
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah. So sports obviously became an outlet for you then. Oh, yeah. And you got pretty good at it because you got a college scholarship to play ball.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Well, dude, one of my proudest things, like, look, on The Apprentice, I got fired. No news, you know, newsflash. There you go. Spoiler alert. Come back and watch it. Yeah, I got clipped. But the thing that I'm most proud about about that show was the show psychologist wrote a book called Sweet Success and called me to interview me about it after after all the seasons of the show.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And I said, why don't you interview me? She goes, because you tested higher in resiliency than anybody ever had. And I was like, all right, cool, whatever. There you go. So, hey, man, I'll take it. Like, I don't look back at anything in my life as a negative. It was all a gift. Everything is a gift to me because it makes you who you are and builds you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Example of the rocket fuel law, it works. If you're not willing to throw it all away and go work at McDonald's, you're not entrepreneurial enough. That doesn't cross your mind.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Dude, it's like Alex Ramosi was saying a couple, I saw a clip of him on social media. This is how powerful one clip can be. This is probably a month ago and I still think about it. I literally think about this clip from Ramosi almost every day where he said, look, my life is a story. I am the hero of my story. Every time adversity comes up, I think to myself, this is going to make a great story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
So the bigger the problem, the bigger the dragon I get to slay, the bigger the hero I become. I look at everything that way. And I was like, man, that's really fucking good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Okay. God bless. I mean, you know, it's so funny. Let me ask you a question about that while we're talking about that. So is that something you regret? You look back, does that, does that always had a grinded on you forever?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah. When people ask me, like, if, was there a mind shift in your life that like that, that mind shift that affected you more than anything else? I think the day that I realized that I am a bit player and everybody else's movie and they're the star of it, not me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Because, you know, dude, why don't they think this is important? Why are they reacting a certain way? It's like, oh, yeah, I'm just a bit player in their life. I'm starting my own movie and I got to let that go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And now anytime anybody does something that I don't agree with or I would take as a slight or whatever else, I'm just going to go like, dude, I'm number 57 on the call sheet today in their movie. I'm nobody. It doesn't matter. It does not matter. It's not me. It doesn't matter. They're in their story. So I want to talk about this, man, because you said you got an 18-year-old. How old are the kids?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
My daughter's 12. All right, 12. So you being a gentleman of means, as we all are, I ask everybody this because it is my biggest fear on the planet. Somebody asked me what I'm scared of, and here it is. It's raising worthless kids. Terrifies me, right? Because, dude,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
you want to give your kids all the nice stuff you want it you want it you know when you go on vacation if you're sitting up front that you want to sit up front with you it's just kind of how it is so what does mikey c rocket mrs c rock do to make sure that c rock jr and little mrs c rock are not entitled terrible humans so well there's a balance right because i believe see when i grew up i was sitting in nosebleed seats all the time yeah right
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
is better for him i think i tell my son i tell my son this is the job dude yeah this is the job i'm your father i'm not your friend man yeah and i'd rather be hard on them and put them in really tough situations at home so when they go out to the world it's a piece of cake dude i'll tell you i'll tell you a couple things i started doing recently i love number one so my boy's working here now right so occasionally i you know he's done he'll do the podcast stuff but i have him doing other stuff he's a really bright kid 4.65 gpa all ip class is really smart kid
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And so I've just said, okay, cool. I'll take this from the bookkeeper. You can enter the credit card charges into the QuickBooks, just the credit card charges. And dude, I started him with that and he would come around the corner and say shit like, man, I am so glad we got rid of Cox Cable. We got YouTube TV. That bill was crazy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And I was like, yeah, because now he sees how much every little thing costs. That was one. And then number two, because now he has a job and I'm paying him and he has money coming in other than his little side businesses. I said, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give you a credit card. just because it's stupid to pay cash for stuff. I'm giving you a Chase Reserve credit card.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Here it is. I said, once a month, we're going to reconcile this. And he goes, well, how much more? I know how I'm spending it. You're going to have to track it, right? So we sit down once a month and I add it all up and I make him transfer all the money to me at one time. And I'm like, bro, you spent like...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
180 dollars Taco Bell what are you doing and it's gone from freewheeling good time you know Hayden throwing money all over the place to yeah I'm really cut back this month I'm eating at home I'm being responsible I'm like dude this is the greatest yeah so I um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
give them challenges like that yeah yeah so little things like bro you see these kids today and it's it's i think my kids are head like did you see that i don't know if you saw this some like 10 year old kid created a meme coin yesterday and rugged it for 30 grand he's 10 he's 10 years old 2 million if he could have stayed in and we could have made 2 million if it stayed in yeah dude but
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Dude, there's nothing. I've been here before. There's nothing more humbling than when you're flipping through like Instagram and you see like an eight-year-old doing something that you do better than you'll ever be able to do it. I just say he's been here before.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
I don't know. I've been playing drums since I was a little kid. And I'll see some nine-year-old just shredding doing stuff that I will never be able to do. And I'm like, well, that's just disheartening.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Something. Well, I want to, let's finish up with this man. Cause I think it was a good way to finish up. So obviously very heavy with the Christian faith. Love that. Do very well. Entrepreneurship. There's gotta be some causes that are near and dear to your heart. Do you have giving is built in a part of your of your business or do you have an arm of it that works that way or talk about that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
children's hospital or children's home by the sea it's called and it's just it's out of baltimore and then they expand down to ocean city maryland with houses they bought houses that they put people in for vacations that's awesome all right well if they want to find you how do they connect with you how do they find you mikey c rock on instagram man mikey c rock on instagram and um that one agency that one agency look rocket fuels on amazon yes yep all of it dude thank you so much for coming i appreciate it look dude
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
If you didn't get something out of that, there's something wrong with you, not wrong with me. Yeah, I mean, personal brand is so important. And the best way, like literally, it used to be every kid's dream to be on TV for 10 minutes. I mean, everybody has their 15 minutes of fame. It's so easy to get out there in front of people if you have the right people behind you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
If your goal is to become known, I would reach out to this dude. I do business with their agency. It's great. I think you'd be impressed. Anyway, I'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Were you hustling in college? What was the hustle?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
I did work as a bartender and waiter.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
I commiserate with you on all of that. So first off, like my college outing story, like it was one of those things where I never told people I didn't finish school. Like I never announced that. I just let people assume, right? They knew that I was at this, you know, I went to school, I was there, but they never like knew that I didn't finish and I never brought it up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And I got pretty successful in my life. And it got to a point where I got outed was, so I'm sitting there literally on the first day that we're filming The Apprentice. We're sitting there, right? And Trump walks in, he says, This year we're going to do something a little different. We're doing everything a little different. This year what we've done is we've divided you guys into two teams.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Half of you have college degrees and half of you do not. Oh, man. Because the ones that don't actually earn twice as much money as the ones that do. So we're going to go street smarts versus book smarts. And I'm sitting there in this room going, what? holy shit, dude. Like everybody that knows me is going to like, getting, it's going to know. And I'm like, I'm freaking out. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Episode of the show that, like I said in the opening, man, gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, ladies and gents, live in the studio. And this is the biggest advantage of being in Vegas because, dude, at some point, all the ballers come rolling through Vegas. And when they do, it's easy for me to get them. I wish I could say these people came just for me. They don't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And it like freaking out the whole time. And then literally it came out and it happened and nobody ever said anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Because I, because I think it was, you know, everybody has that little bit of imposter system, that little bit of self doubt. And it was like, man, if they find out, they're going to judge me. And I felt bad about myself for that, even though it didn't hamper anything I ever wanted to do. It always just made me feel bad. I was like, yeah, I thought people were going to like fucking out me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And then it didn't happen. Nobody cared.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
They're thinking about themselves a hundred percent. And then the, and then the restaurant thing, dude, I, at 28 years old, I, I was involved with several restaurants and bars and I went to the doctor at 28 bleeding ulcers. Oh my God. Doctor's like, well, what do you do? I'm like restaurant bar business. He's like, uh, how many hours you work? I'm like 120. He's like, what's your diet?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
I'm like maker's market cigarettes. He's like, you need a life change, not a job. You need a fucking life change or you're just going to eat your life. And I was done. That was the end of it, man. I got out of everything that I had at that time and was done. Learned how to sell, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
7 a.m. around somebody's kitchen table.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah. No, no, no. And misery loves company. Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
So that business and that's people talk about what the hardest thing about Las Vegas is. Right. Or they want to know, like, why is Nevada so shitty with education?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
and the truth of it is is because when i first moved here it's like everything you think is is normal in the world is exactly upside down here when i moved here i met my wife she's why i moved here my wife when i met her had a master's degree in hospitality from unlv which is one of the best hospitality schools in the country right so what was she doing with her master's degree in hospitality
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
She was a cocktail waitress at the Palms working noon to eight, noon to eight, Monday through Friday, like banker's hours, cocktailing, making a quarter of a million dollars a year. It's a trap. With full benefits. Yeah, it traps you though. Dude, like the guy that you flip your keys to at MGM and you're like, oh, park my car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
That dude's, well, maybe not anymore since they went to paid parking, but before they were doing paid parking, that dude is making 80 grand. So you have this cycle of like, it gets handed down. Like, well, school, maybe not that important because I can get you a job at the casino dealing or get you a job here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Or the bottles girl, those girls with the sparklers at the club that are making 200 grand a year to take a bottle of table.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
They come for F1. They come for these magical events. But, hey, man, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I'm going to take it. And today in the studio, I got a dude that is – he's probably the foremost expert on building your brand through exactly what I'm doing right now. He is the owner of the brand that that – Podcast, he's a best-selling author.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
So you got the license and then started doing that. How long were you in real estate? How long did you just work selling houses?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Um, I think the most surprising thing about this story is that you could have most uber successful people that are entrepreneurs as we are, are chronically unemployable. And the fact that you could have a job for nine years to me is shocking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
It was like a paid internship.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
I'm sorry, that one podcast, he's a best-selling author and is an all-around good dude, and we're lucky to have him here. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mikey C. Rock. Thank you, John.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Dude, for those of you who listen to this and are in the mortgage business, I'm going to tell you something funny about it, which is there's really two players. At the end of the day, when you clear everything out, there's two players, UWM and Rocket.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
right nowadays and they're both they're both based in detroit and for whatever reason these dudes just hate each other it is like it's like old school like the men who built america trying to take over the oil trade it's like they hate each other and at one point i want to say it was uwm came out and said if you write paper with rocket you can't write paper with us right and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
we had dude and this is a couple years ago at inman maybe three years ago at inman we were up in a suite because we were cutting jv deals with a bunch of other people and literally we went through like uwm came in and they presented and then they said this is what we'll do for you guys blah blah blah blah thank you very much they left and then it came rocket and then they presented and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
And then we called UWM back and said, ah, you know, Rocket was better. As I said, they came back and then they were like, and we'll do all of this. And it was like, dude, watching these guys cut each other at the knees out of spite at the end of the day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about that because, dude, you were doing very well with mortgage. And then you woke up one day and said, I just don't love this anymore. I'm going to do something different. And, dude, that takes a lot of brass. A lot of people can't do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Chaos to Podcast Success: Mike C-Roc's Journey of Transformation and Innovation
just to see me all the other stuff is just like yes it's auxiliary it's auxiliary visiting kill time while i'm waiting to come here yeah that whole sphere thing just kill time check that thing out what are you gonna do it's good dude so no i dude i so appreciate you coming in selling yourself short man i know i'm just listen i'm it's it's self-deprecation i think i think people it makes me more appealing yeah i think when i go self-deprecation i can't just go full ego you know brad's got a bradley my buddy bradley's got a he's got that uh that cornered
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I'm like, what are we selling?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Blown it up, killing it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah. So you're, you're, you're, you're a mercenary. You went from missionary to mercenary is what we did. Might be the title of this podcast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
No, no, God, no, that's not what I meant to me. The key, especially in those fast, in those fast interaction sales, like door to door is man, it's quick and it's fast. Right. is you've got to have a very high understanding or a natural ability to be likable. Yep. So I want to talk about that, right? You got to break preoccupation quick. Yeah, you got to be super likable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
The only problem, the only challenge is you're going to be omnipresent everywhere. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So is that something that you just always kind of had or is that something you studied?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So if you had to coach somebody on being likable, how would you say this is how you become more likable? This is what you need to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
like a week and a half because i'm gonna have you out brad's gonna have you out i mean every you're just gonna be out you could be everywhere great i love it yeah it's gonna be getting like launched in the stratosphere which is awesome so let's start a little bit man let's go back because i always like to start these things with the nature versus nurture man for sure let's let's start there tell me about how did chris lee grow up or were you made were you crafted tell me that you did the hero story or the villain like story
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
You're not wrong.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And so I appreciate you not going fat and funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
When you're selling status, you're not selling product.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Needs you to hold that hand. They're looking for reassurance.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So I think for what, Door-to-door is like, man, that is ninja stuff. And in our agents, you know, being in the real estate business, agents all the time ask me, like, oh, what about knocking on doors? And I have some agents that just knock on doors and they just do great. I was never a door knocker for me. I'm great on the phone, but I was never a door knocker.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Unless, because I was, man, like, I got to have a reason to knock on that door. And sometimes... In real estate, there are great reasons to knock on the door. For example, I love when you sell a house to somebody and the day before they move in, you hit all of the neighbors and you're just like, hey, I just want to let you know you're going to see a moving truck here tomorrow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I just want to make sure my clients feel very welcome. Could you walk over and just say hi? Make them feel welcome. Their name are Mary and Sam and they're moving in. Just if you could do that, it'd be great. Oh yeah, by the way, if you ever need real estate, let me know. They always shut the door thinking the same thing. Man, my agent was terrible. They didn't do this for me. I
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I still don't know any of my neighbors. This person is going out on a limb. But how important, I mean, in the door, it's easy, man. The door opens, you're there, it's showtime.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Mm-hmm.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
You know, so much of what we do is on the phone, and I find that pattern interrupting people on the phone is so important because the biggest mistake, and I can't believe this still happens, right? To me, the biggest mistake that salespeople make is they call you up, they call anybody up, and they go, hey, it's John there, blah, blah, blah. Hey, John, it's John, so-and-so. How you doing today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Mm-hmm.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And everybody's so programmed that you're a telemarketer. Like they don't even hear anything else after that. It just shuts down. And I can't believe people still call it that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So what is your best pattern interrupt to people to make them skip a beat and actually think about what you're saying before they categorize you instantly as a salesperson?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Oh, you want them to say, can I help you first?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, I love that move.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, dude. When I went to, when I went to sell cars, right? When I learned, that's where I decided I didn't go sell Kirby vacuum cleaners. I went and sold cars for 90 days. And one of the first things I said was, man, when you walk up to somebody in the lot, no matter what they say, You say, hey, how you doing, blah, blah, welcome out, blah, blah, blah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
No matter what they say, you just say, follow me, and you turn around and walk to the dealership. And you can walk 300 yards. If you turn around at yard 100, halfway to the dealership, they'll stop. But if you get all the way to the door and open it, they'll be right behind you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And they don't even know why they did it. Right. Because they just will.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
No kidding. Speaking of which, man, Robert F. Kennedy got confirmed today. Yeah, let's go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Come on. My wife was beside herself happy this morning. It's like, she's like, big farm is going to get it now. I'm like, yep, let's go. It's kind of crazy. It's a wild time out there, man. It's, it's exciting, but let's get back to you. So you're doing all of these, you're crushing. You're crushing doing, you know, your hired gun for door-to-door.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Okay. Best time. Unless it was foreclosure prevention, that might not have been the best time to launch a business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Welcome back to the program, everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So you were all, but you hired two more of you. You partnered with two more. Exactly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah. If you've got, if, if your partner is you, one of you is not required in that partnership. You better, you better bring people to the table to have definitively different skill sets than you have.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
When you structured this partnership, did you also structure the exit? Did you start? No, no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah. Well, somebody out there right now is listening to this and everything about starting a business. And let me tell you, if you take a partner, it's like a marriage. You better have a prenup that goes along with it. What I mean by is you need to have a, if this doesn't work out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Every single thing that's going to go into solving this business from you get the website to you get this and I get that. And this is how we close the bank accounts. It needs to be spelled out before you start day one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So what was the first hustle as a kid?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I have such a great partner in our business here. And we've here's again, something that's super simple and stupid, but I think is clutch in this. My partner in this business, we've been partners for 14 years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Nice.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And I, outside of work functions, I can count the number of times that he and I have been out or at dinner in 14 years on two hands, less than two hands. We don't hang out as friends. We're business partners, which I think is definitely a huge success. Everybody wants to do business with their friends. It makes it very difficult.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Okay, solid.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So do business with the best player you can find, not necessarily the best friend you can find.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Oh, for sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I want to talk about this because that first business failed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
You lost your dad's money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
How long did it take you to make it right by a mall?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, money's so weird, dude. And I get it. It's a huge loss. And it's hard when you take private money from people that you know, love and trust. And I had a situation where 2017 did a house flipping fund with a guy that was the best man at my wedding, right? I raised all the money, shouldn't have done it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
He ended up splitting town to move to Houston with the money and left me with a bunch of lawsuits and a bunch of unfinished projects. And it was a mess. And, and yeah, I had to make all those people whole and it hurt.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
It was a lot, it was a lot of money and it hurt and it, and it makes me to this day, you know, I try not to, you know, if you haven't lost seven figures, at least once you're not entrepreneuring hard enough, she's got how it is. And, uh, but yeah, that risk aversion, I wish I could say that it raised it from that experience. Just didn't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I think like, I'm still like, if I see something I want, I'm like, yeah, let's do that. That looks good. My wife is now my risk aversion. She's like, whoa, slow down, slow down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I'm not dead. Yeah. No, no, it's good. I couldn't agree more. So, The second, so the, so security fails. Yeah. And you move on to something obviously that became very successful, which was not right away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I have Vivint at my house, I think.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Well, let's talk about that real quick, because I think this is a mistake that a lot of people make as well, is they think those doors are closed to them. Right. They don't understand how to get in somewhere where it's like, listen. I just want to, I just want to watch. I just want to learn, like I'm going to do my job, but in the, in the, in the spare time, help me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
How do you have that conversation with somebody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
That's voodoo generators.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
It's not good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Bro, it's so funny, man, because as a kid, all I wanted to do was get out of the 8,000-person town I grew up in. All I wanted to do was get out. Yeah. And now when I go somewhere, it's like kitschy like that, right? Like there's a little town that I love called Franklin, Tennessee, which is just south of Nashville. I love that little town.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And- So you were all from Facebook ads, booking appointments you were sending salesmen out to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, I was just going to say.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And here comes private equity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So now that this is obviously, look, you don't have to do anything at this point if you want to. So it's so funny. You know, somebody asked me, like, what's your definition of success? And it's like, dude, I just don't want to have to be anywhere. I just want to go only where I want to go and not have to be anywhere. And I think you're already there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And every time I'm like, man, this just reminds me so much of the place I grew up. That's why I love it. I'm like, dude, I'll never move back to where I grew up. But I get it, dude. You long for that nostalgia of your youth because it was a much simpler time then, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So obviously you're doing exactly what you want to do. So what are you doing now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
100%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Dude, that's such a bigger challenge, man. Cause the money's easy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
100%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
He says, that is my number one metric we look at. Because if your employees are super happy and they love you, they will go to the end of the earth for your clients. Absolutely. And I was like, whoa. And so many people think of that differently. I mean, how many times have, you know...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
you go to some random place and there's a problem and then the manager, you know, they don't back their people at all. They just, the Karens of the world want to raise, you know, a ruckus.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Well, Neil Patel posted something I thought was really interesting. Not too long ago as well. It was talking about, it had a, it had a, it was a chart and it was showing the most search words on the internet. And up until 2017, the most, when you're attaching it to any product or service, the most searched adjective was free, right? And it was really high. And down here was best.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And it was really low. And in 2017, for some reason, those lines converged and split. And now best is,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
is so much higher than free and free continues to go down so people stop searching for free this they're searching for what is the best this yeah which tells me that as a society currently we're always looking for the best value and best equals value all right one more question if you could go back and talk to your 23 year old self and you could give yourself one piece of advice what is it
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
I got to tell you, I never thought about it. It's odd that I never thought about it until today, but dude, the number one skill that I think is going out the window with these young kids is the ability to connect personally with somebody individually, personally. And I, Look at the Mormon church, dude. They're teaching him two years at a time exactly how to do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And that is a skill that I think will take people further than ever. So if you're not Mormon, go knock a door. Learn how to talk to somebody. If they want to find you, Chris, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yep. Love it. Okay, cool. Well, awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming by. I appreciate it, man. And look, dude, if you're listening to this, I think the lessons you should take away from it are number one, Risk is what makes the world go round and it's not always going to go your way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And if it doesn't go your way, you've got to have the cojones or the fortitude or whatever it is to keep going and try something different. And if, if you're going to bet on something, I mean, we're in Vegas, man, bet on yourself. It looks like Chris did that and it worked out pretty well. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Nobody's telling me how much I can make, but they're definitely telling me how little I can make. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So let's talk about, so you went to work for Cutco Knives at 18 years old.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So let's talk about the training program for Cutco knives. Cause I've heard like when I got into sales, right? When I first got into it out of the bar business a million years ago, my buddy said, you got a choice. You can sell Kirby vacuum cleaners or you can sell cars. Either way, you'll have a PhD in 90 days. Yeah. I was like, all right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
This week in studio, it's one of the advantages of being in Vegas. I've said it a million times because when you have an event like right now, ClickFunnels Live is going on down at the Strip. And just bringing all the ballers in. And when the ballers roll in, it's kind of easy for us to book. Not going to lie. If we were in Topeka, Kansas, this kind of thing wouldn't happen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
But I've always heard that Cutco knives had a great like sales training program. Is there anything that you learned then? Or no, you're shaking your head like no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So you're set. So Kaka, where do you go after that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
See, the Mormon church, that's the sales training, dude. That's the sales training. Because do you have any, like, I mean, how can you go on a mission and have any resistance knocking on a door after that? Yeah, right, right, right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Are you still active in the church? I am. All right. Let me ask you a question because I saw this not too long ago and I'm sure running in the circles that you run and you run in some of the same circles I am. You've heard about recently some issues in Utah with some people getting arrested. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And I want to say the attorney general of the state of Utah said Salt Lake City is ground zero for Ponzi schemes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So my question is, right, as a member of that church, why?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And today for you live in the studio, if you are somebody that you're interested in sales, you're interested in home service businesses, you're interested in getting better, man, getting your life to the next level. I have a dude in studio today. He is a graduate, an alumnus, if you will, of Harvard University. He has multiple six-figure exits. Not six, seven, no, nine. What am I talking about?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
No, they're all, they're always good intentioned.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Well, that's how it's like in real estate, man. That's how I know instantly like a flippers in trouble when it's like, well, I'm going to refi this house and pull out the equity to then cover the, you know, finish the repairs on this one. You're like, oh, dude. You know, you got to look at those projects as singular, insulated things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
When you start pulling dollars out of one to chase another one, the whole thing is going to tumble. And I've taken some big losses on investments that went like that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And what's probably, it's probably of all of the, if you call it American type religions where, you know, Baptist, Catholic, whatever, Bob bothered, you know, where you, a lot of the people, you know, go to this church to that church. I would say that's the most connected, uh,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, it's a bad combination of trust and just trust you. Yeah, it's such a tough thing, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And, dude, like, it's getting to the point now where it's like, okay, where's this dude from? Utah? Yeah, I'm out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
The math is wrong. Yeah, no, multiple nine figures. Everybody just turned off. They seriously just shut this off. Multiple nine-figure exits in the home services industry. And he's here today to share that wealth of knowledge with you guys. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program, this... It's Chris Lee. Chris.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Come on. No, that's where I'm from. All right. So you spent two years on your mission. You learned how to close like a mother trucker. And then what do you do with that skills when you get it? Because after the mission, do you go to college right away?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Right away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
And that's also a very Mormon thing to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
What were they?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Either way, you're getting a ring. See what I did there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
What were you selling?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Same deal with Oregon.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
So you were just free aging like crazy. Okay. So what was the best conversation you ever had with one of your bosses to try to get you to stay when you just were up and quitting after three months?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
No, I don't say up and quitting like a bad thing. Right, right. But you're going back to college. You can't stay in North Carolina.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Because they just have this never ending wealth of people. Oh man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, dude. Glad we could swing you through. Yeah, this is great, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Well, you probably know Sam out of Utah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
Yeah, we're homies. So when I first met Sam- I thought he was kidding. And this is before door to door con. And like, I didn't realize how big door to door in Utah was. I didn't, I didn't understand this thing. And he's like, Oh, I'm going to start this thing called door to door con. And I was like, I mean, does that, is that, I don't know if that's a good name for an event.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Humble Beginnings to Nine-Figure Success: Chris Lee's Entrepreneurial Journey
It's like con man, door to door, door to door. Like, I don't know if it's good. And dude, he's blown it up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? I know, that sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando All Over Deodorant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
That's easy money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
See, you know, that brings up an interesting point because they say that tough times breed strong men that build great times. And then great times build weak kids that build tough times. That's a fact. So obviously you, because you grew up single mom, you have a brother.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
No more hustle the cart wash 14 to buy what you want. Yeah, that instilled an internal sense of resilience with you. So how so you had your kids pre fall, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
All six were on deck. Like they were they were living the high life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
So how did you? How do you not raise worthless kids?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah. I think that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
know obviously i didn't have the same situation you did but my parents got divorced when i was very young my father was an attorney in a very small southern town yeah rule number one if you're a woman in a small southern town or your husband is attorney there don't get divorced in that county it's just a bad move bad move my father was not very generous with my mother and the divorce so we still lived in like the ritziest neighborhood of my small town yeah in north florida
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
but we didn't have any money. So we're broke. And so going from that situation where, you know, you're constantly having to try to keep up with everybody else and there's no way to do it because you're behind. I think that much the same way it did for your kids. I think that burned my resiliency. And I think that's what made me that of my child. And I look back at my childhood very fondly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I don't, I'm,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Nobody is one wouldn't nobody, you know, you hear like David Goggins and nobody is feeling bad for me. Yeah, exactly. But that, I think that. That less, that, that feeling of less than, and that feeling of left wanting.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah. Right. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Is what created that burning desire in me to, to get successful. So I think, I think that's good. And it's so tough. when you are someone of success. I mean, it's the biggest fear we always have with our kids. And we're constantly trying to manufacture adversity for them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, and it is manufactured.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
As much as we can manufacture, I mean, sports and all that stuff and everything we can manufacture, we're trying desperately to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And dude, my kids are great, but... At the same time, when they were eight years old, they had a, you know, they had an opinion on the airline we were taking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You're like, whoa, did Delta know? Why are we on Southwest? Did Delta not have any flights here?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah. And they had that, you know, we had a private jet for a while and they had all that stuff. And And I think they're still very well grounded, because I think we do the best we can with them. So let's, because you were very successful early, before your trouble. So what was the, so you went into what field after, because you went to BYU, I'm assuming?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Chalker. Not a big surprise, based on the story so far.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Or as the used car manager at Troncolli Nissan in Atlanta used to say, James Myrick, man, this car's been hit more times than Joe Louis. That's it. And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I'm a total imposter. Yeah, come on, figure it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, you're like, okay, no problem.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of the show that, like it says in the opening, man, gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today in the studio, I got a good one, guys. This is going to be super industry. Interesting.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Or as the used car manager at Troncolli Nissan in Atlanta used to say, James Myrick, man, this car's been hit more times than Joe Louis.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Not too often do you get to sit down and talk with somebody that has had such a meteoric rise and such a massive flame out. I mean, we all talk about the ups and downs of life, the ups and downs of business, all of these things, but this is a guy, he did a little bit of time, went inside a little bit because he was convicted and accused of $180 million Ponzi scheme.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, because everything's half price, sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And I kind of just want to hear the story of how all that stuff happens. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is James Catledge. James, how are you? Good, thanks for having me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Because this package they got is, man, I put it on the boy. And I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
See, I want to take it one step further. My favorite technique in business anymore is I call it the Tony Soprano, which is this, which is if I want to build an auxiliary business on a bolt on to something that we do here, right? I'm going to say, okay, cool, you can do this. And then I'll go get the best person I can to plug in that already has this existing business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And then we flood them with customers. And then at the end of six, seven months, I asked a very simple question. How much of your business is our business? And when that number tips north of 50%, well, I'm going to be your partner now. Yeah. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
See, full disclosure, I screwed up the first opening. That was word for word almost exactly the same thing. Very good, yeah, very good. See, I'm a pro here, James, I'm a pro. Yes, you are. That's how we do it. So let's back up, man. Obviously... You know, you've had quite the life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Now we're partners and that's how it's going to be because you know, once you get somebody so dependent on that source of business, they don't have a lot of choice. It's like, listen, I'll bring you more and we're going to do this, but we're partners now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
The men that built America literally should be required education.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, should be absolutely well. That's great. How do you go from that? Because you're making a million bucks at 27.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Which have a massive markup.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, I have. You've had quite the life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And yes, we're going to get to talk about some of the negative things. But I always, I want to try to find some positive here. So obviously we talked about the show. The idea is helping people get to the next level. And I believe now, obviously, you are a reformed gentleman. You're not somebody that is still looking to do anything that could be perceived as a negative in the world. No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Well, you became probably an expert through the copywriting process of finding pain points.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Dude, I could tell you, because I own an insurance agency that specializes in Medicare supplements. Okay. And when you're a young guy, all you're doing every day is sitting with people that are 40 to 50 years older than you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And you don't reach the heights you reached because you reached a lot of those heights, perfectly fine, great business, doing wonderful things. And there's a lot of good knowledge in there that you can use to help others. And I love that that's what you're trying to do now. I love that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
It's tough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
It's tough. And they can't hear you. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
i can't hear very well and she doesn't see very well and he goes i know what what's the secret to a long marriage he goes i just told you i don't see very well and she can't or i can't hear very well she can't see very well it's the perfect combination it's called chemistry yeah she can't see me anymore and i can't hear her anymore that's great that's it
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
So let's talk about, I always like to talk about nature versus nurture first, especially with high profile, very successful guests. So tell me about young James. How'd you grow up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Come for a free lunch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
How many agents under you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Dude, my guy Sean Mikey came in here a couple weeks ago. He's in Miami. He's got a life insurance.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And it is, it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, but let me ask you a question in that situation. This is where Chris screwed up, right? Would you have done a deal with Chris where you got to be a GA and paid him a 25% kick?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, and you'd been happy to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, but my point is, dude, you can't cut the deal. You can't be greedy. You don't get to keep it. Here, over the years, we have amazing people that work at our company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And we've had over the years, some people that split off and want to go do their own thing. Yeah. I want to go up in their own company. I'm like, man, I wish you well, it's hard. Yes. It's really hard, but I wish you well, because that's the nature of the beast. And I think if you start trying to, you know, you know, I always ask people, I want to leave here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I go, I go, is it about money or is it about a dream? Yeah. And if they say it's about money, I go, then don't do it. You're stupid. Like, it's going to be really hard to make money doing this in this economy. If it's about a dream, if you've always had a dream to own your own shop, go do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
But you get your own agency eventually.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Okay, so in my- This is mid-90s. That was the way of the business. Primerica, that was the way of the business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
We can't. We're going to run out of time. We've got to skip ahead here. So you're making a truckload of money with insurance. Truckload of money. Truckload of money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
We've got to get to it. How do you go from you're so incredibly expensive. You're killing it in insurance. You're crushing it in insurance. Yep. How did we wake up in a Ponzi scheme? I'll tell you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
But how do you go from there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Confession.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
If they want to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And my attorney- So what did the jury end up giving you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
What happened to your personal finances? Did they attack your personal finances?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
When you... When all of this kind of came down, right? And obviously your whole life changes in an instant. It goes the other way. You know, a lot of the people that you, you know, you thought you were doing right by me. Dude, I have a similar, look, I don't have a $180 million problem. But I had a million dollar problem where I had taken money from my friends and family and people that I knew.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
The investment in something that wound up not being what it was. And I ended up having to pay it. I paid it all back because I didn't want to have that. Luckily, I mean, look, a million dollar hill is, $180 million is a lot different than a million. And since then, I have a friend of mine that's doing a very good business right now. He's got a very good business model. It's very smart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
It's very sharp. And I was supposed to get in as an investor to it prior to them doing a Series B fundraise. Problem was the valuation that I was granted would have not been the valuation Series B was being offered at, and it screwed the deal up a little bit. And that's fine. I get it. Attorneys get in the way of things all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
But he hit me up now, came back and was like, hey, and this is a good friend of mine. I believe in this business. This is a good business. But he said, hey, you know, could you could you put it out to your people and see if they was part of the Series B? And I just my response was, bro, I can't do that because I will never again raise money for anything that I don't have total control.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I totally agree. I just want to wise position to take.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, and I love him, and I love the business. I was going to invest in his fund, but I just won't do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I think, too, if you look at that time, if you look at that time, because I was in real estate at that time, and you look at how fast everything was going. It turned upside down. Everything was going so fast. Yes, yes. you know, I mean, no income loans and nothing was getting vetted. People just in a deal and just, hey, I just made 50 grand in this house, so let's just buy that one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
It's just, everything was going so fast. On every level, on every scale. You look at, you know, I, at the time, during that boom time, Right when I first got in real estate, I was selling, there was a company here in town called SunVest that was doing condo conversions all across the country.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And we would just go to these real estate shows in like San Francisco and just stand in front of the room and then just literally present five projects and then sell 200 condos.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And like 300 grand.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
And then two years later. Yeah. I'm sitting in Vegas selling those units that I was selling for $350,000. I'm selling them as foreclosures for $40,000, $30,000. It was crazy. So look, I'm not going to fault you for going as fast as all of us did at just a much bigger scale. Anybody that wants to throw stones at you at that time, I was living it then. We were all running.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
any construction project is never let your contractor get ahead of you financially, ever. That's it. Ever let them get ahead of you. I don't care if you're remodeling your bathroom or you're building a high-rise. You never let your contractors get ahead of you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
That's exactly right. Ever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You're always building incrementally in arrears to the work that's getting done. Correct. The only thing you're ever fronting is material. Exactly. That's it. So let me ask you one more question before we go, just because I think this is something that a lot of people, like this whole story, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
The thing that I think probably we didn't talk about that I find that I want to understand is the reputational collateral, the damage that was taken. Great question. Right? Like, how do you deal Yeah. With somebody at your heart that you feel like you're doing the right thing. You're just trying to do the right thing. Yes. Yes. You're crushing. Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You're doing this, but everybody around you is making money. You feel like you're doing the right thing. And then all of a sudden I got to believe, especially in the circles that you're, you're in with that tight net church community.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You are a person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I think we'll leave it at that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
No, thanks for coming in, James. Well, listen, man, if you listen to that, I think there's definitely... I think that last question is the takeaway, man. We talked about so much stuff today, but listen... Life is going to give you ups and downs, and sometimes those are self-created, sometimes they're not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
But at the end of the day, you need to focus more on who you believe you are than who other people think you are. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
So he's not really in a position to. She's thinking, I don't have to run faster than the break in. I just got to run faster than my eight year old son.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Well, I think it's very interesting that even at a small age, you realized that Sometimes just changing your physiology, and you, your physical world, just by the act of holding those knives, right? Just change the whole process. And I think if you're somebody out there that's struggling with fear of anything, I think you just got to find something
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
You've got to find that knife to put under the hand of the garbage can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
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The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Chris Leake is a friend of mine and he had a massive home services business that got sold out to private equity. And he's a Mormon guy. He's from Utah. And I never put it together. He's like, oh yeah, dude, all I do is recruit former Mormon missionaries. Right when they come off the missionary. And I'm like, Yes. Oh, my gosh. I'm like, they're banging on doors trying to sell Jesus. To strangers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
To strangers. They got no problem asking about solar. No problem asking about solar.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, and he told me, he goes, literally, he goes, every home services building business across the country, they recruit from Utah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Right from Utah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
I can't believe I never put that together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Yeah, that's a conversion. That's it. Literally a conversion. Literally a conversion.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
Anything that, look, whatever it may be that teaches you that level of responsibility and dedication at a young age, be it the military, be it that, be it anything. Yeah. I'm going to get behind. That's good stuff. As a kid, let's go backwards a little bit, as a kid, because you said you didn't get paid for that. What was the first hustle you remember you did for money?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
The Unseen Strength in Setbacks with James Catledge
What was the first way you got money?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay. So what year was, what year was this? You started buying investment properties? 2013. Okay. Good time to buy. Yeah. Coming out of the crash. Good time to buy. And you were buying in Nashville, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
What happened? Tell me the story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I got a question. I got a question. And this is something I think is important in your story because you guys bought your house before you got married. Mm-hmm. what was that thought process like? Cause that there's a lot of people that, that need to, did you structure that? Like, how did you structure that deal?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay. So, so when you say we bought our house, it was him by our house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay. Cause I see, and you probably now on the flip side of this coin, many years later, after being in real estate, you see people that are domestic partners or whatever that, that go in together on a house. And it's like, okay, did we talk about the house before we bought it? Was there a plan?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So I just, when I hear that in a story, like I get it and I'm just, if you're listening to this, if you're, if you love your, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, whatever, whatever, if you're in love, dude, don't go buy a house with them unless there is a division of assets plan arranged by a lawyer ahead of time for what happens if you break up. A hundred percent.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yes, they did. It was so bad. Should they have started Arch Manning? Should they have gone with Arch in that game?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Because that house is going to survive whether you break up or not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Unless you get somebody really crazy that burns it down. Then the insurance pays. Well, maybe insurance doesn't pay it off anymore. I don't know. Who knows if they paid off their fire.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
fire was in southern california was it no no good lord terrible terrible anyway so you get a house you're moving along you got your 10 grand you want and isn't it so ridiculous dude it's so i'm gonna talk about that too because you walked into a place bright-eyed like excited to be there man this is going to be the solution to our problems and they look at you and they go Not good enough. Yep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah, it sucked. And how did you, and look, I don't even have to ask because I know you felt defeated. You felt less than.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You felt terrible when you walked out of that office.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And the only reason I want to bring that up is because one of the first things that I teach so much to real estate agents that work for us, right, is there's no such thing as a bad appointment. And if you're listening to this and you're a real estate agent, I'm going to teach you a lesson right now, which is if somebody calls you and they want an appointment with you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
People know if their credit's bad. They know. It's not a surprise. Nobody gets their credit report and they're like, oh my God, 520? How did that happen? They know. They already know. But they're still coming in on a slim hope and a prayer that you can help them. So you have two choices of what you can do with that client when you meet with them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Now, so many agents are so quick to try to pre-qual people and like, don't even meet with them because they're done. I don't teach that. I teach that there's no such thing as a bad appointment. If you can get in front of people, get in front of people. And then if their credit's goofed up, man, you treat them with respect and empathy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And you look across the table and you say, I don't care if it takes a year or five years, we're going to get this credit cleaned up. And if owning a property is important to you, then we're going to get you, we're going to get you there. And in the meantime, if you know anybody else that wants my house, give them my card. And because you treated those people with respect and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
total respect, they will refer everybody they know to you before they buy. So, but so many people in the financial services industry, real estate, what you just said, do exactly what you just said. It just blow people out. Yeah. Do you, do you carry that somewhere in the back of your psyche, that feeling?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Oh, my gosh. That's right. I didn't even think about that aspect of it, which is shocking that I didn't see that. And it's funny that you being from that part of the world, obviously you went to Texas, which was interesting. But let's talk about you growing up. So you grew up in this small town. What do mom and dad do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah, so she did you a favor. Yeah, she did. So she sends you out. You're dejected a little bit. You got your $10,000. At what point do you guys look at each other and say, maybe we should try my house?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Fair, fair.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So he can't talk. He's sitting in here, but he can't talk. It's fine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
That's not him? No. Oh, then your husband's at home.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Oh, cool. Then he'll listen to this later. Definitely take credit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So here's the question. All right. So here's my first question is, did you guys underwrite this at all? Or do you just hope for the best? This seems like a good deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Did you have to rent out the house at all?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, so like.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Thank you, real estate class of Wednesday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Thank you for that deal. So you got in, did you buy it? I mean, obviously 2013, I mean, we were scorching buying stuff for the hedge funds. Were you guys able to buy at a decent margin? Did you walk into equity there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Dude, exactly position.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's going. And do you remember what your interest rate was on that at that time when you bought it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, mom's a, okay, so dad, chiropractor. Is he one of the, like, I can cure the common cold by cracking your back chiropractor?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So how did you come up with the down payment for that one? How close were we? How close were we away from the revenue on this one? And did you lever? Did you start levering? At what point? I'll get to that. How did you buy the second one?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
That, that, that, that, what you just said is the difference. That, that is the line that most people that will never, never have an immense amount of success are willing to travel over because they're not willing to do, they're not willing to take the step back in the eyes of their peers that is required to take 10 steps forward.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You know what I'm talking about. There's the voodoo chiropractors with the gongs and stuff, and then there's the, let me just straighten you out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
yeah so listen dude i mean look if you learn nothing else from this today i mean you're gonna see where this story lands which is wild how much oh how much how big this portfolio is and they were driving uber to make it happen like shit like it doesn't happen by accident no so so he's swan is probably driving uber you saved your money bought the second one
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I was like, I was going to say, what was the point? What was the goal of the real estate license? Kick the commissions on the deals. We buy back into the deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. Like, Oh, you have the flu. I can crack your back and it can make you better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So you got your real estate. I've never heard this. I've dealt with thousands of agents. I got my license because my husband was embarrassing me. Now look, my wife does a lot of what she does because I'm embarrassing, but she's never kind of never taken it that far. Maybe I've never taken it that far. Maybe I need to take it further. I don't know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
My wife, my wife is going to get an MBA because I'm annoying. I love the way this is working. I could be annoying. I have no problem doing it. So you guys get the second one in the Smokies. Now, talk to me about managing that remote, that first property remote. Walk me through that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So growing up, growing up where you were, did you, I mean, obviously dad's a doctor. That's cool. Mom's there, which I love that. It was mom, like the peanut butter and jelly mom, or like all the kids would come to your house and she would, she was like, was she that mom?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Do you have electric locks back then?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
No, no, no, no, no. So so at what point did you say, OK, we've got our two and you went from, you know, we're doing this to we're scaling this. And what at what point what did that decision look like and what was that process?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You're buying where people actually plan vacations.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Well, there's going to be a lot of opportunity, I think, in the multifamily side because the syndicated deals are smashing into walls. Yeah. They are just, I mean, those guys that, I know a lot of deal syndicators that were flying pretty high a couple of years ago that I haven't seen them anywhere because their deals are falling apart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So I think there's going to be some, I think rates are going to need to get below six to make those deals work, but they're going to have to do something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
2008. Well, I think for the residential market overall, I'm talking about multifamily, but in residential and tell me, my number on residential market is five, five. That's my number. What I mean by that is I think that when the rates, now that we're far enough away from the 3% rates, we're far enough away from it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And when rates tip back to five, five, when they hit there, I think people that have a three, one, five rate are going to swallow a five, five rate. They're not swallowing seven. If they're in a house, they're like, I really need a bigger house, but My interest rate is 3%, right? I think that's the number that eases that up, that feeds inventory to the market, that makes things go. What says you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Right now- Well, I'm talking about what's going to motivate people to sell the houses they're in and go off and look at other things. Because that's the problem is we've got those golden handcuffs of just eliminating the inventory.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Which is the problem.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. So here's an interesting question though. Cause I always kind of think about this with my daughter, right? Cause my wife, thank God is the stay at home mom as well. So we get to do that. It's what we do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Oh no, for sure. I mean, when you look at, we advise clients all the time, it's like fishing, right? Like right now there's not a lot of boats on the water, so it's easy to catch big fish. But if you wait till rates come around, everybody's waiting for that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Everybody's waiting for that. I mean, granted- if you're trying to do, you know, burr properties into long-term, you know, rentals, it's challenging to get them to cashflow. Like right now, stuff we're trying to acquire, if I can just break it even right now, I'm fine. Cause I'll ride the appreciation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I believe in, especially in this market, I believe in it based on the growth of Las Vegas and what's happening. But yeah, cashflow, you know, buying a cash flowing asset in Vegas on a burr strategy is damn near impossible right now. It just, it's, it's just impossible. So what point did you look? Cause obviously you're learning as you're doing deals.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
What percentage of your education would you say, like you went to YouTube and figured it out? What percentage of it was school of hard knocks from getting smashed around in these deals?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
decided we wanted to do when we had kids and she wanted to be the peanut butter jelly mom do you think that you being a woman having mom as a homemaker which is obviously a hard job i'm not taking anything away from it but that being her homemaker do you think how do you think that affected you as a daughter growing up in that type of world vision as far as you kind of went the other way and became power entrepreneur so did that affect you or or anything like that
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Rust belt garbage. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. See, I went the other way. I went the other way on that. I learned to stay closer to the median price, not the luxury stuff. I mean, last year when the interest rates hard turned on us in 2022, at the end of 2022 and the rates shot, right? I was sitting on probably close to 12 million in luxury flips. Wow. And it wasn't a bunch of houses. It was a bunch of square feet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It was a bunch of big houses. And yeah, and when the interest rates turned and everything stopped, we just got, I mean, the juice just demolished all those deals. And it took a big hit. And you know, that's real estate investing. I always say, if you don't have a big loss sometimes, you're not entrepreneuring enough. You're not entrepreneuring hard enough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
What's the biggest hit you've ever taken?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It was that one?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Man, is it... Tell me about a time through this, because you did something kind of interesting too, right? So you came out of the box doing something that normally takes people a lot. It's a hump to get over. Most people, when they start investing in real estate, even on a small scale, they want to buy everything in the market they're in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's a lot for them to say, how am I going to buy a property across the country? How am I going to buy a property that's 800 miles away from me? That's something people normally work up to, but you came out of the box swinging with that. Yeah. So did you guys even think about that? Do you realize that's an anomaly with you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yep. That's always my comeback too. It's like literally if there's a leak, are you going to go fix it or are you going to call a plumber?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. So you mentioned earlier that you own properties in just a vacation markets. What markets do you have and what makes a good vacation market for you? Is it a place you got to like to go or is it a place where you just, what do you look at?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Well, I want to talk about 30A in particular because you own a bunch of properties there, and I love that area. My family, we spend a week there every year. But I also know that, you know, being from Florida, growing up there, you have a little issue in that part of the world called hurricanes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Like, for example, Mexico Beach got leveled, what was it, three years ago?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Oh, my God, is that far? No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Good Lord. 2019 top flight. You blink, man. Yeah. I had friends that had houses in Mexico beach that got leveled. Um, You know, when it comes to that and the new the new laws, because now you have a roofing issue where you have to have your roof redone every so often in Florida to get insurance.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And, you know, you look at what just happened in Southern California with the fires and insurance companies. I mean, how much of how much of how much of the natural disaster potential do you pencil into these decisions where you're doing this stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
There's always something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
except in vegas baby it's just hot here that's it we have no natural disasters here yeah you know it's it's funny you talk about how expensive it is on 30a everybody that ever bitches about the price of food in like football stadiums when they go i'm like bro go buy a snow cone from the from the snow cone truck it's east side and you come back and tell me how expensive that oh yeah i'll go out to eat like just me and my six-year-old daughter and have like two appetizers
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Oh, dude, my kids, my kids that ride the bikes in those food trucks and like, like I got to fill out a credit app. Wait, wait, wait, what do you know? I don't do that. It's crazy. It's insanely expensive, but, but that's wild. But you wrote this book. I want to talk about the book. Okay. All right. This one short term now question. Cause I was a little confused with this. You have to forgive me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay. But, but my podcast affiliate, my podcast associate that booked you on the show today is also my 16 year old son. So sometimes some of the notes I get are a little bit incorrect. Okay. So it's fine. Um, The book, Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth, that one's out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, cool. So you have another one coming out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
All right, well, let's talk about this one first.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So what inspired you to write a book?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Love that. Bearded Brandon, man. He's a convincing dude, isn't he? Yes, yes, he is. Such a good dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. Cause that, that's your, that's your niche. We didn't talk about that. I'm sorry. That was your niche. When you got into real estate was all of a sudden like, not only am I doing this for myself, but I can help other people do the same thing. I've got the blueprint, I got the plan. And that became very, very attractive to investors. Cause I'm sure you're like a one-stop shop.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's not just like, let me buy the house. It's we're going to set the whole thing up for you. Is that part of the process for you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Better yet, there's a me right here. Let's do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's like a boot camp?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Don't people find him abrasive? They just, no, I'm kidding. Luke, if you listen to this man, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, cool. So yeah, he's better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
He's learned.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I'm going to say this. If Luke is dealing with an army of cleaners and handymen nationwide, needs to be a little abrasive. He's built for that. You gotta be a little assertive in that situation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah, because you don't have to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
He's the enforcer, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
He's the guy that stands behind you and whatever you say just goes... Yeah. It's scary enough that they just do it. I love this. It's a great partnership.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's a good job. Keep going. So not Manning Mondays.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Management Mondays. That's what it is. So I love that as a service. It's a bootcamp. Do you ever let prospective clients go through that just to get a taste? Or is it like you got to buy a ticket if you want to get on the road?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Cause for you, the long-term value is let me make, let me show you how to make money here because these are repeat customers, which is, you know, in real estate or repeat customers every seven years, these are people that can buy something as they're scaling up and being profitable. So good business model. Good for you. Look how smart that is, man. Bam.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Yeah. I love that. That's, that's, that's great. So the new book that's coming out, what's the new book?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I love it. So is this something that... So... should people start here before they start talking to you? Is this like a, you know, cause like I have stuff with me with, with, with not necessarily clients, but more like with agents. I'm like, okay, you need to go through this and then you'll, you'll speak the same language I speak. And then we can talk.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Is that like something you advise people to do your clients when they like, if they come on, are you going to use this as a leader for them? Are you like, let me send this to you as a gift? Are you going to, I mean, how are you going to utilize this? Obviously it's, it's lovely to educate people, but in your, the course of your business, how are you going to use this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Schmucks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Class of Wednesday. You never know what you're going to get on the authority of this. All right. Well, I love it, dude. That's 250 doors in five years. That's amazing growth. And obviously you are tenacious and hats off to you and abrasive Luke for getting it done. That's amazing. If they want to find you, connect with you, learn more about this, buy the book. How do they find you, Avery?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Where's the best place?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I love it. Well, dude, Avery, it was such a pleasure to meet you today. I'm so in awe of your success. It's awesome. If you're ever back in Vegas, you feel free to stop back through.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Guys, listen, man, if that doesn't get you fired up and inspired to do things, I mean, look, take some chances with your life. Do some things. Take steps back to take steps forward. Nobody's coming to save you, man. It's on you to get there. See you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
welcome back to the program everybody and again the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be and today in the studio ladies and gentlemen i've got somebody that has taken the short-term rental niche to a beast mode level not just a accomplishing for herself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Not me. When they were sick, I was like, you need to take this one. Well, mine is... That'll come in when we need to talk about business advice, but us, yeah, wiping noses is never... Oh, no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Dude, is there anything better than staying home from school, eating chicken noodle soup out of the can and watching Price is Right? Is there anything better than that? It's pretty good. No, it's the best. It's just the best. So... So obviously you were a good student because you went to Texas and did that. What was the first hustle you had as a kid?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Like, were you, were you, were you aware of money at an early age? Is that something that was, you were driven by that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I was thinking horse. I was immediately going equestrian with that. And no, it was escape. I want to escape.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I can commiserate my town of, see, you grew up in a college town. I grew up 42 minutes from a college town. So it was like 8,000 people in my own town. So I could, I completely like, like completely understand that feeling of, I want to get out of here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So I love that. Let's talk about that. So what'd you play soccer?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, cool. See, I dig that because you know, youth sports for me you know, I love it. Cause my biggest fear is always raising worthless children. Like it's my biggest fear in life, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Like I don't like, well spiders too, but other than that, I don't, I'm not scared of a lot, but you know, when you have, when you're a fluid and you want your kids to, you know, like experience nice things with you, especially when we travel and do things like that. I mean, I don't stay at the holiday end motel and you're, you're scared. Your kids are going to kind of wake up and be worthless.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And I always found that When kids are affluent, they don't have a lot of adversity. And I love sports as a way to build artificial adversity because it builds grit. Was that something that you were drawn to or your parents really pushed you into and what you kind of felt developed a love for it? What was that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I'm talking about somebody that owns 250 years or has acquired that with her and her investors and just has taken that Airbnb game to the next level. She is the author of the bestselling book, Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth. She's the host of her own podcast called the Short-Term Rental Podcast with over 1 million downloads. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Avery Carl.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You know, out of the frying pan. You're like, no, I already lived in this town. I don't want to do this again. It was, it's just so interesting that would, especially when you, when you achieve, you know, a D one scholarship like that, at that level, I had Dave risky on the program a couple of weeks ago. He's spent 11 years in major leagues and both his kids are in college on D one scholarships.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And it was really interesting to hear from his perspective, how much you push, how much, how much you lay back to, to reach that level of,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
of of skill because i mean look there's athletic ability obviously you have to be born with but a lot of that's a lot of it's work and to try to get a kid you know especially in this day and age of distraction yeah when the world's entertainment is at your fingertips in your bed and you know you can play grand theft auto and mug people until three o'clock in the morning it's hard to get a kid to be that interested in anything so i think that's that says a lot about
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
it's interesting that your dad was able to navigate that with you in a way that you don't look back at what he did at all and say you pushed. Cause like Dave, he'd say, my kids would say I was,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
dick they say they were i was too hard about it but uh so that's you know that that's really interesting so the soccer career was going well was doing that you got through school in soccer did you have any aspirations to do anything after that with soccer do you know that was going to kind of be the end was there a goal for like the olympic team any of that stuff or was that just i'm gonna get through school this is good or did you get to college and lose your mind a little bit
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So it was perfect. So wait, so you're, okay, you're a D1 athlete in college and you're also playing in a band?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
How would that work out?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So soccer was the ticket, but the music was the passion. You thought that's where you were going. That's what you wanted to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Did your bag get signed by a label? Did you get signed by a label?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Hey, thanks for having me. It's like, man, like there's a sparkler or something going off with that intro. Fireworks are pow, something going on with that. So let's get started with you, man, because, you know, obviously you are very driven in what you do. You don't reach this type of success without being driven. So talk to me about, I always love the nature versus nurture kind of conversation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, cool. Look, man, I love it. Back in the early 2000s, I had a live music venue in Atlanta that we had just randomly just a bunch of people that wound up becoming very famous, used to play there on the regular, and it was always my greatest joy to be friends with the guys in the band, especially after they made it big. It's still my greatest joy to be able to go to that stuff. It's great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
It's great. Um, when did you move to Nashville?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
And what was the gig?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Anyway, you were playing punk. This is, you were like knee deep in this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I love it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I got to ask real quick. I got to ask one question. What was the look in your punk rock day? What was the look?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay, cool. Nothing, nothing too crazy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You didn't get any, obviously you didn't get any tattoos where the judge can see them. Cause I can't, nothing too crazy. Okay, cool. All right, good. All right, there you go. All right, right on. So you went to New York to play, continue to play punk rock. That must've been culture shock. Even coming from Austin to go to New York.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You're like my neighbors looking at me like they're hungry. This is not cool. I don't like this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Very cool. That's awesome. So Where did you live in Nashville?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Right on. Yeah. Again, another great, great city that I love. Some good friends of mine have a festival every year called the Pilgrimage Festival, which is in September, which is awesome. Love it. It's great. They're in, not Parker, not Brentwood, south of Nashville. Everybody lives there. All the rock stars live there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Franklin. Franklin, Tennessee. Greatest downtown of any small town. It's so funny, dude, coming from, you probably experienced some of this too, because you come from this small town and all your whole life, all you want to do is get away from it. And then when you go to like a small town as an adult now for living in these big places, you're just like, oh my God, it's so quaint. I love this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I can live here. When in reality, if you lived there in like five minutes, you'd be like, why did I move here?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
I miss everything, everything about it. So you're in Nashville and you got a job in the biz. What was the job?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Okay. And how long did you do that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So tell me about you growing up, man. Tell me about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
That's where I was headed with this next.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
Your pathway to it. It's so funny because anybody that's ever a high-level entrepreneur, we're all chronically unemployable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
You're the worst employee. Although I will say personally, like a fun fact, right? I've been fired in my life by two people. One of which was the AM room service manager at the Ramada Inn in Tallahassee, Florida. Fuck you, Jeff. I so forgot you. And the second one is about to be the 47th president of the United States. That's the only two people that have ever fired me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Punk Rock to Real Estate: Avery Carl's Journey to Short-Term Rental Success
So good company for you, Jeff, I guess. Still haven't forgotten about it. It wasn't my fault. Anyway, so yeah, at some point you just look around and say, God, I'm just a terrible employee.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I haven't been able to identify, but he has a very, very interesting way of weaving in really big words and complex things, but making it simple. Like, oh my gosh, I've never heard that word before. But I know what it means. But I know what it means, and I know what he meant. And Jordan Peterson has done an incredible job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, I mean, I have an eight and a six year old and, and they, you know, Thank God that they have, they have some YouTube people that they follow and a couple of clients of ours and stuff that the content's good. And it's not like, you know, crazy in your face, TikTok content all day. And I'll let them watch 30 minutes of that a day or something like that. But that's your client dad.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And we said, okay, we can make that happen. And I was like, okay, wait a second. Who's that guy? Who's this dude that's talking about you want a million followers that are highly engaged? I can make that happen. I'm like, this is for me. It's like I don't just look at the dancing chimps on the stage. I want to see the man behind the curtain. I want to see the Wizard of Oz.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I'm like, okay. You can watch it, right? But, but, but I think, I think that like the attention span is lower. We need to capture attention quicker. It becomes this, like we're in an attention economy. And so I think that we need to, you need to find what you're doing. Find your core content pillars.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like for, I want to tie it back to the example because it's an easy one that we can all have reference to. In Liver King, he was working out twice a day and he was eating crazy food every meal. He wasn't eating what we were giving him to eat on screen, but we were like, we can really, really lean into this. And then how do we lean into this? And then how do we shoot it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then where do we get it distributed? But it was something that was natural and organic. We needed to present it in a really, really compelling way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think that because it takes so long to see success with content and branding from a personal side, I mean, hey, you can have amazing press events happen and you get a little bump, but like consistency in it, it has to be something that you're doing. It can't be fabricated. It has to be authentic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And as long as that's happening, there's tons of ways to slice and dice a strategy to make it, and content strategy, social strategy, to make it unique, yet still capturing waves of trends, right? Recent trend right now, this big guy blew up on Instagram and he put in work, Ashton Hall, get ready with me routines.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Everybody on the internet is dubbing him in parody and we pour the Saratoga water in the ice thing and shove the face in. But that became a viral phenomenon. And so if you would have caught that trend early, You could have done a really compelling video just trend jacking that and seeing view just from people looking and recognizing that setup in a video.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, but doesn't that dilute your authenticity like dreadfully? But that is a part of the strategy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Because I think that now, obviously, hey, you're going to have a professional business person not dumping their head into a... For fitness and other entertainment, looking for content ideas, riding these trends strategically is a part of the strategy. But I think it's- So for long-term success, you have to do part of that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, I mean, it's not stealing somebody else's idea, but it's like, what are people interested in and what is currently getting attention? It's the same thing. Now, if we want to take an escaping the drift analogy, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You could be talking about how people are wavering and paralysis by analysis and all of this stuff, but you have to bring it into current two-day situations and things we're dealing with to be able to make it relatable. I think the same thing happens on social. The way that we can tell a story and the way we can capture attention is how do we hook them in the first three seconds?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, let's give them something they recognize. Let's give them something they're used to, and then we can take them on our own journey.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
part of it is getting their attention i guess we do that to a certain extent here yeah because like i've already told my staff like if you're listening to this right now this got recorded a couple hours ago this is going up today i love it yeah because the documentary just came out we've got to go today because that's what people have eyeballs on it so i'd rather i'd rather be a i'd
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
right now yeah yeah i'm not putting you in the stack for four weeks from now because who knows how that documentary is gonna age yeah go with today yeah and you you said your philosophy is something interesting paralysis by analysis right and just like like just move right um fail forward um i think i think a lot of people myself included at times i i think you know social world is a scary world you're going to be putting content out there some something you might not be comfortable doing yeah um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
We say, Hey, no one sees it. Right. I have like 2000 followers or something. Yeah. No one sees my content. And if I wanted to test something, I could test it and I could take it down and I could retest it and I could post it 10 times with different hooks and I could just go. Yeah. And just go and go and just get out there and do it. Because I think that on top of just, you know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I want to see the guy pulling the strings, making things happen. So I start Googling this cat. And my wife sees me pick up my phone and she's like, are you bored? Like, can we turn this off? Because she wasn't that into it. I was like, no, no, no, no. I'm just looking up this dude because this dude's obviously got something. And I Google him and I'd redo some research. I'm like, cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
having a good strategy. It's, I could, I could write you the best script or somebody never been on such the best script in the world and have the best strategy. If it doesn't get delivered authentically and like somebody can actually look like natural, then it's not going to work. So then it's not that that script didn't work. Yeah. There are multiple components that, that come into this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So, so how do, how do we, how do we, how do we round this thing out and, and, and work on all of the components so that like, just get reps in some, when we sign a client, we say, Hey, um, We want you. We're going to send you content ideas. We're going to send you scripts. You're going to send us scripts. You're just going to start shooting in front of content and send it to the team.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And we barely even watch it. We will have some of our strategists watch it to give them feedback. We just need to get them to send a video consistently to us every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
so that they can see themselves on camera, they can listen to how they talk, they can shut their eyes, listen to themselves, they can shut eyes and ears and read their words in a script and go through all of the steps to say, how do I look? How do I sound? What am I saying? And then how do we hone that in so that when we actually come out with a strategy and we actually come out and start pushing,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think, I think people don't understand how difficult that is for people that have never done it. You know, some of my great friends are the guys that are V shred and Vin St. Who is everywhere online.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Now you, you know, I asked my, you ask him what's the heart, what was the hardest part in the early days of building V shred once you got traction and nickel say, dude, I would sit there with Vin with our VSL copy and, And he would read it, and I'd say, again. And he'd read it, and I'd say, again, again, again, until he was just blown in the face because he goes, it wasn't good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
He goes, now the dude is amazing. But when we first started getting him over that hump, it took so much work. But people see him come rolling down like, hey, it's Vin from Beach Red, blah, blah. And it's like, he's just such a natural at it. Well, no, that's a skill that's learned. He earned that skill through reps.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It's crazy. And, you know, I think that's why I think the biggest thing, coming off the top of the head, be able to format. So authenticity, that's where it comes from. It's the same thing with public speaking, right? You get up on a stage, you talk about something you know inside and out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Most of the time, I remember in college, we had to get up in high school, whatever, public speaking, when you're taking and learning how to put together a presentation. Nine times out of 10, those things are, you're talking about something you're not passionate about. So I remember when I was in college, I talked about counting cards. I was passionate about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I was like, hey, I'm going to teach the class how to count cards.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Not that he does that here in Las Vegas, MGM executives that may be listening. Not happened. Does not happen. It was how he wishes he could count cards, not count cards.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Keep going. Exactly, exactly. But no, I got up and I was passionate about it. didn't matter. Like fears go away. You're passionate about something you could talk now. Okay. So I'm passionate about something I could talk. Then once you're passionate, like comfortable talking, then let's work on the formatting. Then let's, so, so you can, so like speaking is second nature about the topic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I'm like, I need to talk to this guy at some point. The very next morning, I get a text message from somebody that knows this guy that was on the screen and said, hey, are you recording a podcast on Tuesday by chance? Because this guy is going to be in Vegas and wants to be on your podcast. I was like, I'm in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Now I can think about, wait, I could have said that better to capture someone's attention better in the first few seconds. I could have built the story arc a little differently. Let me go back here. Let me tease it and let me come back to this because I know that I need to keep them till the end where the payoff or call to action is. And I need to keep them that long.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And it is an iterative and generative process. And it takes time. And I think like, you know, people will see a success story or any success story and say, I want that. And like a million followers. And I'm like, the amount of dedication... and time in, and resources that takes to get there. It's wild. Well, and it can happen. It can happen for anybody. But it's an absolute commitment.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think people that are committed to any craft can do it. And there's a science to success. There's a science and an art to it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think that was one of the weirdest things that I think he said in that documentary when he's like, I'll take 100 takes for a story. I'm like, bro, like, I mean, I'm pretty good at this, but dude, a hundred takes. I mean, are you that bad at this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, I mean, you can go back and look. I don't know what's up on it anymore, but we would often go back. We launched, I remember this because it was either the day before or day after my birthday. My birthday is August 17th. And we didn't launch his Instagram or his socials. We launched TikTok before we launched Instagram. And he didn't even know about TikTok.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
We built TikTok to a million followers before he even knew how to TikTok. And we just said, hey. And we just said, oh, by the way, we built your TikTok up. But I think we launched it either the 16th or the 18th.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
in february to the day we got a million followers on instagram that didn't count all the other platforms that was the goal million followers on instagram in six or seven months we did it in four or five i think uh to the day and um and but but like in the very beginning you can go back to the to the early videos and he was horrible on camera like, like very uncomfortable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, I don't know what to do with my hands. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like doing it and, and, but Hey, he got up every day and said, good morning primals. I put my feet on the earth and I, you know, stay anchored, grounded to the earth. And he had the same thing every day. People knew what to wake up to. He had a motivating message and he was changing lives and, and showing up every day as anything in life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It is so, it's It's the same thing. People think there's some secret formula to success or social. It's the same thing that needs success in every other realm of our life. Show up. You got to show up every day. Every day. And you're going to get 1% 1DS stands for one degree shift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I told that story about, I told the guy the story that I just told you, and I said, I'm in. So, ladies and gentlemen, we are very lucky. Welcome to the program, The Wizard of Oz Behind the Lever King. This is... is the brains at the 1DS Collective. This is John Hyland. John, what's up, man? Thank you, man. What an intro. Thanks for joining us. Well, I got to tell a story, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
that is the absolute ethos of everything we do because you know one degree shift over time equals a great disparity sure and and i think and i think that that we we try to just get incrementally better every single day and when we look back you know major improvements efficiencies effectiveness and all of this stuff has happened we work that into our strategy test often
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
go hard and commit to it and successful so do you think most of the good content out there is scripted versus just off the cuff how much of it's scripted i mean i'm just if you really want to do good at this do well do good if you're going to do well with this how much like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
how much preparation should you be scripting everything should you be running this through a chat gpt to try to say is this got a good hook on it i mean what should you be doing if you're the i mean i could ask you right now how to how to start a real estate company how to start a title company how to start a loan company you can say like oh where do we start yeah i could give you the floor for two hours and you just go yeah then you think like wait a second i have somebody that's never been involved with real estate before
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I need to go back and say, wait a second, I could have talked about and formatted this story a little better so I could, it's influence, right? And so it's like, wait a second, I need to be able to frame, reframe, revisit, introduce things, touch on them, build a backstory. It's the entire thing of like, if you were to put a speech together to a 10,000 person audience on building a brokerage,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You understand what is the audience thinking about this thing. I use these examples because I think it matters, because I think that it's not one size fits all. Somebody very educated on something might just need help formatting and making it compelling. might be changing the background.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Might be, you know, them, they wear horrible clothes that they've had for 20 years and they look like a ragamuffin on screen, right? Like how do we look at all of it and say, like, we are presenting something. Now there's different branding and different things. And we're presenting something to the world that has to be, I say, holistic, like W-H-O-L, and it all needs to be tied together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, it needs to be tied together and buttoned up. So when you say script, like somebody could rip, I could ask, if somebody's not passionate about it, yeah. Or if they're super scared, yes, we'll write you a script. Let's read off a script. Try not to read off a script. Try to like say, hey, I know enough about this. I've studied enough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think that's another thing, you know, put time and effort into like studying your craft.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Right. Because if you're looking at a script for the first time, it's showing up, you're going to need a script to read off of. But if you've read it a hundred times, you need talking points and keywords.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
What's this? It's the same with like, if you're, if you're making calls right in the, in the sales industry, if you're reading a script, it's painfully obvious.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You're not getting anywhere. Yeah. And so it's like talking points. Right. And then, you know, be like anchor man. Right. Exactly. But no, I think that with everything, it just takes time. I think if you don't know what to say and when that camera turns on, you freeze. Then yeah, write a script. Ease into it. You'll probably record... 50, 100 pieces of content before you ever post anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And it's just like, but go until you get a cadence and test it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think as someone that has tried and failed personally, and I'll admit that, you know, we do very well in the podcast space. Our YouTube sucks. It just does. Just, I don't know why. It just does. Probably because it just doesn't have enough effort leaning into it. I've never been able to crack TikTok. I just cannot figure that thing out at all. So we just barely do anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You got to sink them in. You got to grab the attention.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I just, we're posting the same thing. what let's go through each media channel and how you become omnipresent. Cause you guys are good at being omnipresent everywhere. So I just want to talk about, in your opinion, obviously we don't have to go too deep in it, but I just want to get like what works for each channel.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
If I'm out there trying to make content for each channel, let's just do the basics. We'll do Tik TOK. We'll do Instagram. We'll do X and then we'll do YouTube. Yeah. What works for each one?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah. You know, the doc is funny. I got to see my parts. I think it morphed to when I got to see the cut, but it was very, very interesting to see how this stuff unfolded. I've been getting texts from all over the place saying, Holy hell. The same response you've had. It's been a wild week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, I mean, I think, I think, um, And can you recycle the content? Well, yeah. The biggest thing is to ask like, where are people viewing this? Right. Like, because I would imagine Instagram, like most X, Instagram, Tik TOK are all viewed when you have 20 minute break at work or when you want to escape. Yeah. So that needs to be entertaining. Yeah. called edutainment, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like how can you just, how can you create something? It can't be dense. It has to be entertaining because somebody's sitting somewhere that got their lunch break, sitting eating their lunch and they're scrolling. They wanna stop and they wanna laugh and escape, right? Typically. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then it's like, OK, well, you know, then then on X, you have a little bit more honed in niches where, you know, a lot of crypto communities on their finance and business. And like you have all of this stuff where, you know, there's really, really engaging conversation. Wasn't very video centric. Obviously, now they're introducing video in a major way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And well, they have been for a while, but really focusing on it. And then TikTok was a younger platform, right? That was, that was bit dance. And that was musically before it was TikTok. And, and that was just, you know, having songs and dancers. We, we work with musically early days cause we had, you know, dance and dance stuff, launch songs, record for record labels on musically.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, and, and, but I think it matters that so, so, you know, somebody has a, you have to make it entertaining, light and engaging. And that's where the magic of the strategy comes in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Because I think that, you know, though it is scientific that there's structures to content that works, there's ways of viewing things, there's ways of presenting things, there's ways of shooting things, there's ways of editing things. There's a bunch of like just technical knowledge and best practices. There's also a magic of understanding, you know, what do we have here, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It's like looking at a kitchen table of a bunch of ingredients and, you know, and saying, I can make plenty of different dishes here, but like, I know, hey, these people haven't eaten all day. I'm making pasta for them, right? Or I don't know what it is. But you know what I mean?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like, and like in understanding the different audiences and the different platforms and saying, you know, I, I, I need to, so YouTube, for instance, a lot more long form where I believe you can go deep on things, but it's also be engaging. And, and I think that people, people, if they're going to open up YouTube to consume content, they plan on or intend to sit there for a little while.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
We watch YouTube on our TV, right? And I think you're not pulling up TikTok or Instagram on TV. So I think that that lends itself to more, but the same capture attention, create intrigue still happens the whole thing. Podcast is a very, very laid back atmosphere where you can open it in any way, shape or form.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
If you have a good platform, you have a good guest and you have something compelling to talk about, they're listening to it in the car for an hour drive. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You know what's funny, man? When I first got into this, I did research and I got to meet some guys that were very good in the space, like really good in the space. And they all kind of said the same thing. They said it's very difficult to move people from podcasts to the other mediums because they're just podcasts. People are podcast people and they don't necessarily want to do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So let's talk. I don't want to talk just specific about liver King, but obviously there's some magic there. So is this, he came to you and said, I want a million followers. I want a million engaged followers. Not just, not just BS where you'd buy the bots from China. He wanted real engagement. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Now, I don't know how much of that is still true today because I think people are consuming things over every medium. But It just it's always been a little bit of a challenge. Now, my next question is this, because this is we're going to get into some stuff that I wrestle with in this space. And I'm curious what you think about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So what says you as a guy that is is the guy behind the guy that gets millions of views and captures so much attention and 30 second increments? Do you think, do you wrestle at all with the morality of the potential damage for doing to the attention span of kids that we talked about? And do you think you are contributing in some way to the dumbing down of America?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Because I wrestle with this shit. Yeah, it's an amazing question. Yeah, I think it's interesting, right? Because marketing is that in itself, right? And we are a marketing entity and ecosystem, right? Um, mostly. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think as attention spans lesson and which one came first, right. Right. Who knows? Um, but, but I, I, I, I, I've thought about that a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, I probably lose a lot more sleep if I thought about it the way you're making me think about it. But I think, you know what the biggest thing for me is, is that, is that integrity and, and, you know, if, if, there's a difference between like manipulation and influence. I think that in the early days of the liver King message and what he really, really stood for and was very empowering.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, and that's why we got behind it to answer like me. Do I, I don't, we demand to work with people that are doing good and we don't have like or market companies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
There's no nonsense. There's no island boys running through your... You're not helping those guys jump around and do anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
No nonsense. We'll fire clients like that. Yeah. And because... And that's essentially what happens over a long term and never... Very, very grateful and... anybody that trusts us and clients and stuff, but, but, but, you know, there's a certain line where I say, Hey, no, so I don't feel that because I'm not, we're not pushing things that are bad for people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, and now, now how we get their attention could be a topic of your conversation of like, you're attributing to the attention span of our young people. And I, I, I get that. I think, um, you know, the platforms in which I've doing a really, really good job of messing our kids up. If you could say that of, of the way they present things, the way you scroll,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
infinite like insatiable appetites for content yeah um yeah a lot of the streaming partners like netflix where you watch a doc and all this they can't acquire content enough because people just have a ravenous appetite for it and and and so and so i think that um you know people want to consume content um i i think uh with the amount of clients we have we're mainly in health and wellness.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And that's something that you guys obviously do because you made it happen for him and he's proof positive that he can be done. So how do you get, into that let's go back a little bit before we start talking let's talk about john highland what did you grow up doing what did you like how did you get into this
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Mainly we work in some other verticals have had experience of real estate and some partners of mine and, and some different things. But I think essentially, I think if I'm, if I'm, I will team up one DS, our group will team up with people who are doing well. Well, I think there there's hope for the space, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Cause you look at guys, cause you think that's kind of what I wrestle with. It's like, dude, I'm trying to put this content out that helps people, but it's not me jumping around, you know, with a tiger in here, you know, and it's just, it's not that right. So yeah, how do you make it engaging where you can still get the message across?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And you see people like, like Jordan Peterson, that I've had no problem capturing a tremendous amount of quick, you know, quick, whether you agree with this politics or not, the dude's really smart and makes a lot of great points and is engaging people. through his content in a way that I think inspires other smart people to try to follow in that footsteps.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So Jordan Peterson, did you listen to his Rogan? The recent one? No, not the recent one. He's very intriguing. Jordan Peterson does a really, really good job of taking things that all of us are going through And talking about it, you trust him. He's built that trust.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And he says it, he has, I haven't, now that you say it, I haven't been able to identify, but he has a very, very interesting way of weaving in really big words and complex things, but making it simple. Like, oh my gosh, I just understood. I've never heard that word before. But I know what it means. But I know what it means. And I know what he meant. And Jordan Peterson has done an incredible job.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Credentials, he's being authentic. He's a counselor and psychologist for a very long time, still maybe is practicing. And he did a really good job of distilling this and talking to things that people were going through every day and giving really sound psychology advice to people going through relationship issues and issues in life, mental health issues.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And so he caught on because it resonated and related to a lot of people. And he took what is typically a complex. You're teaching psychology at Harvard. I mean, like you're not talking about like a husband and wife getting in a fight. You're talking about, you know, deep stuff and the science behind it. But he's done a really, really good job of putting stuff in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
A lot of influencers in the same thing. Leaders in their space, they found a really, really good way to simplify the brand and, you know, give people what they're searching for.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, I think, you know, I, a serial entrepreneur, you know, grew up in Florida as we were talking about. God bless. Yeah. And, you know, small beach town, wanted to get out. My grandparents' parents, all very business savvy. And I was saying, you know, I need to get out of sleepy beach town. This is where I'm going to retire.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, let's talk about the flip side of that coin, which is the... Now what I've seen, and I, and I think, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of blowback coming to it now, but the, the, the entrepreneur bro is what I like to call him and friends with some of these dudes. I get it, whatever, but you're starting to see some of these guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like for example, there's a dude, Jeremiah bull Evans that just got sentenced to nine years in prison for, you know, massive Ponzi scheme for his embezzlement thing for real estate. And, you know, you're seeing these guys, social media made them huge. And then there's these, you know, invest with me coaching program stuff that with not a lot of substance behind them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So the eyes go wide for John if you're not watching this. So my first question is. Like as somebody that puts out and was in charge of so much content, obviously you guys don't deal with stuff like this because you just talked about the level of integrity you have with what you do. But how do you like, how am I trying to say this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like if you're someone that watches a lot of content, how do you not get duped?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, it's a really, really good question. I mean, it's like what, every time you watch finance advice, they say do your own research, right? I don't think enough people do that. I think people are good at content and they understand the scientific method behind it. And I think they can get attention.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And typically people, you know, if they look up to somebody or they see them somewhere, you know, and they're like, Oh my gosh, I saw that. And you saw that. And I, Oh my gosh, let me listen to this. Let me buy this. They run you through a funnel. Yeah. They run you through a funnel.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, um, and then all of a sudden, you, you know, you end up giving this person a hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, 5,000 bucks, 10,000 bucks. Um, and it's, it's wild. Um, Yeah. There's a ton of that out there. I think there's also a lot of people that have really, really good stuff that don't get the attention.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, and, and, and so, but, but anyway, to what you said, I know one, no, but, but to what you said, man, I, I, I agree completely. Um, you know, it's, it's, um, it's, it's tough. Do you want research? You know, you know, anybody would ever ask me business advice or anything. And I said, just Google it. Like I, So many of these scammers, they get caught.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I said, I'll read a story or listen to a piece of content, and I'll go Google their name. Yeah, it's all out there. Better Business Bureau, this, lawsuits. U.S. government versus. United States of America versus. And these people are signing a contract, paying somebody, getting buyer's remorse. Googling and seeing it after. And then that Google before, but, but you know what I mean?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like, like, I think, I think that just got to use our heads and, and, you know, you know, I, I am very conscious of what I read, what I watch and,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
um because i i believe you know ingest and what we ingest matters subconsciously yeah and and so well why am i so worried about what they put in their mouth you need to be far more worried about what you put in your head exactly exactly i my follower list is very curated that I follow, or even newsletters I subscribe to, all of this stuff. And I don't read fiction.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I moved to New York, pursued some different things there, had fun for a few years. And then I had an opportunity to come to, you know, LA and put together a deal to create like the millennial Tony Robbins self-help program.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I just, I don't resonate with it. I like psychology and business. And so, you know, I think that I filter that stuff out. I see something very compelling and I do a ton of research. And I think people should do the same.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, and I think also when you're listening to these guys online, like you talked about earlier, and it's why I, I do not do the, I guess I have to in some way, but I don't like doing the news kind of viral stuff. Like if somebody talks about a certain topic and it takes off, right. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
The reason I'll do that is because it's almost like you make a copy of a copy and it's a little worse and you make a copy of that copy and it's a little worse and a little copy of that copy and all of a sudden you kind of can't read it. And there's so much of this information being disseminated online.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It doesn't even make any sense by the time this guy is regurgitated at five times down the line. It's just so far-fetched.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
There's been times when me and my, instead of breathing six breaths, as John Asheroff would say, taking six before I did it, there's been times when I have called out financial gurus online that want to prognosticate about the real estate market, where I've said, dude, I'll put $10,000 in an escrow account right now. You put $10,000 in and we'll wait six months and see if you're right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And nobody wants to take my bet. Nobody ever wants to bet against me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
People are, we were talking about that, you know, this morning, uh, we're, we're building up a tech AI company as well, um, where we can, you know, solve a bunch of problems for businesses that, that are marketing and social and content problem. Like you're talking about, we're building a platform for that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But anyway, um, we're having a talk and talk about that this morning, um, with the head of that company. And, um, you know, uh, Even, even AI and the systems in which we're like, AI is going through the same thing. Garbage in, garbage out. It's now learning itself off of garbage. Yeah. And it's bloated. And, you know, there's, there's a bunch of, I think it's the same thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You have somebody make up a story. I think, I think that what was really, really good. And I think people are, when you say back to scammers and this stuff, I think it's, This last election, not political at all, but the last election from how different news organizations on both sides everywhere latch onto a story, see the story, take something out of context, that gets picked up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then you have all the secondary and third publishers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Have you seen the video with the split screen and it's like all the local news and they're all reading the same story?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So what we are going to do is, you know, myself and partner at the time, we co-wrote an audio book and wanted to get in front of young people in live event setting and talk about goal setting, state management, and just like, you know, chasing your dreams. Um, and, uh, and, and so that morphed and I was managing talent throughout all of this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, yeah. Yeah. And you say, so you have, so you have a, you have, you have an article that gets picked up by a major publication or a traditionally trusted publication. And then you have RSS feeds all over the internet that are now picking that up and feeding it into automated posting on blogs, automated posting on social sites, automated posting everywhere.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But then you also have, you know, now with the age of the tools that are at our disposal and, Let's take a major channel piece of content, whether it be video or whatever. Let's run it through a system. Let's rewrite it in our voice. But what you're just saying, we have now just manipulated a shit story in the first place. And all of a sudden you get, you know, what? 10 steps removed from that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It's a completely different story. The elephant's not blue anymore. It's a pink penguin, right? Like, and it's wild. And I think that that's happening in content. I think that similar to my thing of what we call trend jacking, it's more about... a video format and framework than it is like a content idea. So it's like, hey, this is going right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
The Ice Bucket Challenge is a great example, right? Or, oh, that's more of a content idea. But like the Get Ready With Me framework, there's a format that the internet, it was no sound,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
all like asmr sounds like like no music which i don't get that at all all that and and and and from the ice pouring in the water to the you know everything and it focused on that and really compelling visuals and so if you read between the lines you get the front but going back to what i was saying it's everything is a remix i mean you know um well anyway i won't get it everything is a remix have you seen that youtube series i haven't but it might as well check it out a watch
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
All right, cool. Everything's remixed. There's like a four-part series. I don't know. It's been around for 20 years, but it was really, really well done. They go through art, music, and all this stuff, mainly music. And they talk about all of the tones and the chords stolen and remixed and done this. And then they go through just life in general, pop culture. And it's a fun watch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Everything repeats itself. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you talked about AI because I also see a trend of like... Billy Jean is marketing. I don't know if you know who he is. Billy Jean is a great guy. But Billy Jean with AI and using Hey Jen to create the avatars of him. And he's just don't make speech in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I see, I think you're starting to see this now set it and forget it where you can create an avatar and then you'll just get scripts from what's trending and put it in here to auto post it here, blah, blah. I think every social media channel is about to absolutely become unwatchable. because of shit like that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think it's just going to get flooded with just nonsense of AI-generated nonsense that, like you said, AI is learning from itself and it's now becoming bloated. It's not working.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think these videos are going to start posting and say, oh, that's a good video when it's not, and then it's going to replicate it on some other avatar and then it's going to keep getting posted and it's going to be a sea of just mess. It's going to be a mess.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, I think that the same thing in business life cycles, right? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, well, let me ask you the question I was going to get to that was, do you think it'd be wise for the content for the platforms to say no AI content?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And there was a talent that my partner was working with at the time that, you know, wanted to expand his brand. He's like, how do I, I've always been very, you know, deep thinking about how can we monetize and maximize these op, whatever the opportunity is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I don't know. That's a great question. Um, Because they're already doing, you have to say it's AI generated if it's AI generated. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that it's coming to a place right now where I think it's going to be indistinguishable. Obviously, there's a ton of metadata and stuff. Yeah. We're quickly coming to a place. Hey, Jen's great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But the human regeneration and the AI image is not there yet. It's close. You can still tell. It's going to get there. Number of fingers. Yeah. That dude doesn't have seven fingers. Yeah, exactly. But it's getting there. There's some... But it still takes a ton of human intervention. And so, like, I think we're far away...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
from not having to manipulate, not for, I don't, time and space is extremely relative to AI because, you know, tech has been moving quickly anyway, but this is a completely different animal that, yeah, we can talk about that later. But anyway, so you take this and I think that the rate in which, you know, I can take a video of you, you read a script, I can reproduce you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think it still needs a level of tweaking and editing to it for it to actually be believable to be you. Now, when you go onto a website and you're used to seeing like a training module that's boring, right? And you actually see a human,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
or you talk to a customer service on the phone and you're used to hearing a bot, but that's getting better and it sounds like a real human, that's not going anywhere. And I think that's gonna get better and it's actually better for us. But I think from a content on social media standpoint, it's really, really hard to do that right now. But I think just like anything, Quality will win.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And so though we are having this, it was like crypto back when at first everybody was jumping on the NFT train. And then when everyone started jumping on the NFT train, a bunch of fraudulent projects came out. A bunch of people got fleeced. And then NFTs died down and there are some projects with utility that kept going on. Well, none of them had utility.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, but at least you could trade it for real world stuff. And it had some utility to where if I had this, I can get in here. I can go to this event. Exactly, exactly. And I was never really big in the NFT. My business partner was though. But then you have crypto and you have a bunch of projects like this meme coin thing jumping up. But all of them, that is dying off too.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, um, he came to me and I said, you know, let's build a, um, he goes, I have, you know, a bunch of people coming to LA to audition for my company every year. How do I monetize this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think the same thing is going to happen with content. We could go on and create really shitty content really fast right now. right now but no one's going to watch it and so the internet is going to be flooded with horrible content and like always quality is going to win now what is going to be is it filters for that stuff now then you ask the question so the platforms come in and stop it um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I don't know. I think they'll do something, but I think the same thing. There's a ton with before AI, there's a ton of really bad content on the internet. Yeah, I guess that's true. And we don't consume it. It just gives anybody with a keyboard, the ability to create content and, and just like, and have an opinion, which is probably terrible too. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
There's, there's so many blogs out there that just don't get attention, but I think it's the same. I think it's the same thing. I think, I think that creativity and quality will win. Authenticity will win. Um, caring about something, building community around that, I think that the same things still ring true, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You have to, if you're selling a product or have a service, amazing customer service and building a raving fan following, right? Whether it be customers and clients or whatever it is, having a great reputation, talking about things of value, adding value, like those things still ring true. Like I said, the core...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
fundamental philosophies that that that have ran true through time are still true to today we just have different communication and different mediums in which to tell stories and to communicate and people sniff out inauthentic we can sniff it out we're smarter and and people say like oh i thought that was real like yeah you didn't no you know well here's my next question so
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So here's the interesting thing about that, because a lot of people have, cause, cause dude, if you haven't looked on YouTube or seen him, John's a good looking dude. And a lot of people with that, with that, that thought process would think, how can I get on stage? Right. How can I be the guy out front?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You know, everybody always talks about the algorithms changing through the social media channels. Well, you know, man, I was killing him. The algo is killing me. I've got shadow ban, this and that. Do you guys worry at the level that you're at, right, with the agency level? Do you guys worry about the algorithm so much? Is it really just about making the best quality content you can?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, and it's a mix of both. Majority of it is quality and strategy and creativity. The other side of it though is, yeah, formatting.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
A great example of this is when IGTV came out, that was a while ago, we got a beta program where we, because we have partnerships with all the social platforms, they'd give us access to tools before we give them to our top clients and people and test them and do stuff. And we got ahead of that. We were first to YouTube Shorts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
We got, not us first, but there was a pilot program, very select partners that get the stuff. And we go to summits at these, you know, headquarters of these, you know, Snap, YouTube, all this stuff, TikTok. And they give us access to this stuff. And platforms change. Yeah. These platforms are constantly in a race on how to keep you on platform, right? Yep. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And so, and so how many different formats and mediums can they push to get you to stay on? And then you want more people creating content. You want to incentivize good content to keep you on the platform, keep scrolling. So if they can find a better way, something to push a feature to push that, that like, you know, is going to help. I think it's good. I think it's good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
These algorithm changes, but it's the same thing. You get ahead of them. You have a team that understands what's going on with the platforms, whether it's, you know, an agency, a partner, like, like somebody in the company that lives and breathes on these things and knows them, you can get ahead of them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And they're, they're minor tweak adjustments, a new feature coming out where you're like, oh, what we can now make three minute videos instead of two. It's like, well, it still has to be an engaging two minutes or no one's even going to get to the first 30 seconds.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It sounds like what you're saying is when somebody says the algorithm changes, screw me up, it's like a salesperson saying the leads are weak. No, you're weak. You're weak.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yes. There's an ounce of playing to it. There's an ounce of it, but a majority of it is just tried and true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
All right. Well, we'll finish up with one last question, which is if you could go back and give 27-year-old you some advice, what would it be? I'm going to start in the, you know what? I'm going to start ending every single podcast with that question. I just decided. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, that's a wonderful question. Um, I was always fearless. I was going to say, be fearless and just go after life. Um, I think, wow. And you talk about this and I think it's really, really important because, um, I never took any shortcuts. And I believe I did stuff the right way and I like people around me that do the right way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But you, did you guys always kind of think we're going to look at this kind of almost from a record label standpoint where we go find talent and then we are, we're the machine behind the talent. Did you always think that way?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I also, which is controversial, I built this business, my brother, my mom, some of my best friends brought along with the ride. Amazing, controversial. Have fun with the people you love and do it the right way. And be true to yourself. I want when I'm sitting, I'm telling my grandkids, I'm a father to a girl, especially the little girl, look up to a man, legacy, be true to your word, honor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think these things that are very, very cliche in old school, but you realize in the older we get, you start thinking, man, like if I could tell my younger self, these things matter. When you start doing business and there's a lot of options and a lot of competition out there, these little things, reputation, trust, integrity, these things make the biggest difference in life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You'll never know if you didn't get the gig or got the gig based on these things. But I know from experience that this stuff stacks and exponentially grows when done right. And it's Warren Buffett of compounding. I think we compound in our everyday lives. And if we do things right, things happen. Dude, we're going to wrap it up on that, my brother. If they want to find you, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
This is his first podcast, by the way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, yeah, I think, I think I never, I never wanted to be, you know, in front and, uh, even, even with the audio book program, uh, my partner, he's, he's a very, very smart guy. Uh, my, my ex partner, um, and he's still doing amazing in life. Um, he was a student of Tony Robbins as well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
This is where you thought like your Instagram handle or your website.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, it's at J underscore HY. Yes, there you go. I don't have much of an Instagram, but agency at 1DS Collective on all social platforms, 1DSCollective.com. We're doing some cool stuff. We're kind of, you know, boutique. We have a bunch of different things going on. And yeah, hey, happy to talk this stuff. I'm so excited about what you're doing. It's inspiring. Love it, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Anytime you want to come back, you let me know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I love it, brother. Well, let's wrap it up, guys. Look, if you listen to that today, I think the things you got to take away is If you want to get traction with people anywhere, man, if it's social media, if it's just in your circle, if it's in your network, if it's through your business, be authentically you because everybody else is taken. See you next week. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And he, he wanted to be out there like evangelizing about like, you know, philosophy of self-help and how to unlock a better version of yourself. And I was cool with that. I'm like, you go do it. I'm going to sit back. I'll strategize and do what I do. But yeah, I've never thought, you know, I had an opportunity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
You know, from him coming to me saying what we could do with the brand, we created the largest event in the commercial dance space called Build a Beast. It was huge. Got dubbed the Coachella of dance. 10,000 people from around the world came to the first event. And like professional dance learning from the best choreographers in the world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And we capped it off with an audition to become part of the dance company. which is the biggest dance company on YouTube, pioneered the whole dance video space. You see dances like online, the viral choreography stuff and built a whole business around that. But like I, I got asked to come on stage at a couple instances in front of these people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Found our episode of, like it says in the opening, man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, man, talk about serendipity. I'm going to start with a little story today. So the other day, me and the wife were flipping around through the old channels. I'm trying to figure out what to watch. And what do we see on the old Netflix?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I never had a problem speaking, but I was like, no, Glory, I'll stay back here, do what I do. I can live a quiet life and help people achieve their dreams and hopefully change the world for the better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But what's also good about that is everybody has an arc. You have a peak and then you have a valley and then you maybe drift off, right? It's the same, but you, because you're the guy behind the guy, you just replicate the same systems for the next person and the next person and the next person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So, you know, regardless of what happens with taste or trends or appetites for certain individuals, you can always maintain and stay solvent just by finding the next person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Well, of course. And, you know, mediums change, right? Materials change. But I think at the end of the day, yeah, tried and true. Marketing is... getting attention, right? One of the best books ever written, Breakthrough Advertising. And the same exact philosophies that were introduced back when, you know, copy was it. How do I, people flipping through a newspaper-
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
copywriters are the most valuable part in marketing. They still are today. Who's your favorite copywriter? Well, I mean, you know, breakthrough advertising, amazing. We have a couple of really good copywriters at 1DS. And I don't, I think following, following how people get attention with words is amazing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think watching that transform, like YouTube, we were able to all have a broadcast channel, change things. Now how do you get attention? Same thing. It's the same structure in like psychology behind all of that. And so I think fast forward, I think, yeah, you know, Liver King, for example, you know, we had to put really polarizing things on screen and get it in front of a lot of people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And we have channels to be able to do that and strategically distribute content. That's what makes us pretty unique. And, but, but I mean, it comes down to the same thing. You have to have something that people are interested in. You have to present it in a compelling way and you have to find a way to keep them around. And, you know, I think it's, it's, it's the same thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
It's just, how do you, how do you package it up? And, and everybody's unique with dance, with the example I gave you. You know, everybody had this, aspired to be part of this dance group, is the best dance group in the world, like from a credit standpoint. But, you know, and people traveled around and we created an experience out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then we sold, and then we created a media company from that. And then we created a studio where we shot and did classes and we created a clothing line and monetized that. And it's all the same stuff. How do you, how do you, you know, make something, whether it's a piece of clothing, a ticket to an event or a person like a liver King, um, interesting in a very simple way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then, you know, tell that story in a really compelling way. So do you think that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
obviously that guy's a cartoon character. Obviously, obviously. Right. Like he walks the door and you're like, okay, this is going to be easy. Yeah. How hard is it for you when clients come to you and they say, you know, I want to get the same kind of results. I want to do this, but, but I'm not all jacked up and I'm not jumping an ice pass and wearing an elk hat or whatever he's wearing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
We see the Liver King documentary. And if you don't remember who that is, that's that lunatic dude that was all jacked up. It was like jumping in cold water and eating animals alive or whatever he was doing. Everybody knew who this dude was. He went from nobody to everybody in like two seconds. And we're watching the documentary about his rise and fall, whatever it was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Like, do you, do you have to have that sort of a thing to catch on like this? Or is just your content can be delivered in a certain way to make you that way?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a ton of different ways to grab attention. I think obviously when you have a guy with, you know, as jacked as he is, with a shirt off, eating crazy food, doing crazy workouts, like he was the real deal. We just needed to package this up and distill it in a really compelling way and then make it go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And then media training and just continually just sharpening the ax. But yeah, I think that... Building person, a lot of what we do is personal brand stuff. At 1DS, we have a marketing agency side that's strategic in this type of Liver King thing. Liver King was our first personal brand where we deployed our agency model, which we would do for brands, right? And it worked wildly well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And so now we've attracted some personal brand engagements. And we also have a talent management side that has like, I think roughly a little over 200 influencers and athletes under management. And we do some light strategy work with them too, but that's more of a traditional talent management thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think around the personal brand thing, I think you have to have an engaging and compelling message. We start everything with a strategy, a communication strategy, right? Branding. Branding is everything. But simplicity in branding. And the nine ancestral tenets for Liver King was very complex. I remember and list all the nine in a row, but all people cared about were a few of them. right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And it's like, wait, I can, if I eat better, if I move and if I sleep good, what? And then you can block and shield and sun and ground and bond and all this stuff. But no. And then it's like, well, let's digest this because if people are interested in that, they're going to unpack more. So simplicity is key. And so with a personal brand, with anybody, unique angle,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
copycats crazy like i think i think the personal branding space is everyone's trying to take everybody else's message and remix it some way yeah yeah and and and i think i think unique we have we have something in that we dubbed it 1ds that i think is really really helpful um it's for clients as well as our philosophy it's called max measurable actionable and extraordinary and the extraordinary stands for unique right
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And I think that X factor there is very important in things. I think that, hey, in your business, real estate, right? How does an agent stand out? Well, I mean, you talk about it, integrity, going above and beyond. You might have to buy a refrigerator, as you say, right? Everybody buys a refrigerator once in a while.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But, you know, and you're getting down to like what makes you special and being able to communicate that to have people trust you and then continually build upon that message and stand for something. Because at the end of the day, the entire real estate industry, they're just trying to do one thing. They're trying to get properties, move from one entity to another.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And so how do you create that compelling? And I think a lot of people do. It's a unique touches. It's when you get in a Lyft and an Uber and they have water for you and a snack or something. And it's like, you don't have to do this. But it was a good experience. And so we just try with the personal branding side, tying them all back around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
how do we create a unique brand story that we can distill down in a really compelling way and then do some proactive strategy of like, how can we be different, but also how can we ride the trend and what's currently happening in the social media and digital world that we can latch onto because people are searching that, but also play into a unique go forward strategy that, you know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, you know, it's like 30 minutes into it and I'm, you know, I'm watching it, but I'm not super vested in it. Cause I'm like, okay, this is kind of whatever, but you know, I'm not super vested in the program. And then all of a sudden this dude pops on the screen and this guy says, I remember exactly what he said. He goes, so he came to us and he said he wanted a million followers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
you know, gets people's attention in this creative. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think it's talking about most talking heads on online also on the same because they're watching each other's content. And I think you absorb it at kind of this at a visceral level, right? Like I had a, it was on here. Oh, somebody great. And I said something and Ari Mizell, who's great. Ari's amazing. He is the go-to guy on streamlining organization, organization and business. He's the guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
He's written great books on it. And I made a comment about something that I do with my, with my email while I was talking to him. He goes, Oh, where'd you get that? And I said, I don't know. You know, maybe I thought it up. Maybe I do this. And he goes, no, you got it from my book. I was like, you know, sorry, I didn't give you credit for that, but there is a certain amount of redundancy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
But I think a bigger problem to that is you see like as you're scrolling down social media, you see like all of these ads for you're going to get our foolproof system for, you know, making content and we're going to have our ads. AI pull what's trending and then rewrite the scripts for you. And so it becomes this just hamster wheel of the same shit. You know what I mean? That just spins.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
So for you guys, when you're working with, listen, not even you're working with them. If somebody is out there that wants to start making good content, like how do they make it? What do they need to focus on to make good content? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
I think they need to understand who they are and what they stand for, first and foremost. I think as people, we need to understand that. Escaping the drift. Yeah. Right? But I think once you have that and you're passionate about something,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, I hadn't even stepped up and made content at the level I should, and that I, you know, built our entire organization with my partner around, you know, helping people do. Um, I always say I'm like the painter on the street who has the worst painted house, right? And I'm like, that's a horrible excuse, but I laugh about it. Um, but, but no, I think, I think that, um, you know, uh, you know, we,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
finding your voice, being passionate because you want to wake up every day. And this isn't easy. This podcast putting together with the grind. Yeah. You're in the what? 200 episodes now or something like that. Yeah. Give or take. Yeah. And it's a lot. And so like, that's, that's, that's a lot. One episode a week, that's four years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
And, and now just starting to really, you know, and understand it, it takes time and effort. So I think understanding and being passionate about the content you're making is one thing, but I think going to like the tactical standpoint of like, okay, yes, I'm passionate. I'm going to show up every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Nobody to Netflix: The Genius Marketer Behind the Liver King
Um, yeah, I think, I think, you know, focusing on there's, there's a, there's a psychological structure to what content, like if we want to talk short form, cause there's different, there's different, you know, formulas for different mediums of, of content. I'm so glad I want to get to that. So keep going. Yeah. So, but I mean, I mean, you know, capturing attention and holding it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
One of my current superpowers is using AI, which I love, right? All these people use AI to make these stupid pictures of Kamala and Trump making out on a beach in the back of a car, something stupid, right? The image generators on ChatGPT are the greatest vision board tool in the history of man. I mean, I have four images.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I won't get into exactly what they are, but I have four images on the mirror in my gym at my house. And every morning when I'm working out, I look at these images. And I mean, they're real. I'll tell you one of them. So I got a book coming out in the not too distant future, and I literally have a picture. And it's photorealistic, dude. It looks like it's real. I took it with my cell phone.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And it's my book in Hudson News in the airport with a little thing that says bestseller. But I look at that every single day and I'm like, man, that is just, I feel that every day. And I agree. I think the universe doesn't have any idea of what's real or what's not. You just got to put it out there. So I love that concept, which is great. When you were going and raising all this money,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Were you talking to businesses about trying to get like some sort of a purpose driven capacity into their like scheduled giving into their businesses? Which is something we're huge on here. I love that. Is that something you went after?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Right, the sun came up today, the clouds are out, nobody, the world has not fallen apart. You know, here you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Your resilience level is just through the roof.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
tenacity i do think gets lost as we make um our children's lives very easy and cushy as opposed to that that that is the struggle i mean as they say you know hard times make great men great men make good times good times make soft men the cycle repeats and soft men make hard times and it just repeats and how are your kids you got kids yes Your mother's three. You said that already.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
It's never, you know, and something I posted yesterday, I mean, this is like early in the day, like early when voting first started. And I made this comment, I'm just curious, we're not going to get political, but I'm curious your thoughts on this. Because I said, Not supporting whoever wins the election tonight is like going to the doctor and hoping they misdiagnose you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Mother's three. You said that earlier. How old are your children?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Okay. Well, 13. You still got mad home runs running through the house, which is fine. My biggest fear in life is raising worthless kids. And you catch yourself when you're like, dude, because my kids now are 17 and 15, or my daughter's almost 15.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
and it's like but i can remember like little moments like when it's six years old when my son had an opinion on airlines i'm like oh you know this is this is not good right this is i gotta reel this back and you know we got to try to create as much adversity as we can for them and and we've kind of done it through sports which is good i that's why i love sports for the kids but i i think
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And so many people have that issue with they're not getting that resilience. I mean, I tell people all the time, that's my superpower. Resilience is absolutely my superpower.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
When I was on The Apprentice, several seasons after I was done, the show psychologist or psychiatrist, whatever she was, Dr. Eliza Siegel wrote a book called Sweet Success or something, whatever it was, about the show and about the psychology of the contestants. And she called and said she wanted to interview me. I said, why? Why me after all these contestants?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And she goes, you scored higher on resilience than any contestant ever had. And I went, wow. And I was like, cool. So, I mean, I'm officially certified, I think, in that group of people who are all super type A successful people. That's my superpower. So, I tell people I just nothing...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
nothing gets in front of me and gets me down but i do but this this that's such a good segue man i love when i just solid segue in the show yes so talking about resilience and nothing getting you down here you go you're doing what you love you're raising all this money things are going great amazingly good in the world of barbara and then something happens that nobody would ever expect to happen which is what i got diagnosed at 42 um in 2015 with stage 3 colon cancer
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I mean, that's just wild. What is that day like? What is that day like?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
So bonus time. Okay. Yeah, there you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Hang on. When your marriage was falling apart, was that taking a heavy emotional toll on you already? Or was that something you're kind of like, we talked, was it one of those progressive, we talked about it and we're going to uncouple and everybody's kind of okay? Or was it like our parents' good old 1970s divorce, which one was it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Don't you have to kind of root for whoever? You got to kind of root for them because rooting against them is kind of rooting against yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
There's so much to unpack from that, dude. First of all, Our friend, Jessie Lee, I don't know if you know who that is. She's incredibly successful, multi-level marketing. I was in a mastermind group with her. And we just passed the one-year anniversary for passing from exactly what you had.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And none of us, none of us in our group, none of us ever even thought that it was possible she was going to die.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, it was. And I'm glad it's over because me being in the business that I'm in and needing to advertise, holy crap, everything just got way cheaper today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
It was wild. And so there is an element of, you know what, man, we're all just dangling on strings here. And it could be gone in a second. And, you know, one of my favorite quotes, and I don't know who said it, as I'm recalling it now, every time I say it, this is one of my favorite quotes. I don't know who says it. I just know I like it. But it says, like, you know, it says a man has two lives.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
It has the lives up until the moment he realizes he's not immortal. And then what he chooses to do with his time after that. And I think that's one of the things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And the fact that you understood that you always kept that why and were very clear on your why and very focused on that, I think is probably what really shapes you and what a lot of people fall down is because they haven't identified their why. You know, I'm not comparing stuff. I just, it's just, I'm getting crushed with it right now as I think about this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
So, you know, it's funny, I'm one of those guys that, you know, I'm on a lot of stages and I do those things and you see these stories and the other speakers that go up before you, after you, they're like, you know, here's my soul crushing story of David Goggins gets up there and just lays out this horrible, horrendous childhood. And I'm like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
For a second, I'm like, man, having to grow up on the second hole of the golf course instead of the 18th or the first, the walk to the clubhouse is further. Yeah, nobody gives a shit about my story, right? So I always think to myself, even though through all of the things in my life, I've never had any real great adversities.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And I got zapped with something like a year ago that I'm dealing with right now. And hopefully I took four MRIs on Monday and hopefully I'll find out exactly what her course of action is. But I have something called tribogenital neurology. I always want it. Be careful what you wish for is the moral of the story. Like you want that adversity. Okay, universe, here's some adversity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I got something called tribogenital neurology where you have a nerve in your face, right? And it misfires. It's a neurological thing. But literally, if I go outside right now and the wind blows on my left eyelashes, it feels like somebody's tasing me with a taser. I get electrocuted. And as we're sitting here talking, I keep getting zapped.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Oh, and our text messages have stopped. I can put something in somebody's... People will answer the phone again for my people when they call. I can put something in somebody's mailbox that is not buried with 800 other things. And man, clicks just got way cheaper on the interwebs, which I like. So I was, you know, high performing people. I like to do this nature versus nurture deal. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
So if I make a weird face, that's kind of what it is, is I'm literally sitting here getting electrocuted. Yeah, I'm going to get it fixed. We got a meeting on Monday. But yeah, there's my adversity that you need to be careful to wish for because the universe will serve it up to you in spades.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, it kind of sucks. It's interesting, but we're working on it. But I'm bringing a voice to all those out there who are going to get electrocuted on their face today. I'm getting a fix. I'm going to get this. There's a couple things we don't get a fix. But back to this. So you get through the cancer. You fight your way through the end of it. And then it's the end of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I mean, you got to have that moment when you know you're out of the woods, when you're like, okay, cool. I did a lot of A to Z in my first life. What am I going to focus on on life number two? Did you have that moment?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, I feel it. Yeah, I get it. Yeah, I get it. I like it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
So I like to kind of go back to the beginning of your life and how you grew up. And you had kind of extreme circumstances, just got a lot of twins in your life, I think, and including one of your siblings had special needs. So we talk about that and what it was like growing up in that household. Where did you grow up? Tell me about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Let's call a spade a spade. 43 ain't exactly the age to break into the old television game either. If we're being honest about what we're talking about. not exactly the age you want to break in. So I think that hurdle against you as well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Let's work together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
There's your little foothold.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, you're like, hello, Mayo Clinic. I'd like to buy this taco you have. Cedars-Sinai, room for one, please.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Other than being able to power a small village with a, you know, sticking a light bulb in my mouth, I'm not sure exactly how to help anybody with this, but, but it's, it's funny. I mean, I saw a, uh, I don't remember who it was. Gosh, just another thing. It's the guy that was on stage, you know, the same event I was doing a long time ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
He was talking about when he and his father would be down and out, down to their last dollar, right? They live in a one bedroom apartment, sells before they found success. And now they're down to the last five bucks. His dad would say, time to go give. Time to go give. Let's go give this money away. And he'd be like, we're going to give away our last $5. He's like, yes, we are.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Because it will come back. If we go out and we focus on giving, it will come back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Well, it's funny. It's funny. We're going to segue again because this is a good segue point for this, which is, you know, talk about being of service to others. And I look at,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Again, bringing the election back into this a little bit, I find the people that were most upset about the results today, the people that in me were, and if you go on Twitter, there's just streams of people just bawling over whatever perceived thing they're going to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And if I had to put one thing in common for all of these people, blindly without knowing any of them, but just basically just saying, this is a box I'm going to put you in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
i'm going to say victim is a huge box for all of them they're a personal victim and to me people that put themselves in the victim box have no sense of personal accountability and i know that that is something that has become very important to you in helping others achieve so let's talk about that yes it's so real you know you you've
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah. How far, just out of curiosity, because it'll frame kind of your mom a little bit for me, how far apart were the births for your mom? How much older...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Oh, dude, I read it. Tim Ferriss put it on his mailing list, which I love Tim Ferriss' mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And what I'm reading right now, Hillbill Elegy. I'm like, what is this book? I just, Hillbill, I just, the name caught me. And I got the book way before Ron Howard ever knew it existed. And it was just... I read it on a flight. I think I read it from a flight from New York to LA. And I think it was four hours. I just pounded the whole book down. And amazing, amazing what that guy has overcome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
i want to be the victim so maybe just always feed the victim narrative like i have it's super frustrating and i can always be it's like you can't you can't oh you can't always bring colonialism into your everyday life you didn't lose your job at the quickie mark because the the british took over the virgin islands you can't get there you can try but as i get there you know i find the easiest first step and personal accountability for anybody is to change
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
one word, one phrase in your everyday life, which is if you're not going to do something, stop saying, I can't, and say, I choose not to. Like, oh, you should, you should lose weight. I can't, I just can't lose weight. No, no, no. You choose not to. I just can't find time to go to the gym. No, no, no. You choose not to. Oh, I can't, I can't find a job. No, no, no, no. You're choosing not to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
There's a lot of things. And if you just change that one phrase, It first will sting, but then can become incredibly powerful. Because when you realize that you are the master of your own destiny, you are the captain of your own ship, life becomes a little bit more fun to live. Absolutely. Like you said, when you're a passenger, it sucks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
How many people are out there in the passenger seat of this runaway car of life at their end? And how terrifying and miserable must that be?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, my dear friend Kendra Todd had two sets of twins inside of 18 months and she had four in diapers. I was like, dude, that's aggressive. But your mom still three years old and new twins. She was hustling. But one of your siblings had special needs. Yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I'm at 82.65 right now already.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I hit it every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Well, I, you know, I do, I do, this is my, I do a guest podcast that comes out every Tuesday and it was solo pod that comes out Thursday. So the pods are much shorter than this, but I talked a couple of weeks ago about my daily routine because people ask, right? They're like, how do you get so much stuff done? What's your daily routine?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I'm like, bro, I don't get up at four o'clock in the morning and get an ice bath. That ain't me. That's not what I do. And it's okay if you don't do it either. Right. It's like, The entrepreneur culture, if you don't get up at 4 a.m. or 3.30, you don't have to do that. You just need a routine that works for you. And it doesn't matter what anybody else is doing. This is about what's good for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And I think so many people get caught up in, like you said, 75R, which Andy Purcell many, many times, a wonderful dude, and it's a great program for people to complete it. I'm proud of you. Yes. Probably not for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Because quite frankly, dude, if I'm going to go out to a really expensive dinner and I want to drink a glass of wine, I'm going to drink a glass of wine because that's what I want to do. I'm not a heavy drinker, but I want that option. And I don't think that's hurting me. So whatever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Back again, back again with another episode of Like It Says in the Opening Man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, ladies and gentlemen, today in this day after the election when a lot of the country anyway is wheeling and trying to figure out what to do. I got a guest, not in studio. She's where she is and I'm where I am. But this is a guest that
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
There's people out there today. They're looking for some help.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Yeah, poor Rachel Maddow today is in a safe space somewhere. I'm sure she's having a meltdown.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Well, for me, talking about getting organized and getting on the thing and the hows, the why. For me, I like to take the resistance out of anything. Like, for example, and granted, I understand that I'm in a certain economic bracket that I can make some of the stuff happen that other people might not be able to. I understand that. I'm not talking down anybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I'm not, oh, sure, John, you can do whatever you want. That's not what I'm trying to do. But like, for example, the gym. Do you know what I hated the most about the gym? Driving to the gym. I hated it. Parking. Parking at the gym drove me crazy, which is the dumbest thing because you're like, you're going to exercise anyway. You have to walk far, blah, blah, blah. So I do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I built a gym at my house. Now I walk downstairs every morning. I go to the gym in my house, right? I want to watch TV. That's not good for me, right? So I just attach that vice of occasionally I want to watch TV to the only time I watch TV is if I'm on the treadmill. It's the only time I watch TV. So if I want something, I got to walk to do it, which is why I always hit my steps, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
So for me, it's about trying to connect my vices, whatever they might be, with something sort of positive or taking the path of least resistance to the best choices I can make.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
whatever i might go for a coffee walk it is you you get two women on a coffee walk they might never come back i mean we are just like so well i i think i think it comes down to i i think the word goal is is a dirty word for me and i don't like the word goal and i'll tell you what i don't like it i use this analogy all the time is that first that first press conference with every nfl coach midway through training camp where they go coach
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
What are your goals for this year? And they're like, goals are to make the playoffs and go to the Super Bowl. And every single one of them, all 32 of them will say the same thing. That coach knows his quarterback sucks. He already knows it is impossible for them to achieve that. But yet they still throw it out there as a goal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And so many people throw these things out there that are just not even, like, not there. So I prefer the word commitment. In my sales organizations, my teams, my businesses that I do, it's always every weekly, what is your commitment this week? What are you committed to getting done? And this ain't something you hope is going to get done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
This is a, I'm going to be awake at 1159 the day before I got to come back and see you and figuring out how I can accomplish this because it is a have to. And I think when you get away from the word goal, which I think has gotten diluted and watered down to something you're absolutely committed to doing, I think you're better off.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
But like I said, like I said earlier, I would go back and I would take that now and I'd say, Okay, this is what I would do. I would say if I want to go hiking in the Himalayas, I wouldn't cut a picture of the Himalayas out and put it on a vision board. I would go to ChatGPT and I would say, make a picture of a hand holding an airline ticket with my name on it one way to Nepal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Make that where I can look at that and I can say, man, there's my name on an airline ticket and dude, it'll spin it out. Put that up there. Make it that real, that appealing. And I think Going that far, but also I think when people are doing that stuff, right? I think one exercise they don't do enough is they don't go deep enough in the why, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Like, come tell me, come and wants to work with me. Where'd you go? I want to make $250,000. I don't care about that because you're never going to hit that unless there's a why behind it. Like you, it's down to the end of taking care of your brother.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
a lot of people like oh because i want 250 because i want to buy i mean i'm just gonna make this so much realistic it's gonna be terrible but let's say because i want to buy a porsche gtr okay why do you want a porsche gtr because i've always wanted a porsche gtr what's that a private plane there you go private plane which i do not advise i do not advise to do that i've done that it's not good it's not it's fun for a minute but then it's very expensive i would definitely buy that um
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
But yeah, you kind of get back to like, well, why do you want the Porsche TR? Because I've always wanted one. Well, why have you always wanted one? And it comes down to, because I want, it can be as, you got to get to the, you got to be real with yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
It can be as petty as, you know, when I was a kid in high school, everybody had the cool car and they laughed at my Ford Escort with the broken door with the wired up. And I want people to look at me and feel, I want to know what it feels like for others to look at me and feel envious. Well, dude, that's a real emotion. Whether it's positive or not, I don't care.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
But I can tap into that and say, okay, let's make people jealous of you. And that will drive people to accomplish their goals. But you've got to be honest with yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I can imagine that there was probably some sticking up you had to do for your sibling.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Go ahead. I was going to ask if that shaped your empathy. I was going to ask if that shaped the amount of empathy you have, if you think that that was a cornerstone or was there other things?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
And that's- But I think there's one thing we skipped over about your television thing, which we didn't talk about, which was, didn't you hawk your wedding ring to pay for that? Like you burned the boats.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
My business partner for like the first probably four years when we had our business open, it was just handshake, right? We just, we've been friends a long time and just business going and, you know, the operating agreement just, I just going back and forth and we were just never, it's like, it wasn't even like I would make a revision.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I'd send it to him and he'd sit on it for six months and then he'd make a revision, send it back to me and I'd sit for six months. It was more of like four years. In the meantime, my partner is also a semi-professional race car driver. His wife is like buying him helicopter pilot lessons for Christmas. My wife is like, can you please get this on paper with this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
You're not going to have anything on paper. But anyway, dude, it was such a joy talking to you today. I loved it. I loved every minute of it. If they want to find you and connect with you, learn more about your coaching programs, all the things that you can do, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I love it. I love it. I love it. Well, thanks so much, Barbara. If you guys were on this today, man, I hope that fired you up and just understand, dude, life is going to throw you some curveballs. And it's just going to and how you deal with that, how you overcome how you face that adversity head on. I say this all the time, dude, but it's like my favorite line from Die Hard.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Nobody's coming to save you. Save yourself. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Because mom had four kids. Mom had four kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Man, I saw her on the gram and she came flying down. And I just started doing a little bit of research on this person. And I kind of got into it, man. I was like, man, this is a person that's kind of got it figured out, has had that adversity in her life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
No, it would have to, because I mean, you received a humanitarian award in 2015, correct? What was that for? I mean, obviously, of course, the humanitarians, but what was the actual act of kindness or the great gift you gave to the world to get that award?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
When was that? What year was this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Because you know I was on The Apprentice. Did you know that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I was on that show. Yeah, I was. Not early. My season would have filmed in 2006. So it's been a minute.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
She's had some things that have stepped up and hit her in the face and managed to keep pushing forward in a way that her view on life and just watching some of the stuff she does is really impressive. She is a frequent guest of shows like the Today Show, Fox and Friends, those sorts of things. She is the founder of the More Life Collective.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Any little thing, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
she is the host of her very own bearing it all podcast and ladies and gentlemen we are glad to have her in on the podcast today to get her point of view this ladies and gentlemen live in the flesh it's barbara majewski it's barbara yes great to see you how are you i'm doing great i mean the election we know what we've got she conceded we can continue on with our lives
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
Well, we're going to get to that. I saw that as well. And believe me, we're going to spend a minute on that, but I want to back up a little bit because when you went on this mission, I'm assuming you were gainfully employed, right? So this was something that you just scheduled into your life or how did you make time to give? Because I think that, you know, I order one every year.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Finding Purpose Amidst Life's Challenges with Barbara Majeski
I just ordered Jesse Etzler's big ass calendar for 2025. I love Jesse. He's a great dude where you schedule your life and then you work around the life you schedule. So so many people, I think, wrestle with that, right? Yeah. So how did you schedule that into your existing busy life? Did you find it difficult?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So here's my favorite car story from business. And this is a little terrible, all right? I'm going to preface this by saying this story is terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And we walk out of the blimpy and he looks at me and goes, you feel better? And I was like, no. No. I don't know how that was supposed to be a lesson for me. But, yeah, that was welcome. I think his thing was to get one back at the other team.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
But that was welcome to the car business for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That was it. But enough about me, dude. You didn't come on here to hear me talk.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
It's an easy sell when it's like, come here, go to the Bellagio, go to STK for dinner. It's an easy sell.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You're just thinking the sale.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Well, you know what I'm worried about?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And we're not editing that out either. Because look, I mean, now we've gotten full stereotype. Now the stripper lives in a double wide on the wrong side of the tracks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Easy sell to get you in. So, man, you're just not born a great salesman. So I always like to start with like the nature versus nurture part of this. So tell me about how you grew up. Tell me about mom and dad. Tell me like how you became an entrepreneur. Tell me about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So I, so this is like, this is not your Friday night stripper. This is like day shift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
What is it with strippers and pit bulls?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I'm going to clarify. This is before he met his wife.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That was 20 years ago. That part wasn't real clear.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That was trying to earn extra credit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, no, I love it. So you're back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You guys just all sitting there like watching the carts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Immediately thought about his life choices and was like, maybe this wasn't the best move. I'm going to go ahead and leave.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Okay, so you're in the car business. Things are going well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
How long before you're the top guy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
There's something about a car floor, right? Yeah. Like I said, I only did it for a short amount of time. But I found myself, even though I was leaving, you really feel like you're kind of part of a gang when you're in... If they're running the dealership right, I think that's how the salespeople kind of feel.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, no, no, no. Because I think it's... I think... I think it depends on the long sale or the short sale, right? I agree with that. And car sales is a short sale to me because people are walking a lot, they buy a car, and it's quick. It's not a slow-moving process.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I find in the fast sale, the quick sale, when you have that kill or be killed, eat what you kill, there is no fair, you have that mentality. Buy or die. Yeah. It almost becomes like a rite of passage to earn your spot in the tribe. It's a very tribal thing. It is. And I think with long sales, not so much just because, you know, a lot can happen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That is Labatt's blue country.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I mean, I've got a really good team that works for me here that handles, I don't, unless it's, unless it's a really large transaction, I don't do personal real estate anymore. I still do it for my clients when they're large transactions. But, you know, most of the, most of the other stuff goes to my team. So I have, you know, we have, a total of about 585 agents that work here for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Overall, it's simply Vegas, but I've got 10 of them that work directly for me on my team, right? And I would say that, yeah, you know, I've got to constantly be working to create that tribal team environment for them. Whereas I think, I don't think the dealership did anything other than create the situation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So I think it depends on its long sale or short sale.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So you joined the trade. Even though it was a mean certain end, the reason that you fell into that hole is because you became part of the tribe.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I don't think they tell you what it smells like.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Oh, I think now with kids, it's incredibly apparent what that is. Yeah, man. It's this right here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
It's this. I mean, if you're like, and that scares the shit out of me with my kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You can look at it like, dude, you look at these kids now. And they're all so head down in these phones just as fast as they can go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Was it always pills, or did you graduate to the hardest?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You're high functioning. You're high functioning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You're done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Dude, I had an assistant years ago. I won't mention her name, but we have a rule if you work for me. Nobody gets paid till I get paid, right? Like, I mean, obviously payroll is fine, but like bonuses on deals that I do and things that we do and bonuses come in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I got to get my piece before you get your piece. And this particular, this is years and years ago. And this particular assistant one time, my wife was doing the payroll at one point. And she mentioned, she said, oh, I did this payroll. This person asked me to do their payroll early. And I was like, what? And this is a person who's been making great money for me. And I was like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
i do her payroll early what are you talking about she goes yeah she asked me to do it so i was like something's wrong so me being me i i feel responsible for all my people so i'm like we live in vegas i'm like she's gambling yeah she's fucking gambling because she was beast like like like hammer down job performance great she's gambling i'm like i gotta talk to her about this so she comes in my office the next day and i go hey
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I'm going to talk to you about this advance you needed. Like you just got like X amount of dollars last week. There's no way I know your lifestyle. There's no way you should need this. What's going on? Do you have a problem? And she goes, yeah, I got a problem. I said, okay, is this a problem you've had for a while? She goes, yeah, it's been going on for a while.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And I said, have you had it before? And she goes, I said, have you gotten help for this before? And she goes, yeah, I have. And I said, where did you get help? Like, did you go to a meeting with Albie? I'm still thinking we're talking about gambling, right? She goes, this place, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, okay, well, I'm going to call them and see what we need.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
She goes, well, they're going to want me to do inpatient. I'm like, inpatient? She goes, yeah. She goes, yeah. And I said... I said, okay, what should I tell them when I'm going to call them? What should I tell them? She goes, tell them I relapsed. And I said, okay. And she goes, tell them I'm going to need to detox. And I was like, detox? I go, I'm still thinking we're talking about gambling.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I'm like, what do you have in your system? She goes, heroin. I was like, what? Yeah. What in the – what – like, and then I just –
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
mine starts going what have i been missing for the past month and now i'm like and then as soon as after the meeting i'm like googling it and they're like i'm like yeah she does look a little gray yeah i mean yeah her eyes are a little pinned or whatever like this is a little i'm like yeah this is a little yeah dude this is not good so anyway i ended up center rehab i made her pay me back for it because i said if you don't pay for it you're not gonna appreciate it right thanks dad for lessons like that um but yeah dude so i get it man and in the same thing with her dude she had gotten hurt and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
started on oxy and whatever else, and then couldn't get it. And then moved on to the hard stuff, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah. I got a bone to pick with that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah. Dude, literally. I just told this in another podcast, but I was randomly, somebody posted, you know, sometimes you get on those holes on the internet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
The whole kit for heroin. I've seen the movies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Rig. Not kidding. He's like movies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Somebody randomly posted like my ninth grade yearbook, but in a digital format where you could go back and see it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And this was where I went to. I was also from a small town. Okay. And where I went to school, like ninth grade wasn't in high school. It was in junior high.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
This went Appalachia real quick.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So like if you were the ninth graders, we were the kings of junior high. getting ready to go to high school. It was like high school in my town was 10, 11, 12. And so when they had the superlatives of my ninth grade yearbook, I got most accident prone. And I'm thinking, and so then, no, this is the whole thing going. And I look at the dude that they said most likely to succeed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Notice he said the first time, not the last time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So what finally got you out of it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And I'm like, let's see where this dude's at. And let's just say I looked him up. And yeah, there needs to be a fricking recount. Junior high school, Lake City, Florida. Yeah, I need a recount on that because I think the kid here, He's doing it better. Just saying. Anyway, so go ahead. You weren't watching his podcast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
This wasn't a master plan in a basement with the plans.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Oceans 1. Oceans 0.5. 0.5, there you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Welcome back to the program, everybody. As it said in the opening, man, the podcast, it gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today in studio, I got a dude. I mean, this is a dude when it comes to selling stuff, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You're like, maybe I shouldn't have been so cordial.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I don't hate it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
All right, so they arrest you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Did you call your parents?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
More than you should get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
All right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Because it was an armed robbery.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You got clean, obviously.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah, so you got back into sales, obviously.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So my question is, does the coach of the wrestling team come to you the next day and like, hey, buddy, might want to join the team? I mean, if you take out the captain, I mean, his job is to get the best kid in the seat, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
um so what tell me how that is man so you think i'm back on the straight and narrow i'm starting my life over here i am and you get a job and then the dude walks in and goes hey man
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Did you, so did you have to get away from the hometown before things took off?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
It could be hard.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Your experience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So what do you, what do you think he's selling you that made him? Made him believe in you in that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah, it's very dry. Sorry.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
It'll be a favor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Well, before we get onto now the national training of sales agents, salespeople everywhere, I want to talk about, let's do this. Let's do true or false. Okay. Which is my opinion from working at the car dealership. This is the things I tell people they should do when they buy a car. Yes. And you tell me true or false. Number one,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
In every car dealership, there's a board somewhere in the car dealership that has every salesman's name on it with X's and lines on it showing half deals or whole deals that they've done that year. I recommend you walk in and find the worst salesman and ask for him. True or false?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And the reason being is because that dude is desperate for a deal and he is not going to fight at all.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
He's not going to fight for the pencil at all. He's going to fall over and tell you exactly what you can get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Number two, you should buy a car on the last day of the month.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And the reason for that is- They got numbers to hit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And isn't most interest on the auto lines figured on the first of the month?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So anything still sitting on the lot, they pay interest on.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So if it's gone, they pay less.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Number two, or number three. Here's my third one. You should go 20 minutes before they close on the last day of the month. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
He wants to get to that dinner, buddy. He's done. And you're sitting there grinding him for everything that happens.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That's it, yeah. But he's going to fall over when you push back on all of the garbage that he's patting on you in the box.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
See, that makes me feel better because I'm giving people good advice. So there you go. That's it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
All right, there it is. So let's talk about a little bit about about you training people nationwide. Sorry about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No common ground. You just made them that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, that's, yeah, I got to talk to my wife or talk to my spouse is always the bullshit to just get off the boat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So what's your pivot off of that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, I find that with our process, because again, in real estate, it's a long process. It's not short. What we do is it's much easier because we try to cover as many of the things that could happen through the process of buying a house. and get clients comfortable with hypotheticals and get them to agree to hypotheticals way before it happens.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So for example, like, like if the market's hot and there's a lot of competition, it's like, look, you know, we're going to go out, we're going to see, we're going to narrow it down to three houses. And we're going to say, do you want to write an offer on this house, this house, or both of them? And a lot of people are like, you write an offer on more than one house? Like, of course you can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Sure you can. Can't the seller take more than one offer? Yeah, they can look at more than one offer. We're going to write more than one. And having them agree to that hypothetically before it becomes reality in front of them makes it much easier to go down that road when it is in front of them. You have them agree to all of these things hypothetically.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
You know, we talk about the inspections at detail. We're like, look, when the inspection comes back on the house, the idea is not necessarily to get the house back to 100%, perfect like it was the day they built it. We're looking for any material effects of value or is health and safety.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And that way, when, when, when it comes back and you know, every, if you've ever bought a house, you've seen the inspection, it's like 50 pages of everything. They don't freak out. Right. You're like, okay, we're going to go through this and do what we talked about and do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And I think just prepping people, it's the same as what you're talking about, but just effectively prepping people for what's coming. saves a lot of problems.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Oh, really?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah, process matter.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Consistency is the key.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
1,000%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
This is going to be offensive. Just, just throw it out there. I didn't say it. I'm telling a story, right? I walk out to this dude. How you doing, man? He's going, cause I'm doing good. It was a stuff on the lot. And I go, uh, think about getting a new car. Like somebody goes, oh man, I'm thinking about pussy. Gotta buy a new car. I love that. I was like, uh, Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Please don't hold that story against me, people. That really happened? It's not my word. That is not a word I use a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Well, dude, you talk about that, right? You talk about that. And this is why I teach everybody that sells with the phone. The worst thing you can ever say in the phone is, hey, Bill, blah, blah, blah. How you doing today? Because when you say, how you doing today? People are so programmed. Like we are programmed. Like when you drove over here today, did you almost die?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah, you're in a 6,000-pound death machine going 70 miles an hour down a road with somebody else in a 6,000-pound death machine coming the other way that at any time they could have just swerved over and killed you. Whoever's driving, sorry about that. As you guys leave, you'd be thinking about that now. But you could have died.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Oh, this was in high school. This was in high school, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, but here's what happens. So the brain conditions yourself to understand that that's not probably going to happen, so you don't even think about it. Otherwise, we would be walking around like, oh, God, like all the time, like fight or flight. So you condition things to eliminate them. So it's just like when that person, when you're, are you a person in a clothing store that likes to be helped?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So you're in store, man, you're looking and you see them coming and you're just waiting for them to get close to them. You say, ah, I'm just looking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Right. They could be walking up to you a million dollars and you'd be like, no, no, no, no. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. You don't even want to hear it because you're conditioned to what they're going to do. And if you're selling with the phone, when you call people and say, Hey, how you doing today? That's what every telemarketer in the world says when they call. Hmm. Hey, how you doing today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So they rescinded your offers, essentially.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Their brain shuts completely off to this is a telemarketer. Again, you could be calling to give them a million dollars. They're not even going to hear it. So it's those patterns and those frequencies that are so important.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
100%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, we're going to buy a house here. We're just going to make that easy. I mean, do you really want to go back to New York?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
it's so funny man talking about confidence and sales i got a guy that is english that works for me matt and uh one of the most my business partner is also english and one of the biggest unfair things on in in the world of business is this you can take the smartest dude from america and drop them off in london and those limey bastards will be like this idiot what a moron and conversely you can take the dumbest person from england and drop them off in america and everybody's like oh my god oh my goodness
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
This person's a genius. He said, hello. So just to prove a point, I wrote three nonsense words or nonsense phrases on cards. And Matt got on a phone with a client, just supreme confidence. Oh, I love this. And it randomly, and he was on the speaker and it was during a meeting and he was talking to this client and I would randomly hand him cards and he had to say what was on the card.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And he'd be like, oh, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to dodger your uncle's tractor, aren't you, Roger? And God would be like, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do. Dodger the tractor. I have no clue what any of this means. And it just went down so smooth because it was the supreme level of confidence.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
200.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
10.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Amen. Amen. Well, dude, we're going to leave it with that, dude. If they want to learn more about how to sell with supreme confidence, how do they find you, bro?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
If you are somebody that is in sales at all, you're going to want to listen to this because this guy is one of the best out there at not just selling stuff, but teaching how to do it. And he's also got a cool story of overcoming some serious adversity that I think that, uh, If you hear this, you're going to be like, whoa, because I was kind of like, whoa, when I just heard it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I could tell you a lot of stories. I could tell you a lot of stories. The worst.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
the worst agreed so what i do and you know nowhere near as popular because it's not entertainment value sure but i give out oh i'm pretty sure look we we entertain today i mean we've definitely offended some people again the thoughts and views of myself do not reflect the thoughts and views of myself that's what it's supposed to say i think that's
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That's a good point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Well, dude, that's why I got to tell you, a good friend of mine, Kent Clothier, who I love, always says, dude, I'm polarizing on purpose. Yeah. Because I want, dude, he goes, I am unapologetically me. And when you meet me, I want you to love me or hate me as quickly as possible because I need to sort people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I don't have time. I got to sort. That's what I'm doing. So, guys, there it is, man. If you want to. Oh, cool. My car's on its way back. Love that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Got some new wheels today. What did you get? It's pretentious and stupid, but it's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So let's see. So I appreciate the car business so much because when I left, I used to be in the bar and restaurant business many years ago. And when I got the news from my Essentially, my doctor and my bleeding ulcers at 27 based on my lifestyle. Wow. He said, yeah, you're going to need a life change. That's what he told me. So I was like, oh, shit. So I called one of my buddies.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Not a calling it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, so I put 24s on it today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So it's on its way back now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I don't hate it. I don't hate it. No, this thing's like driving a fast couch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I love it. It's good. So there we go. What do I do? If you want to learn how to sell with more confidence, look at my man, Luke. He will sort you out. Pleasure having you, bro. You're welcome anytime. Appreciate you, man. Come back, dude. All right. All right, guys. We'll see you next week. Unless we're canceled, then you'll never see me again. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
No, the bar business. Oh, excuse me, the bar business. He was like, you know, tell me about your diet. I'm like, makers marking cigarettes. And he's like, how many hours a week you work? And I'm like, how many you got? Yeah. Because somebody is always stealing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And he said, you need a life change. And I called my buddy at WorldCom who was a vice president. I said, everybody has always said I should be in sales, give me a job in sales. And he goes, man, I can't give you a job off the streets, you know, selling telecom. I can't do, you got to go get some experience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I said, what should I do? And he goes, you got two choices. I said, what's that? He goes, you can go sell Kirby vacuum cleaners or you can go sell cars. He goes, either way in 90 days, you'll have a PhD in sales.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I was like, there's no way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I was like, there's just no way. There was one more. It might've been,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
copiers maybe ibm or copiers or something but but there was just no way i was going to go sell kirby vacuum cleaners door to door man i was like all right i'll go sell cars so that's where i also learn how to cut my teeth uh doing that which was funny and we'll tell some stories about that bro it's a crash so so your so your experience with cars this is going to be good stories
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So tell me about that first week. Obviously, you grew up in it. So you've been around the dealership because dad was there. So you had a little bit of foresight here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I am genetically predisposed to success in this business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I'm pretty sure that's everywhere.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program in studio today. This... is Luke Lunkenheimer. Luke.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
and running my own stuff. So it was always very amicable. You know, everything was always about like, you know, when you're doing schedules for staff, it was just like, oh, we'll make sure everybody gets even, you know, everybody's happy. You try to accommodate as many of their requests you can when you're handling your staff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
That was the first place I ever worked where it was like, yeah, dude, we don't care. We really don't care. Like there's no such thing. You want fair? It's down there. They sell cotton candy and there's a fair. So this ain't here. This is go get it. And you're right. You're 100% right. Because in my situation, there was a couple of dudes, like this one dude, Feroz. He was of a person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Because this dude, like this dude, Feroz, was the best dude, right? And how he did it was really smart. And this is a great lesson for business, right? So this cat had the office right by the receptionist. So he would listen to her answer the phone and he would walk into his office when she would go sales call 100 or whatever. So he was grabbing, he got every single phone up because he can do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So I just started watching him. And when I saw him look at her and then he turned to go in his office, I started beating him fast to figure because I figured how to time it. I out-timed him on picking it up and he didn't like that. That was bad. So when I went in, that was the first place, A, that didn't care.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Look at that. Lunkenheimer. I nailed it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
But I'll tell you my favorite car story business and we'll get back to you because I don't want to monopolize this. So here's my favorite car story business. And this is a little terrible. All right. I'm going to preface this by saying this story is terrible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
But it must be told. And it might get me canceled. I hope it won't get me canceled, but it's a terrible story. So the used car manager at this place where I work. Now, granted- I only worked there for about 90 days. In my first month, I sold 30 new cars. First month. That's like bowling a perfect game.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Nailed that thing. I was a little stressed out about it. Not going to lie. Lunkenheimer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
They moved me immediately from Nissan to Highline to Infiniti. Sold 24 my second month. Nice. Third month, about the same. And then I quit. I quit the owner of the dealership called and was like, I lied for why I was quitting. Cause I was going to start another company with my sister. I just did it for the experience. And I was like, oh, my, my, my roommates moved out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
But it must be told. And it might get me canceled. I hope it won't get me canceled, but it's a terrible story. And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So I'm going to, I'm going to move to back to Florida. This is Atlanta. So I'm going back to Florida. And he's like, I'll be your roommate. Like, what are you talking about? He goes, how many rooms do you have? I'm like, I got four. He goes, I'll pay four fifths of your rent, all the bills. You'll never see me. I'll never come over.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And I'm like, huh? And he was like, yeah, don't leave. And I'm like, oh, I'm good at this. This dude doesn't want to lose me. So I was probably like, I'm actually going to open another company with somebody else. Anyway, long story short, but this story I'm going to tell that it's going to get me canceled. So where this place was in Atlanta was in Decatur, which has a heavy Indian population. Now,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I know. I was a little stressed out about it. So, bro, thanks for coming in, man. It's good to see you. I know these Vegas podcast tours can get a little arduous. And what conversation are you on right now with May? How many have you had in the last 48 hours?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I don't say this as a matter of race. I say it as a matter of culture. The culture within the Indian community, from what I have personally experienced and heard and seen, is they are ruthless negotiators. They're not happy until literally they're yelling at each other.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And anyway, I had never negotiated against people of that culture.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
And because where we were, it happened all the time. So one day, right, like my first or second week, now the used car manager here was a dude named James Myrick. Okay. And he was ghetto Don King is the only thing I can say. Had the gold tooth, had the chains, had the, I mean, had the rings. I mean, you take a car up there and you'd be like, oh no, this car has been hit more times than Joe Louis.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
I mean, it doesn't matter what you took up there to get appraised. Yep. Oh, this thing's a piece of junk. I don't know if it's going to make it back down the hill. Everything has a mouth. Anyway, so one day some Indians came in and they were on the ad car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
On the ad car, which doesn't exist. Sorry, I don't make the rules. I didn't do this. It's just I worked there. So they grab another car and then they start grinding that we want the same price. We just want, no, we want the same price. And I'm like, bro, bro, bro. And this was on a Saturday, which is like in the car business, we make your money. And this went on all day, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
It went on like two and a half hours. I miss lunch. I miss this. I see people just cars fly out the door and I'm just, these people wouldn't leave. I'm like, guys, seriously, we're not, nope, we're not leaving. We're not leaving until we get it. They would not get out of my office. Yeah. Until finally, I'm like, I'm like, I'm just not coming back until finally they back down and they finally left.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Okay. After like three hours. And I'm just fuming that this went this long, lost a whole Saturday, whatever. Here comes James market. Cause he kind of saw what happened. He goes. that's your first group of hard negotiators? I said, yeah, it's my first group. He goes, okay, come on, man. Do we get lunch? I said, no, I miss lunch. He goes, come with me. I said, no, I don't want to eat anything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
He goes, just come with me anyway. I'm going to teach you something. I said, all right. So we walk across the street and there was a blimpy sub shop there and we walk in. And he's talking to me. He's like, you sure you don't want anything? I said, no, I don't want anything. He goes, give me a foot long turkey. And the little guy is making it. And because again, we're in Decatur.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
So a heavy Indian population there. This particular location was also owned by Indian business people. He's like, you know, tell him about the car business. And man, well, you can't, you can't let people do that. And you can't. Oh yeah. Put some more tomatoes on that. No, no, do this. Put some onions on that. Okay. No, no, you got to do this. But okay. No, can I get some extra oil? Gets to the end.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Yeah, it's a lot, dude. There's too many of us in Vegas. No, but see, here's the thing, though. If I was in like Des Moines, Iowa, yeah, you're coming to Des Moines, Iowa.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Bank Robber to Sales Success: Luke Lunkenheimer's Journey of Redemption and Resilience
Guy rings it up and goes, that'll be $6.50. He looks at him and goes, oh no, I can get that same sub for $2 down the street. He goes, I'll give you $2 drive out for it. Guy's like, what? He goes, I'll give you $2 for that sub drive out. No tax. That's all I'm paying. And the guy, he got so furious and threw us out of the blimpy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Just interview me and let's go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Did you have a deal before you started or did you just start with Tull in a manuscript and then submitted it to the big five and went down that route?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, well, that's a good thing, man. That's a good thing. So I want to get started, obviously, because you are the apex of your career. You are the top dog in your field, I feel. Thank you. And you don't reach that kind of excellence without having some type of internal drive that was embedded in you through youth, through your childhood. My youth, as they would say. Youth, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yep.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I would guesstimate that's probably right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Why did Tall not write the proposal? For those of you that don't know, when you submit a book, when you write a book, you have to write essentially, it's kind of a bio about you, your following, how you plan to help market the book, and then they submit a sample chapter with it, essentially with the proposal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Did you have a manuscript at this point?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Okay, no idea. No manuscript. Okay, no manuscript yet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So what is it about growing up Chris Voss that made you Chris Voss?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
It's just where his brain went.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So her superpower is finding something and then finding an avenue for it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And that was that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, it's beautifully done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Did you see this stuff coming? Was this a vision that you had? I mean, is this where you thought you would be when you started this journey?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
you're not Jim Carrey. You were walking around with an $8 million check in your wallet from a book sales or anything. Okay. Yeah. So it's just kind of, I mean, is it just kind of been like, well, Hey, here's a cool opportunity. I'm going to seize that. Here's a cool one. I'm going to seize that. I'm going to seize that. And just one thing has led to the next.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Are there any opportunities that you really wanted that didn't work out? Like what's something you really, you're like, man, I really want to do that. And then it just didn't happen. Because it seems like you got so much. I mean, it's been such a great run, bro.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I've been down that road. Yeah. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Did you guys shoot a sizzle reel? Did you do all that stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
The one that you co-wrote. Yeah, well, you know, real estate, there's not that much going on these days. It's a little bit. Well, you know, considering you are sitting, and I'll give myself a shameless plug, you're sitting in the highest grossing office in this city.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, we sell more real estate out of the box you're sitting in right now than any other company, any other brand. So I'm very proud of that. You should be. Yeah, very proud of that. So- When you wrote the full fee agent, obviously, we do have a lot of realtors listening to this. And even if you're not a realtor, don't tune us out right now. We're going to talk about this for a couple minutes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
We'll come back to some other stuff. But I did want to talk about it because I thought it was worth a shot. So what was the purpose behind that? Talk about how you got started with that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Pre-list presentation?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
How'd you get started with the FBI?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
A lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, it's calmed down a lot going through probably August and September. It was a lot higher. It was a lot of fallouts when the rates were spiking and jumping around pretty aggressively. We saw a lot of stuff fall out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Well, you know, for me... And what we teach our agents here, when you price a house, right? And when you're talking about what the house is worth, you always have to frame it in a way that makes sense to the client. Like the client would never hire us unless they feel that we're really good at marketing and negotiating.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Well, you help enough people get what they want, you'll always get what you want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And that's it. But when it comes to that pricing deal, like we always just present prices this. It's like you're hiring us based on your belief that we are the best marketers in the business. And your property is going to be global with the best possible exposure. And the market is going to either accept or reject our pricing. It's going to, the market is going to tell us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And it's like, if nobody comes, we're 10% off.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
If people come and there's a bunch of people come through the door, but we don't get any offers. They're using your house to sell another one. You can get this for 400,000, but look over here, which can give a 400,000. So that's five to 7% off where we want to be is in that three to 5% off. Cause that's where we're going to give offers and have room to negotiate for. You'll still be happy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And as long as you frame it in a way that the market is going to dictate, it's when agents walk into people's houses and say, oh, no, I'm going to get $1.8 million for your house. Well, that's when you've just painted yourself into a corner that you're hanging your hat on that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And from the selling side, you know, also what's very important is you always hear sellers want to go back and say, well, I need to net X to sell my house. You know, I need X. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
At which point, you know, you've got to frame it in a way where it's like, look, I love when agents get mad at lowball offers. It makes no sense to me when listing agents are like. I'm insulted by your offer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
It just makes no sense because any offer is a good offer because A, it's going to give you something to work or B, it's going to help reframe your client's mentality of what the property is actually worth. Maybe not that low, but it's data. It's feedback from the market.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And I always explain it to both buyers and sellers the same way, which is, you know, when I get a lowball offer, I'm always like, great. Can you help me with your offer? Can you tell me the standard of value your client utilized to come to this number? And because deals happen when parties can agree. It's not the number they agree on. It's the standard of value that was used to get there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And if everybody can utilize the same standard of value, well, now we can negotiate.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Now we can make a deal work. But just because you want to make X and you wanted to offer X, neither one of those variables mean anything to the other side.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
You got to bring it to a better place. Right. Which is what we try to teach here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I think I may have.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Let me ask you this because I'm dying to know this, man. Because like years ago, it's been a million years, but I was in a restaurant and bar business for a long time. A long time before I did this. It's what I did all through my early 20s. It's what I did all through my early 20s. And to this day, I'm 52 years old. I've not worked in a restaurant now since I was 28 years old.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So now it's been a long time. But I still, when I walk in a restaurant, I am looking at my watch for how long it took to get greeted, for how long the ticket time is, for how late it is. I am looking at old table tents. I'm pulling the place apart because it was such an ingrain to me. So my question for you is, Can you turn it off? Are you always reading people?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Elite customer experience is one of our core values in every one of our brands, in every one of the companies we own. Create an elite customer experience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I mean, I think if you take care of that first, I mean, the numbers tend to take care of themselves.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So I think you just, you just kind of answered this, but I wanted to ask this too, which was in the book beyond entrepreneurship. There's a concept where the author talks about at some point, you've got to go through life, either assuming people are trustworthy or assuming they're not trustworthy. So the people are either earning your trust or, or waiting until they, they deserve.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So you, with all of your experience with some pretty terrible folks over the course of life, Where do you sit with that? Do you assume the best in people or do they have to earn that spot with you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
What are some of those quick red lights?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I'm out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
That's it. I saw a thing the other day. I'm going to have to look it up now real quick because I saw this and I thought, man, that's so good. It was Neil Strauss. I like Neil. Neil, yeah, who's a great author, posted something the other day that I just loved. I'm going to find it real quick. Cause I actually took a picture of it. That's how much I loved it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
But it was, it's, it's what we're kind of talking about right now. If I can find it or not, I can't find it. It was something about, you know, never trust anybody so much, especially if they, if they tell you who the, you know, if somebody shows who they, who they are, believe them. Um, if they tell you who they are, don't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
And then it says, especially if they tell you who they are without asking them. And I thought that was very, I was like, man, that's, yeah, that's, that's spot on from Neil, which is good. Well, let's talk a little bit about, about the new project, man, the new thing you got going on. Cause it's kind of cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Cause I mean, what dude, if you're sitting around and you're like, man, it's like that, what would Jesus do? Bracelets? This is the, what would Chris Voss do? Bracelet, I guess.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, exactly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I do prefer to think of it as like you're the father they never had.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, next thing you know, they'll be licensing like Chris Voss rubber sex dolls to go with them. No, no, we're not doing that. We're just kidding. Well, dude, that's awesome. And this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming through, man. Anytime you want to come back, I love having you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, it's really cheap.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, you better write a big check.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
I love it, man. I love it. Well, dude, if you haven't, I mean, you can follow Chris obviously online. If you haven't read his book, I mean, again, Never Split the Difference is recommended reading to everybody that comes to work for me. It's just in that box. And now the full fee agent obviously is going to go in that stack as well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So read that stuff, follow Chris, check out the AI, do all that stuff. And remember, man, this is one of those skills. Like if you are not where you want to be in life, if you are not getting to the place where you want to go, negotiation is probably the most expensive. It's the best skill you can develop to get you out from where you are. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
But now the degree mattered.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Back again, back again for another episode of the show like it says in the opening, man, gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today in the studio, man, I'm so excited. We have waited three months for today. We scheduled this a long, long time ago and in studio today. I'm talking about kids. I got a legend, a legend in the studio today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Come on, Chris, you're saying college isn't the real world? You're saying you don't learn everything you need to know being in college? Come on, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah, the phrase you're looking for is ask whole. They ask and then they don't do what you tell them to do. Yeah. So don't ask me at all.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
This dude was the head of the FBI's lead international kidnapping investigation. He was the negotiator for that division. He is an adjunct professor at the Harvard Law School and Georgetown University. He has written one of probably the Bible-type books. It's the Bible for negotiation called Never Split the Difference, Negotiating as if Your Life Depends on It.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
then bang, look at how easy that is. Well, they're not really looking for advice. They're looking for validation to whatever they're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Do you think there's an epidemic of that in this country right now? Or do you think the pendulum's swinging back now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
He is the CEO of the Black Swan Group, and now he's an AI, which is cool. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the studio. This is Chris Voss. Chris!
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Well, I think it's almost become an honor badge to be a victim. It's a contest. Yeah, it's like, oh, I'm victimized because of this. Who can be the most victimized? And I think that's bred this fear. fucking terrible apathy through everything. It's just like, let me, instead of being introspective about my problems, let me look outward for all of my issues.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Why the world is happening to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Mm-hmm. Well, the thing I love about it is, and I tell my kids all the time, I'm like, look, if you can just maintain a massive sense of self-responsibility for everything that happens to you, everything you do, you're going to eat these other kids for lunch. Extreme ownership. You're going to be a savage. Yeah, you're going to be a savage by the time you move.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
No, just, I mean, in my house, fair is a bad word. I say fair is where you get cotton candy and popcorn. I don't know what you're talking about. There's no such thing as fair. It doesn't exist. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about, I'm really interested, man. I think everybody's kind of, you're such an icon at this point, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
You went from, and seemingly you came out of nowhere. And I know that every overnight success story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Yeah. Every, every overnight success story has 15 years of grind behind it. Right. So I'm really interested, you know, obviously did the FBI negotiation thing. I'm interested in the time period really between nobody knows who Chris Foss is and you are on everybody's reading list. Like, I mean, it was, it seemed like it happened overnight that everybody I knew had this book, including me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
How are we doing, man?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
So what was it that like, what is that journey?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Good to see you. And another fellow Las Vegas or a Las Vegas. I am residing here these days, which we like. Yeah. We, we, we always like having our neighbors come on. I'm, I'm sorry that it was such a long drive from your side of town to my side of town. It's getting longer every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Iowa Roots to International Negotiator: Chris Voss on Success, Perseverance, and Building Trust
Was it your idea to write the book, or did somebody come to you and say we should write a book?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Today's episode of Escaping the Drift is brought to you by Mando. Are you somebody that stinks? I know, that sounds crazy. Or more to the point, you got a teenager that stinks. Because, wow, this Mando stuff, they sent me a package of it to try out. And if you've got that weird odor emanating out of your teen's room, try Mando All Over Deodorant.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That is, yeah, I mean, that is, that is, dude, I've been doing this for a long time, right? That's probably the best example I've ever heard of identifying a buying market, identifying a target rich environment, no pun intended, I'm shooting, but just being able to identify who you're selling to. So how do you take that methodology and translate it into other industries? How do you do it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
What year were you with Wendy Williams?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I was on her show like 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. Yeah. And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yeah, for me, man, my superpower, and I say my superpower, I probably picked it up from Dan Fleischman, who is a friend of mine, and he always says his superpower was his phone. And I've taken on that same idea, that same persona, where when I meet somebody and they start talking about what they're doing or how it can help, I don't really look for – I don't ask, how can I help you? I just think –
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
who do i know that could help this person what connection can make this idea go faster further create a sale create revenue help both parties and they're like you know i'll say like oh you know you got to meet my friend bill i think bill could really help you with what they're doing this is what they're doing this is why it would work together here give me your number i'm going to connect you guys right and then a that is a really simple way to connect with somebody else yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
and somebody saving and if you want somebody to save you in your phone in their phone dude get their number in yours and then do a three-way text with somebody that can help them yeah it's over we're gonna save they're gonna yeah they're gonna save that and i try to always think every time i'm in a situation some business i'm like how can i connect them with they could help make this go faster right or help what they're doing that's always my thought process so i love that you you come from that place of giving and you do that
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
So let's talk about when you wrote this book, man, because you've written a bunch of books now, right? Yeah, like 22. Like 22 books. All right. So that first one, so that, and here's the thing, you've been doing this since before AI would spit a book out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That was the first book. What was it like when you were writing that book and you were going through it? Did you know who you wanted to take it to as far as a publisher? What was the goal for that book?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yeah. One of my biggest problems with people that are in the sales industry is they try to create these different bullshit terms that are like, no, no, no, I'm not a salesman. I'm a, I'm a luxury consultant. No, dude, you work at Gucci. Stop. Just you. It's okay. And I think that's the thing. So many people have just made it in their own mind to load what they do. Like, you asked me what I do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
back again back again for another episode of the podcast like it says in the opening man gets you from where you are to where you want to be and today beamed from the interwebs right into the studio i got a dude that has worked in the broadcasting industry with such greats as charlemagne it's just this dude's resume goes on like crazy and he has developed some systems and some processes to help you achieve some things that you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Like, dude, we sell. Like, I am an elite level salesperson. That is what I do. That's what we do. And I own that. I don't try to sugarcoat it as in my industry, because in real estate, you know, certain people are like, we are a homeowner.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
home lifestyle consultant no dude you sell houses that's what you do own it just be good at it because there's nothing wrong with it because the world needs sales people and i think that because again if you come at it from a place where you're problem solving and you're actually getting there there's so many people that need a good sales person to get them where they are where they need to go you know i found one of the interesting things i found about about the car dealership
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
was the people that let you do your thing always seemed to get a better deal and were happier. And the people that wanted to fight you tooth and nail almost got their heads popped off and they always left mad. It was crazy. So like, what do you think people can do in the sales industry to make the image of what we do better?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Okay, so that leads me to my next question based on what you just said, which is, what is your genuine feeling about some of the alpha sales gurus that are out on the internet right now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yeah. I just, I look at some of it and you see it. I like, I don't, I try not to follow a lot of the people, but occasionally I'll be at an event or speaking somewhere and I'll walk around the corner. I'll see what he's talking about. Like, oh, great. Here's this person. And I just feel like.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
like I hate the alpha culture dude like I'm in the gym every single day I do my thing but I'm not standing in front of a mirror going like I just I hate that culture I think it's so stupid it's just it's just dumb and I think
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
know there's a movie i hate to say this but there's a movie out there uh maybe you've seen it maybe haven't it's uh what is it it's a luke luke wilson oh the one where he falls asleep and then um terry crews becomes the president yes yeah yeah he's the smartest guy in the world exactly And I just watched that movie and I just, I see it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And I'm going to say it's not frat boys because the people follow these guys don't have an education at all. And I just see them grunting and I get fired up and I just see this and I'm like, bro, this is the dumbing down of America in real time. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
got to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Dave Anderson. Dave, how are you, man? I don't have any interesting complaints, man. Thanks so much for having me. Interesting complaints.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
on it live in color and some of the stuff that i see that people teach is just so transparently stupid like if anybody ever walked up to me and said half of the stuff that comes out of some of these sales trainers mouths i'd be like bro you got to be kidding me for example let's talk about this because cold calls you are in sales cole carls are a way of life yes i want to talk about i made a video the other day
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
on my Instagram. And it was basically, I got victimized by a cold call. That's what I said. I got victimized by a cold call. And I said, this dude calls me and first thing out of his mouth is, hey, this is John, blah, blah, blah. How are you doing today? And I'm like, okay, sales call. There you go. And he's like, so my CEO asked me to reach out to you. I'm like, really? Who's your CEO?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
He's like, what's up? You know, Bob Smith or whatever. I'm like, how does Bob Smith know me? And he's like, uh well like dude and he just fumbled and fumbled and i said and i just i eventually just let him off the hook and it's funny i made this video like like the ten commandments of sale of cold calling is if you're gonna do it and i said i'll start it out number one
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Never ask anybody, how you doing today? Because as soon as you say that, and they always do it in that same cadence. How you doing today? It's like, I instantly know you're a salesperson. You don't know me. When is the last time you called one of your friends and said, hey, Dan, how are you doing today?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
never you say what's up man hey hey what's happening how you doing today nobody i know your sales number two don't tell me your ceo asked me to call you that's the new one of the invoke things oh they asked me to call you unless you're ready to be called on it because this dude was not And it just went on and on and on.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And the funny thing was the first comment that I got back on that video and I made it was some dude said, he goes, I mean, if you get victimized by getting a sales call, I mean, you're a little soft. And I'm like, okay, bro, you don't understand what I was trying to say.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
If Gordon Ramsay goes into a restaurant and they serve him a terrible meal, he's going to say, this chef just victimized me because he's a master. Yes, I'm very good at what I do. So if somebody does it sloppily, I'm saying you victimize me. So what sends you walk me through what makes a good sales call?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
At home in Philly, are you still, is the hangover still going from the Super Bowl win, I'm guessing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I want to back up real quick because you said know who you're calling or know about them, right? Right. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they try to sell the same way to the same people always, right? Like if you are in a business that you're selling tools or services to salespeople, Don't sell them like you would everybody else. You just cannot do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That's why like, look, I think salespeople are actually the easiest people to sell to if you do it right. Like no bullshit rapport, none of that. They know you have a, forget all of the script, forget all that stuff. If you're calling a sales person, come out of the box with what you got, why it's going to help them and how long it's going to take to talk about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Hey, man, I got product X. None of your competitors are using it. You can absolutely use it to kick their ass. Is it worth 30 seconds to hear about it? That's it. What do you got, dude? I'll hear your pitch. But if you call me with the chunky, my CEO asked me to come on, dude, can we just like time is valuable, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Most good salespeople, when they hear a bad pitch, they're just going to hang up on you because they're trying to save you time. That's it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I do 97%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I got a girl that works for me on my team that went to the Super Bowl. She's still posting about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
She's like, here's your daily reminder that the Eagles won Super Bowl.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
No, absolutely.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That to me is a... Yeah, that's the key, dude. Everybody I've ever met that has said, oh, I did sales once, I hated it. What were you selling? I was selling this. Was it a good product or bad? I was terrible. Well, that's why you hated your job. Cause you had to stand there and lie to people all day. You don't believe in what you're selling, bro. You're never going to want to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yeah, I can see that. Let me ask you this. Why does Philly, before we get into the thing to help folks, why does Philly have such a reputation for having such confrontational fans? One of my favorite things I've seen on the internet and probably the last year is somebody said, hear me out a new reality show.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
You're never going to be any good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Well, you know what's funny that you said, and we talked about earlier, I think, a little bit, was getting in a rut or getting on a roll in sales is something that attitude does everything. You said, like, you can't have commission breath. And I think that, you know, we've all had, if you're in sales, you've had times when you're just snapping. Everybody's just buying.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Because this package they got is, man, I put it on the boy. And I got to tell you, he and his room had never smelled so good. I mean, literally you can use this stuff all over you. I'm talking about your feet, your butt crack, anywhere. Anywhere you got skin, this stuff will work as a deodorant. It was created by a doctor. It lasts for up to 72 hours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Everybody is, you can't write fast enough. Everything's just going your way. And I think a lot of that has to do with what you're projecting internally. And then you have times when you get in a slump, dude, and all of a sudden you're like, hey, man, like my bank account is starting to go down a little bit and starting to feel the heat a little bit. And then people start smelling desperation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Like I always tell people, like, if you want the best deal on a car, here's what you do. Number one, go to the dealership on the last day of the month. That's fine. Somewhere in the dealership, there's going to be a big board in there with all the salesman's names on it with a bunch of X's and lines on it. Find the dude that has the least number of X's and lines and say you want to work with him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Because that dude is so desperate, he's going to fall. and not fight for anything just to get a unit to try to keep his job. So if all of that is said, if you get in a slump in sales, what's the best way out of that and to maintain that calm and still put out that good energy and not put out that negative energy?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
We take MMA fighters, we take UFC fighters, and we put them in the opposing team's jerseys and take them to Philly sporting events. They won't survive. I think, dude, what is it about the passion of the city? Is it just is it a tribal instinct that we have to beat up opposing fans?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I love that you said, feel good, play good, pretty much what you said. Because I tell people, if you're in a slump, step number one, wear a suit every single day. You got to put a suit on. Because to me, man, it's like that's your Superman suit. Like there's a change in that physiology.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Like if you're rolling into the office, I'm casual today because a little nippy in Vegas today, believe it or not. Really? What's nippy in Vegas? High is only 58 today. So a little nippy in Vegas today. Yeah, it's cold, right? That's really weather. Yeah. Yeah, it is, dude. It's cold outside for this time of year. It's going to be 97 next week, so there you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
But anyway, but yeah, look good, feel good. And I always tell people, if you make that change, you put on a Superman outfit, right? It's going to change. Your physicality will change your physiology, which will change your outcome. Two, I'm a real big believer on visualization of things that you want to manifest.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
and right now i think if for me like for all of the stuff we use chat gbt through we use it all day long for a million different things in our company but for me like one of the most valuable that i never really hear anybody talk about is chat gbt is now especially with the new upgrade makes incredible imagery like incredible imagery so dude you can like when you write out your goals and you're writing that vision statement about what you're going to have
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
absolutely tell it what you want, like describe what you're after. And it will create an image of that that is so vivid. It's like a picture and it's there. Like if you go to my gym right now, My gym, my house, I got stuck on the wall. I have a copy of my book in the, in the, in the, the airport bookstore says bestseller. And part of my deal is they have to distribute part of the deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I signed that they have to distribute it in the bookstores. It's mall. That's a news. So yeah, that's going to happen. And I put that up over a year ago. Like that, that happened. I had one that said I had an old partner that kind of did me dirty north of seven figures, and I had one of a settlement statement where it said this deal was settled. It just got settled like three weeks ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That happened. Not all of them come to fruition, but, dude, if you just look at that imagery and you just absolutely feel it as though that it's happened – You know, I don't know, dude, say what you want. The Jim Carrey checking his wallet for $8 million, the stuff on my mirror, it works. And if nothing else, it puts you in a good headspace to get where you want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And you just, I think I find so many people when that bar ball starts rolling negative, man, they just keep rolling with it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That's bad.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
But then it got undone. Is that an accomplishment for Thanos? Like, you didn't get them all, but you got half. Like, what are we really... It depends on your perspective.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Hang on though. That brings up an interesting point though, because I think a big part of your success is who you choose to surround yourself with. I think if you surround yourself with a bunch of people that are holding you back in any facet of life. Yeah. How do you, so, so obviously you probably feel the same way. How do you let those people go?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
How do you make that decision to call the herd, to Thanos out the universe, your own personal universe? How do you make that call? Let's go to your next book. I did that phrase right there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
like i'm sorry this is my movie and if you're trying to take over be the main character of my film i'm gonna replace you you're gonna hit the cutting room floor and then two one of the saddest probably things that i i've seen as far as a meme or a quote or whatever you want to call them that they are that i kind of took as a personal challenge which which was said it said when your father dies you've officially lost the only man that ever wants you to ever wants to see you do better than they are or they did
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And I was like, man, that's terrible because it's probably sort of true. But dude, I root like crazy for all my friends to do well. And I got a lot of friends. I have a lot of friends that do exponentially better than I do. And I root like crazy for them. And I'm so happy for them. I make it a point to cheer when my friends win. And I think that's
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That's something that is, I think the hustle mentality a little bit, the hustle culture that's come up in the last five to seven years has created so much competition, which don't even competition is great. I love Pete. I love competition. I love all of that stuff. But at the same time, you got to also be rooting for, for your people on your team.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I'm going to challenge what you said a little bit though. You said collaborate with like-minded people. I like to collaborate with people that think differently from me as much as I can because I think the echo chambers that everybody likes to crawl in where everybody agrees with everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I mean, I would say like, I have a great business partner in our businesses here and we do not always agree on everything because we've always said, bro, if we always agree, one of us shouldn't be here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
It's probably pretty busy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yep. Amen. Amen. Well, if you had to leave them with one more thing, the best piece of advice in sales, what's your best piece of advice?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
It's funny. That's what I always say to make people feel better. I'm like, well, I mean, Jesus didn't get them all in his bed. He got a lot of them. He didn't get them all. He got a lot of them. My sheep will hear my voice. That's what he said. All right. Well, they want to find you and plug it with you more. How can they do that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
for joining us, man. All right. Well, leaving away from that today, man, hopefully if you are in sales, not in sales, everybody's in sales, right? Everybody's in sales. But I would say the major theme of today, and I want you to walk away from this, is this. Sales is not about products. Yes, you have to believe in the product, but at the end of the day, it's about a real connection between people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And that is something, thank God, that AI will never be able to replace. See you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
It's going to be fine. It's not going to pay off. All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about you, man. So obviously you're a guy that's achieved a lot of success and helped a lot of people become very successful. So I'm always interested in kind of the nature versus nurture thing, man. Tell me about you growing up. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
We don't quit. So you said you were doing TV at nine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
And all of this stuff is baking soda free and paraben free. So if you want to try it out, if you yourself are stinky or you've got a stinky teen, I'm telling you, this stuff will change your life. You can get, right now, Mando's Starter Pack, which is perfect for new customers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
So when did you transition to support kind of behind the scenes with all of these things?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Before I was on her, I was on her show. I was on her show like 20 years ago, not 30 years ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Yeah, let me get right to the top and get out. It's funny, man. You would have thought, man, you would have really thought by this point that radio would be in serious trouble. I mean, my sister actually is on iHeart. She's in Denver. She's number one rated morning show in Denver. She's all talk. And it has been for years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
But just like you said, and I keep waiting for it to be like, well, that's kind of the end of talk radio. And it just keeps on trucking. It just keeps on doing it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
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Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Big way. Big way they're back. And I think, you know, it's funny not to spend all the time talking about radio, but this is why I don't have questions because I don't know where these conversations are going to go. Just what I think is interesting. You look at like Spotify and Apple Music and all that stuff. Right. And I find myself like.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
get in my car and even if you put the spotify dj on whatever it's like the same 30 songs over and over and over you just don't get people don't get exposed to new music like they used to regularly because people don't listen to the radio they're listening even if you go on xm right or serious and you put it on your channel like it's still the same like 30 songs in rotation Yeah, same thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
There's nothing new. I think just like people kind of gravitated back to vinyl, I think you'll start to see. I think that's why terrestrial radio will always kind of be around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
no no yeah dude it's it's where you get real-time information for sure let's talk about what you did after you retired because i think that's where you kind of took off right so let's talk about that what was the get what was the thinking when you retired from radio what was the leap like because a lot of people man are in some job that maybe they're doing well they fit they fit the glass ceiling they fit whatever they're not getting what they want in life talk to me about the decision to walk away from that nine to five into something else
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That's user code Gafford. It's ShopMando.com. You're going to get 40% off. So support our show. Let them know that we sent you. Obviously, this is a paid advertiser, which is how we get started. to be able to do what we do for you guys. So check them out. Smell fresher, stay drier, boost your confidence from head to toe. Try Mando. And now, escaping the drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
Off you went. It's so interesting, a couple of things you said. Number one, I find that every great entrepreneur is chronically unemployable is how I like to refer to them. I myself was an employee for a lot of my life. Miserable employee. If I'm not in charge, yeah, I'm a terrible employee. I'm the worst.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
I did a good job when I worked for major corporations that I worked for, but I was a miserable employee because I was always like, well, why do we have to do it that way when this way is better? I get it. Yeah. That desire to steer your own ship. And if you have that, if you're out there listening to this and you got that, that's not going to go away. That's something that's in you or it's not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
You know, the second thing talking about, you know, I love that you talked about when you get great at selling something and you're really talented at it, your competitors will come and recruit you. I mean, if... Yeah, I got a book coming out on November 5th. If you want to get the book, check it out. Get on the mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
It's coming out November 5th, distributed by Smith & Schuster, which is really exciting. Yeah, but I talk very much the most important skill you can learn is sales. Because if you can sell, you can sell everything, anything. So you went, your first gig was door-to-door, which I respect the hell out of that. When I first got into sales, my first job was cars.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
That's where I learned how to sell, was on Carline, a millionaire. I was only there for... seven weeks. My buddy told me, if you go spend two months on a car lot, you have a PhD. And he was right. I spent seven weeks on a car lot and that's where I learned to sell. But going door to door is a whole nother animal, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Broadcasting to Sales Mastery: Dave Anderson on Loyalty and Resilience
It's, it's, it's, it's that not knowing what's going to happen on the side of the door. So let's talk about what made you great at that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
So let me ask you how you do this, because I found this to be a little tricky. Because for those of you who don't know Justin, if you look at the Apple rankings on business, me and Justin are right next to each other always, right? For his podcast, which is awesome, check it out, Science of Flipping. And The Entrepreneur of DNA, he's actually got two.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
You got a new baby. Like, dude, slow down, dude. You're going to make me look bad. Slow down a little bit. But I've always found that now... like you got to kind of preface it a little bit about the podcast. Like you always have to say, it's like one of the top Apple podcasts. You can't, you can't just say I have a podcast. Come on. Cause I just picture some dude in like a basement.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I would say everyone should have, you know, we talked earlier about tempering expectations. That's right. Like if you live in Miami, God bless you live in LA. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
not so god bless today right you live in vegas you live in a place where a lot of people have to go to for conventions for things then yes have aspirations of having big national guests it takes a long time to get to a point where people want to come on your podcast it takes a long time but if you live in topeka kansas dude and you are in business and your business depends on
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
This is a formula that has been well proven forever. It is, you know, do video content, put it into school, put it into a Kajabi, put it into one of those programs that just, just doles it out. And it's good. And look, I'm all about cloning yourself. I'm all about doing that. Yeah. Right. But the problem is, man, things might be a little different today than it was yesterday. Things change.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
50 other people that own businesses. Well, then dude, spin it up and just do have the people that own, have your clients that own other businesses on your podcast. And then you're promoting their business. And now they have that law of reciprocity or reciprocity and they want to help you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
No, no kidding. I mean, I've gotten burned a couple of times with some of the, some of the affiliate links, especially financial stuff, man, I've, I've stopped doing it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I had one guy come on here and it was weird because I didn't know him, but I knew people that knew him that introduced us that I figured, well,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
you stamp by then again look there's a bunch of people just lost money at ponzi scheme because the same theory right so it's like because he was with this guy i figured he was okay and then it's like all right then i bring him on the show and vouch for him and then you know this is like during the erc credits and all that stuff and it just it just i ended up just like bro just give everybody that you met through me their money back and let's call it a day
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Which he did. I'll give him credit. That's good. But it was still just, man, it's so hard in the hustle culture. No doubt. Because there is, man, there are sharks swimming in those waters. There's no doubt. There are thieves amongst us. Yeah. And there is. There always is. How do you determine a good person? Like, what do you go with with good person?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Because that was Chris Voss a couple weeks ago on the podcast. I said, do you assume people are good or assume people are bad? Because the job he's in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Oh, sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah, I was totally expecting Voss to say, oh, no, people are terrible. Think about you. You're the FBI hostage negotiator. That's your job, right? So I just totally expect him to say that. He goes... He goes, nah, man. He goes, I lean in. I always lean into, uh, I leaned into everybody's good and kind until they give me a reason not to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And I'm very skilled at understanding body language and I can pick up pretty quick if somebody is not genuine and I just move them from that box next. But I always assume that they're, they're, they're good people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And I was like, man, there's, there's hope for America. Cause I mean, look, we've all been, you know, I know you and I have both been burned by seven figures. You're not entrepreneuring hard enough. You haven't been burned at least once, but, Yeah, but I have a dude that's seen the terrible shit. He's in keep that positive outlook. I was like, there's hope for there's hope for the world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
The markets change people's attitudes on things change. And the way that you are doing things, This new project that you have or this new thing you've spun up with education is awesome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
There is there's so bad. There's hope so As you grow your network, right, through these people and you're creating, this is kind of back to the education piece, but again, it comes back to, I mean, I think it's so funny, you know, when we first sat down today, I said, what do you want to talk about? And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. I said, shit, shit, figure it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I don't know. And really this has become the value of building your network is really what this has become. That's right. This podcast. And I love that. So as you build these folks through your coaching program, there aren't really students, they're partners. I mean, it's what they are. 50-50. They're 50-50 partners. And they go out,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I mean, this is going to be, if you look at how that replicates and you look at how that continues to grow. Now, let's say you have a student that goes out and does this, teaches this. Somebody comes to them and says, Hey, I want to learn how to do this. They don't have time to deal with it. They don't want to do it. They're going to send them to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah, it's legit. It's like, you know, I'm going to tell you the secret sauce real quick, and we'll talk about what it does. But these guys are on the phone with you for two hours a day. You're listening to them. You're watching them live work deals, do things that you want to do, and you're learning from watching them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. Let me ask you this, because this is always something that's confused me, and I want to know your opinion on it. Like, building communities around real estate investing, like the people that go into meetups and RA meetups and all that stuff. I'm the first one as a realtor. Like, I... Don't take this the wrong way, realtors. I loathe hanging out with other realtors.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I think it's the biggest waste of time on the planet, right? I think all these realtor groups are a freaking waste of time. It's like, why would you spend your time networking in a room with a bunch of people that are never going to buy or sell out? They're never going to send you a deal. That's it. Ever. But what is the difference in a real estate investor group?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Because I've never been to one of those.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah, because they do share deals. Actually, I say I've never been to one. I go to one every quarter.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
But you see, it's like, how can we work together? Yeah, the realtors don't do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Well, I think it's so funny as, as you are getting licensed to kind of get into my space a little bit, we are, you know, you're helping me spin up the wholesale channel, which is just going to be, we're going to use to acquire property and then do the dispo channel a hundred percent into our agents at Sibley Vegas and give those guys opportunities to buy those properties and burn them or flip them or whatever they want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
But we're going to create that deal flow for them for the wholesale channel. So it's funny how these worlds that have always been so far and so heavily separated are now kind of really blending more and more every day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Welcome back to the program, everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
So, like, I have people all the time that say, oh, I want to come and hang out at your office for a couple days and just look at your business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Both of them. If you had to put it down to one or two sentences, what's the secret to your success?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And you're like, you know, for, for my friends, I'm like, yeah, come on down. I'll show you whatever you want to see. But you know, a lot of people you're like, who's this? No, you're not going to hang out. That's whatever. Dude, this is like your insider past to watch this stuff happen live. And I think it's so cool. So first of all, a little bit of the background, man, let's go to the background.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
That happened fast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Have you ever had a home run crypto play?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I don't. I don't. I just buy it and let it sit there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I have no idea.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I don't even know that I can get it in my wallet right now if I have to go to a safe to get that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Here's a surprise disclaimer. Neither one of us is an economist.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Or a financial advisor and or a political scientist. None of us know that. But how are you going to say he wants to get rid of capital gains on crypto when he's a real estate dude?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
No, what's Grant doing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Tokenized real estate, so he wanted to pay gains on the tokens?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
So, because he's just levering the Bitcoin position on...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
How'd you get into real estate in the first place?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
So it's kind of almost like having, yeah, it's like investing your crypto in an umbrella life insurance policy that continues to grow whether you borrow against it or not. That's right. Again, not a financial advice.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Well, the good news is Grant doesn't watch it. He gets an advanced copy. He gets an advanced copy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
He sits in his hot tub every Thursday night and watches this before it goes out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And approves it. That's on how to, you know, I just said it so directly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Well, because you have entire countries now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Man, well, look, I don't know a lot. Was it your podcast? Oh, no, it was yours we talked about. The greatest press conference I've ever seen in the history of my life, which was Trump the other day. talking about going to buy Greenland, come on down Canada, 51st state, go for America. That's it. And people don't understand what he was doing, and they just don't understand the posturing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Dude, Trump is the greatest closer ever, dude. He's negotiating. You throw a bunch of stuff out, and then you settle for what you really want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
That is business 101, man. It's magic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
He's like, yeah, it's just now that he really doesn't care about getting reelected. It's going to be, it's going to be four years, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
It's going to be, yeah, it's good. It's going to be wild for sure. It's going to be wild. Well, Justin, man, if they want to follow you, they want to find you. How do they find the new, how do they, let's talk about that, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
How do they, if they, if you want to get in the real estate game, dude, and you want this dude to literally partner with you and help you close your deals real time, every single day on the phone, two to three hours, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
If you go to dot com, some stuff's going to get down on the computer. The authorities are going to show up any day. So very careful not to put the M in. Dot co.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And if you put in the code escaping the drift, you'll get nothing. Just don't do it real quick.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Now, listen, if you're not doing something, you got to do something. This is a great way that you could get into mentorship. But again, today, if you take anything away, it should be the power of your network is everything. How you grow it, who you're around, who you spend your time with, who you're learning from matters.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And if you are going to start out on a new venture this particular year and you're wondering where to start, do go to the link in my bio. Or if you go to the John Gaffer dot com, you click the very first thing. It is my very free podcast. very no upcharge, no upselling. I don't have anything else I'm going to sell you. I'm just giving this away for free. It is my business planning course.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And at the end of that course, you have a one page business plan that you can execute just about anything. So there it is. If you like the podcast today, share it with somebody else. Give us a like, give us a thumbs up, give us whatever you need to do. Four star, five star review, whichever one's the max. Anyway, we'll see you next time. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. I think I remember this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Today on Escaping the Drift, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. Man. I got a dude. I got a good dude today. This is a cat. It's like if, you know, all you guys that are out there chasing that dollar man saying, I wish I had a mentor. Wish I had somebody that could show me how to make big dollars. Wish I had somebody that could help me get it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I don't know what I, I don't know what I saw it the other day, but I saw a group of guys and we're talking about something I thought was so interesting, which was how many people do you have on your phone? You could call today and say, I need a hundred grand and they get it to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I mean, how many people do you think? Now, not then, now, how many people?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Right. No, you'd have to give them a pretty compelling story. Not people that could. No, the people would give you a hundred grand.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah, but five to 10, right? That's five to 10. So right there, that's half a million to a million dollars you could get if you absolutely had to have it tomorrow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
There's power in that. There's no doubt. And that goes back to network, which I think is so interesting. Like tonight, we're going to dinner, right? I learned this from Dan Fleischman. Actually, not from Dan. That's not what I meant to say. Shoot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
can see his face and i can't think of it anyway um tonight we're going to dinner right so my first thought when you're coming to town like we want to go to dinner i'm like all right i got to get some cool people to go to dinner with love it because i love to connect other people because if i connect other people with cool people then all of a sudden now your network grows that's right and so you know i think superpower that's your little hint for today kids if you're a superpower you want to start doing something start connecting other people be the person that's known as the person connect the dots for others and you will get what you want there's no doubt
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Well, the good news is two of these guys are two of my $100,000 guys. There you go. There you go. There you go. They're worth no one's. There you go. And I'm one of the guys in their phone probably. There you go. So yeah, so you went through the training and you did all that. And I know you just started, you started ripping. What about that education would you have changed?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
If you could go back now and be like, yo, what would you have changed?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Well, this is a dude that's been in the game forever. And what I mean forever, I'm talking about has currently has one of the, has a bestseller on Amazon in real estate investing. Has a dope-ass family, a beautiful house, living the life in Miami. And he has way less hair than I have, which is about the only thing I'm winning at today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
You just described my office. My office is a glass box in the lobby.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
It's literally a glass cube in the office.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Weird how it works. I get it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Same idea.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. It's, it's, it's honestly, it has the same way I do it with agents, man. I put agents on my team, they work my deal, they work my leads for 50, 50 split. And then eventually they get, you know, they either, half of them like want to stay forever because they don't want to deal with the marketing side of it. They're just happy. They just want to close deals.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And then the other half of them gets a point where they're like, I think I can do this on my own. And I'm like, great, just do it in the brokerage and leave my team, but stay here. And there's so many of our top producers in Simply Vegas that at some point over the last, you know, 16 years were on my team at some point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And there they go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
What was the assignment fee on her first deal?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
$16,000. $16,000.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. No, dude, I love that. Oh, it's so funny. You just said, I just, I just realized, I forgot to talk to you about you were at Fleischman's yacht party in Miami last week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. I'm like, I'm like, yep. Eric Wolfer. Okay. This is addictive. Okay. I'm like, I know him. I know him. I know him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Let's talk about, let's, let's shift gears and talk about that. That's something we could talk about as far as how to, how to be successful in a room like that. So let's say, you know, look, we talk about people. We talk about being connected to people is the way to get to the next level. How do you, when you walk in a room like that, how do you connect with others? How do you do it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Walk me through that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
What's up, man? Thanks, man. Dude, I appreciate you coming in, in from Miami. Good to see you, brother.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
I know somebody for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
You know this guy. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Yeah. I think that, I think for me, and I've said this before on the podcast, but I think for me in those, in those, those groups, my, my, my trick or my, my little curve ball is always, I say, Hey man, tell me about you. And when people start saying, well, I own this or I do this and I work at this company, I'm so-and-so I'm like, No, no, no, no. I don't give a, not what do you do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Tell me about you. Where are you from? Your wife got kids. What do you like to do? Like, I need to see if I like you as a human before I give a shit about what you do. And then when you asked me that in a big networking event, bro, their brain just skips a beat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
Good to see it, man. I got to tell you, I wanted to have you on because I'm watching what you're doing with the new deal. And I, I like it so much more than what all the other kind of educators are doing. Right. Yeah. So like you see these, like join my coaching program, get my coaching program. And dude, and here's the thing. Don't be mad at them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
And, and I've always tried and I've always said in, in, in groups like that, it's way more important to be memorable and have a good memory.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
You know, it's funny. The first time it happened to me, I thought it was really weird. I met, who's the guy? Who's the guy? I think he's in Phoenix. He's Vietnamese, maybe owns a shit ton of property. You know what I'm talking about? Or Dallas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
That's when, yes. All right. The first time I met Datch, I couldn't remember his name. First time I met him, We're at an event and he goes, oh, let's get a picture. Let's get a picture. And I was like, okay. And he took a picture and he texts it to me. And I couldn't, I was like, why is like, that was so weird. And then I realized why. So he remembered who the hell I was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Real Estate Education: Networking, Resilience, and the Future with Justin Colby
What a move. What a move that is. So if you're in a group, you're like, let's get a picture. I'll text it to you. And that's a great way. Cause then they'll remember who that was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
When somebody is interested, they come up with stories and reasons and excuses of why it can't be done or why they won't do it. It says they allow their current circumstances or their past failures and traumas to control their thinking, thereby repeating the same patterns over and over and over again, which lead to the same results. It says, but people who are committed...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
My idea of myself, the paradigm I had of myself was not right. Only because of school.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah. But I think so many people, though, get stuck in that paradigm. And I think what you just said is a fable for this example. This is if you're around people with that scarcity mindset, that limiting belief mindset, you're going to adopt it. And when you get around somebody. Yeah. That has that just growth mindset and that just achiever mindset.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It's so unbelievable for people to think that people really think this way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And it's, it's really hard for people to kind of get over that hump. But once you can, I think that's amazing. So my question is this, right? So what do you think he saw in you? As a kid, here's this guy that's obviously reached a certain level. And I talk about this in business all the time. There are seasons of business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And when you hit that certain season of success, you want to find some people to help and bring up. Real success is reaching back to pull forward, right? And you want to find those people. So what do you think it was about you, that kid sitting there, that he said, this is the kid?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I think he saw potential that I didn't see. But I think in him challenging me and me breaking through my limitations, he saw that there's some real potential to help me. Because I came up with the stories, the reasons, the excuses, and the evidence, and I was charged for And then I let him lead and guide, and I trusted him. So I put some trust and faith that he knew better than I did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
That was very hard for me. Growing up, on the streets a lot, you trust you and, and the buddies that are with you, you know, during one of your drug deals or breaking the entries. Like I learned to trust them. I got their back. They've got my back and there's a coat of honor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Everybody else. I didn't trust. So I'm the one who's doing all the illegal stuff, and I didn't trust everybody else, right? Right. So he saw that, and then the best part of all of this, he said he offered me a job. You know the best part? Zero ink, zero salary. Oh, sure. Commission only. I'm like, what? I went from $1.65 to zero. To zero. But, but, day one in the office, June 21st,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
that came from a troubled youth, as so many of us do, overcoming that by really leaning into mentorship, wound up to build his first big company, would be a Remax, where he had 1,200 agents. And trust me, I could tell you somebody that owns a real estate company, that is a lot. And we were just talking about it. They were doing like 35,000 transactions a year, which is insane.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
1980, he brought out that document with my answers to the questions. And then he says, now that we have some goals, is there anything you want to modify? No, I mean, this is like, this is the shit. This is like house, car, travel, money. I'm like, I'm like, I'm down for this. He goes, great. Here's part two of the exercise. What do you think you would need to believe about yourself to
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
in order to achieve these goals. This is a wise guy. Oh, he's wise. Man. And he had a process, right? So he led me to the imagination first. And then, so I'd have to believe I'm smart enough. I have to believe that I'm good enough. I have to believe that I'm skilled enough. I wrote down all of these and then Joe helped me, the manager. Wouldn't you have to believe that you can do this right now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Wouldn't you have to believe that it's possible? Wouldn't you have to believe that, you know, I wrote down like 10 or 15 beliefs that I would have to believe. He said, now what I want you to do is I want you to look at your vision and your goals and read it. I want you to close your eyes and just Pretend that all of these things are already real and true. How does it make you feel?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I read it, you know, I'm 45, retired, $3 million. I feel energized. I feel excited. I feel a little bit, you know, that's not possible, but I'm feeling this. And then I'm reading what I would need to believe in order to achieve that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And he said, now, if you really believed these things, that you were knowledgeable enough, you deserved it, you were smart enough, and you learned what to do to earn this, you think it's possible? I said, yeah, if I believe this and I learned how to do this, of course I believe it's possible. He says, great. Let's move to the how part next.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So he helped me realize that it's doable with the right structure. So he said, I want you to learn this script. He said, in real estate, you have to do marketing. So I was a real estate agent now, right? I had a licensed real estate agent. He says, you've got to do marketing and you've got to learn how to sell.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So the first part of marketing is getting listings or finding buyers because that is the highest impact and income producing activity you can do. So I said, okay, what do I need to learn? Well, he had the phone in front of me. I had one of those books with the streets behind the office and around the office with name, phone number, address. And he had a script on like a little pedestal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And the script was, hi, this is John Assaraf with Allen Brown Real Estate Company. We have somebody who's looking to buy a home in the neighborhood. Have you thought about making a move? If they say yes, I go, great. Can my broker, Alan Brown, and I come over today at 3 o'clock? Or would 5 o'clock be better? He said, that's an alternative choice. Don't ask them if you can come over.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Ask them what time. So I had the script. If they said yes, what time can we come over? If they said no, I said, oh, thank you. Oh, by the way, do you know if any of the neighbors are looking to make a move? If they said yes, great. Would you mind getting me their name and number? If they said no, oh, one final question. Just so we can keep track of you and your home,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
exited that thing, co-founder of Bamboo IPX, which had a market cap of like two and a half billion. He's the CEO of NeuroGym, which is a company that's dedicated literally to changing how you think. He is a thought processor, a thought leader. He was in The Secret, and we are lucky to have him here in the studio. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. This is John Assaraf.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Have you considered if you're going to make a move in the next year or three or five? And if they said yes, we would put it into this Cardex system. So he had a process to teach me cold calling. In my job, I had a sheet of paper with 100 boxes on the sheet of paper. Box one said $15, box two $30, box three $45, $60, $75, $90, $105, $120, $135, $150, $175, $165, et cetera.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
He said, here's your job. Every day, make it through the 100 boxes. Call 100 phone numbers, see how many people you could speak to. Here's what I promise you. Over the next 30 days, you do this for every day, you will start making money. Yeah. So I fumbled at first. I was a clumsy beginner because I was reading. Hi, this is John Assaraf with Allen Brown Real Estate Company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You sure that's who this is? Yeah, it's terrible. Right, so I was terrible. I mean like terrible reading off of the script, trying to talk into the phone, right? There was no headsets. Well, you weren't listening at that point. You were just talking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I was talking. Yeah, you weren't listening.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So I not only practiced the script there, but then Joe had me record the script onto cassette tape. And they said, on your way to work, on your way to look at homes, you know, which is what real estate agents do. So they're familiar with the area. Listen to this over and over and over again. So I memorized the script. So then I didn't need the script anymore. Listen, I'm 63 now. You still know it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I still just recited the script to you. Yeah, you did. Right? You did. I was 63. I was 20 at the time. Yeah. 43 years ago, I learned that script. I think it's ingrained. It's ingrained because I did it for a whole six months every day. And then he taught me another script. Over the next six months, I made $62,000 because of the listings I got or the buyers that I found because we also did ads.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Which was more than you ever thought possible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
my father made 25 grand that year as a cab driver. I made 62,000. I got 31,000 that in six months. Yeah. I thought I died and went to heaven. Yeah. And then he said, great time to upgrade your skills again. Now that you know that script, he's Tommy, Tommy Hopkins for sale by owner script. And so this script was, you know, go into the, um, go into the newspaper every day, cut out all the ads. Um,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
paste the ads onto these little three by five cards by phone number because people change the ad, but they don't change the phone number. So I learned this system. And then my script for that was, hi, I noticed that you're trying to sell your home privately. This is John Assar with Allen Brown Real Estate Company. And I'm not looking to sell your house. If I bring a buyer, will you pay me?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
If I can find a buyer, you know, to buy your home, would you be willing to pay me a small commission we could agree on afterwards? Yeah. Great. Do you mind if I come see the house today at three o'clock or five o'clock so that I can talk intelligently to our buyers and I'll let the other agents in the office know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Now the process he taught me was the purpose of the phone call was just to get to see the house to meet them. And I learned an entire process, you know, for sale by owners.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You know, what's so funny is, is as you talk about this, it's, This is 1980. You're cutting ads out of the newspaper. You're using a phone book, inverted whatever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The tools have changed, but the skill to be able to connect with somebody and make them believe that you can, because you genuinely can, solve their problem, that skill set transcends all technology, all AI, everything, which is why I tell people, you know, I get asked that question a lot by people on panels, whatever. Do you think AI is going to replace real estate agents? And I'm like, no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And they go, why not? And I go, because. much like real estate agents got, or travel agents got downsized. I still love a good travel agent, especially if I'm going to take an elaborate trip. I love a good travel agent, but they did get that, that industry got decimated by orbits and the other companies that came out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The reason that real estate agents will always have a job is because the majority of people when making the largest single transaction or, you know, financial investment of their entire life, they need somebody to tell them it's okay to do it. Yeah. And I get it. Somebody right now is going, no, I can do it without your help. No, no, I get it, dude.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
But the majority of people need somebody or want somebody that is a trusted professional to tell them this is okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Hey, hey, great to be with you. How are you, man? I'm doing so good. It's so great that we're able to make this happen. I know. And you know what? And I didn't even include best-selling author three times.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Even you mentioned AI, but teaching AI to my students, you know, for two and a half years now and help them grow their companies, their businesses. And what I teach them is even though people want to use AI, most people prefer somebody else to do it for them. Yeah. And what Alan Brown shared with me back then is there's a process and structure for every goal you want to achieve.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
There's a mindset piece, there's a skill set piece, and there's a behavior piece. And if you don't have the skill set, then you're basically trying to solve a Rubik's Cube without structure. And if you don't have the mindset piece, you're not going to take action even if you have the skill set. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So the mindset piece was the inner game stuff, the self-belief, the identity, you know, piece that, you know, I can do this. I can achieve this. I can learn this. I can let go of whatever I need to let go of. I can start whatever I need to start. And I was, the worst part for me was I wasn't good at structure, right? I was good at setting the goal and the vision and what Alan Brown provided me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And then later on, when I got into the franchising world, the franchising provided me was a process, a system, paint by number. And what I've discovered in 44 years of brain research now is every brain functionally works the same. And some brains are really, really good at structure. Some brains are not. Some brains are much more social. Some are more conceptual. Some are more analytical.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It's all right. Three-time best-selling author. So, you know, you are somebody I want to talk a little bit about for people that aren't familiar with you. I want to talk a little bit about that early life struggles. Sure. Because I always like to dive into the nature versus nurture of success. So tell me about young John Asereff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
But everyone needs a structure to follow. We need a structure to cook. We need a structure to drive a car. We need a structure for language. We need a structure. And most people don't have the structure for success. If you want to now, in today's day and age, we talked about AI.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
how to achieve anything, how to stop anything, how to start anything, how to achieve anything, how to lose weight and keep it off, how to have a better marriage, how to have better sex, how to make more money, how to build a million dollar or $10 million business. All the how-to exists. Yeah. It all exists. In seconds, I could have it in my fingertips. That's not the major issue.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
There's three other parts that if we don't address when we're talking about high performance, we're leaving a big portion of what it really takes to achieve. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you teach somebody like me cold calling skills, but you don't deal with their fear of being rejected.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
If you don't deal with their fear of being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, if you don't deal with their fear of failure, if you don't deal with their fear of disappointing themselves or others, you're missing a huge piece of the motive required for action. Because when the fear circuit is activated in somebody's brain, the behavior circuit, the take action circuit turns off.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It turns off. Fight or flight. Fight, flight or freeze. Yeah. Right. And it's not that they don't want to take action. They don't know how to turn the switch off and turn the other switch back on. And they're focusing on the pain or discomfort, whether they're aware of it or not. So emotional regulation has to be a part for all entrepreneurs. You want to raise money for your company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You want to sell your company. You want to take it public. There's a fear of making mistakes. There's a fear of screwing it up. There's a fear of things shifting or changing or not doing it right. But highly successful people learn how to feel the fear, the doubt, the uncertainty, and they learn how to do it anyway, but they also learn how to mitigate their risks if they're smart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
There is a chapter, a whole chapter in my book that's coming out November 5th about risk mitigation and how to measure and evaluate risk. And when you talk about overcoming fear and insecurity in these things, are you talking about conditioning your brain to think differently or are you simply reframing the obstacle in a way that doesn't make it fearful?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah. Listen, like many people, I grew up with a dysfunctional family. I think that's normal. Parents were unhappily married, got married for the wrong reasons. But they had my brother, my sister, and I. And we lived like, listen, normal childhood, right? Roof over our heads. My parents worked hard every day. My father was a cab driver. My mother worked as a seamstress. trying to make ends meet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
In some cases, you reframe the obstacle that doesn't make it fearful. But before we even reframe the obstacle, we have to recognize when the fear circuit is impacting... Like why? Yeah, why? Why is like... Our brain has networks, like the salience network, executive function network, default mode network. These are networks, like computer networks. And then we have circuits that turn on or off.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And one minute we can have, you know, the motivational circuit turned on. So let's talk about... Young men, okay? Let's say they're in school and there's somebody that they're attracted to, right? You know, they initially get motivated to go and talk to the guy or the girl, doesn't matter. But then all of a sudden their buddy says, she rejects everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And she's just going to give you the hand or she's going to reject you. Well, all of a sudden, if my friends are watching and I go and talk to her and she basically rejects me, then I'm going to be embarrassed. And they might judge me, and they might reject me, and they might cause me to feel a certain way. So in that situation, do you try to reframe, again, reframing or conditioning?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The first thing we want to do is recognize when the fear circuit is turned on. So first it's awareness. awareness of thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, behavior. So why do I keep not wanting to make those calls? Why do I keep not going, you know, and talking to him? What's the real reason? What's the real reason? Like what's causing me, you know, the circuit to go active?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And so it's only going to be, you know, either being embarrassed, ashamed, ridiculed, judged, failing and what it means to me, being disappointed. And those are the main, you know, seven or eight fears that we have. And so whenever we become aware, we go, okay, so let's say that I take the action and I fail. Can I handle it if I had to? If I, if I. What's the worst case scenario? That's right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Can I handle it if I had to? If the answer is, well, yeah, if I had to handle, I can handle it. Great. Take action. Because we've already established you can handle it. If the answer is no, I can't handle it. Now we go a little bit deeper. Well, what specifically do I think I cannot handle? So let's say, well, I can't handle losing all my money in this transaction. Great.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Okay, now we're dealing with a fear of loss and a fear of things changing drastically because I won't have money for the mortgage, the rent, the car payment, whatever the case is. So now it's a more serious threat. Yeah. So now we go to, okay, what would have to happen in order for me to mitigate the risk so that the worst outcome I can handle?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Because I don't want this to be an all or nothing game.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I think I find that so many people, their biggest fear is simply looking foolish. And one of the things- Embarrassed. That's the biggest fear. Embarrassed. And one of the things I love that right now seems to be coming out of the hustle culture, if you'll call it, is I saw Hermosi post this the other day. I loved it. You know, Alex's guy lives here in Vegas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
He posted, normally the people that achieve the greatest success are the people that are willing to be embarrassed the longest. Absolutely. And I think when you start seeing these guys of very high stature saying it's okay to be embarrassed, it's okay to not know what you're doing, it's okay to look like an idiot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, but even saying that I'm going to be embarrassed, why would I feel like I'm going to be embarrassed? Yeah, why? Listen, yesterday I was on a TV filming with one of our friends, David Meltzer. Mm-hmm. And I was a panel judge for part of it, or a panel list for part of it, and in the hot seat for another part. And in one of the questions, I fumbled the answer. I said, hold on, stop.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And most of the months, there was too much month left at the end of the money. My dad was a gambler, alcoholic. physically abusive to me, mentally and emotionally abusive to my mom, and moved us, fortunately, from Israel to Montreal when I was five. Now, the reason they moved was they wanted to get away from the wars, the wars that are still going on right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Give me a second. I need a retake on that. While this is filming, this is not going to be edited out. Hold on a second. Hold on. Now, what I want to answer is this. Now, I didn't feel embarrassed because I'm okay making mistakes. I'm okay failing. I'm okay whether it's public or private. I don't care. And it was more important for you to clarify good information than it was to just let it roll.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So the reason we feel embarrassed is because of the meaning of that we give fumbling or making a mistake or failing. I don't give failing a negative meaning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Okay, let's talk about this because we talked about cold calling earlier. And I'll tell you one of the things that I do or I do to get people over the fear of rejection on the phone is we value the no, which means how many calls it take to get to a yes. What is a yes worth? take the value of the yes, whatever it is, and divide all those no's into it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And now every time somebody tells you to suck it or hang up on you or call you a name, you just made 300 bucks, whatever it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
That was for all the calls that I made. Every time I made a call, it was worth 15 bucks. Yeah. Because I had to make 100 calls to make 1,500. Yeah. So it's exactly the same thing you just said. Yeah. I learned that 40 years ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah. But see, now you're telling me, and again, which is so great, I feel like I should be digging into why would you be embarrassed? That's exactly right. So I'm not embarrassed. So help me help the folks that listen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
We have a lot of real estate people that listen. The meaning I give anything...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
causes how i feel the meaning i give anything so if i give a meaning example i make a call um you know a cold call or i i ask a girl or a guy or i do something and somebody vehemently rejects me and calls me a fucking asshole yeah okay it doesn't mean anything other than they hung up on me i failed what did i learn failing to me are lessons learned I'm not a failure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
See, there's a difference between- Failure and a loser. Failure and a loser and failure and I'm a failure. Yeah. What I tried failed. The timing failed. The strategy failed. The tactic failed. But the fact that I tried, I'm a winner. Yeah. So failures are some of our greatest lessons. Now, the question that we can also ask ourselves is, what did I learn and what can I do the next time
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So that I get the result that I want. Now, when we're doing sales, 100 out of 100 people do not say yes. Yeah. Ever. So let's change the expectation, right? Maybe five will say yes. Maybe two, maybe three, maybe one out of this 100, you know, will say yes. Maybe none of them out of 200 and then 30 the next go around say yes right off the bat. So in sales, it's a numbers game.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
In dating, it's a numbers game. In business, it's a numbers game. But I want to point something out about that, though, that you just said.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It is so hyper important to track your KPIs. Of course. To understand exactly how many calls it does take. Of course. If you look at my office where you walked into, inadvertently you walked into my personal real estate team's office earlier, there's a board up there that shows the active KPIs based on their calls, how many dials they have to make to get a deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And it's based on the math of what they're doing in real time right now. Every success is all about specific, predictable behaviors. Well, let me ask you this. So, you know, I always think to myself, we went on a cruise many, many years ago and there was the kids talent show. My kids were in the kids club every day as they are. And they go, yeah, come to the talent show. Okay, fine. So we go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And my son was maybe seven. And then they go, okay, for our next act, Hayden Gafford's going to do a dance. And me and my wife were like, what? So what? And my son comes out in front of all these people and he's jumping around like he's got epilepsy on the stage to Oompa Gangnam Style on this thing. And we're just laughing and we're recording it. It's awesome.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So this was literally 56 years ago or so, a little bit longer. And when I moved to Montreal, I was five and I spoke Hebrew, but I was put into a classroom with 60 other immigrants who hardly spoke any language that any of us knew. And I quickly fell behind by two years in school. So I was getting in trouble because I was bored in the classroom.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And at the end of it, I said, dude, how did that happen? Like, and they said... Does anybody have any talent? I just raised my hand and said I could dance. And I've always said, if I had... The confidence of my eight year old son, I can do it. So here's the thing. At what point do you think, I think all kids have that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So at what point do you think you lose that and why do you lose it and how do you overcome it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So let's dive into a little, a little neuroscience. Yeah. I love it. That's why you're here. Um, was any human has been 110 billion humans walking on planet earth since the beginning of time. Were any of them born with any beliefs about anything? No. Were any of them born with any fear? No. Were any of them born with a self-image and a self-confidence of themselves? No. Zero.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So we're born a clean slate, and we weren't born with any knowledge or skills. We have innate ability to suck on. Breathe and cry. Breathe, cry, eat and shit, and the rest is autonomic, nervous system taking care of everything else. So we learned what to believe. We learned what to be afraid of. We learned what is embarrassing and what is not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
We learned to be afraid of snakes or to take selfies with them. We learned to be afraid of flying or not to be. So what is that in the brain? Well, in the early years when we're born, there's something called the imprinting years. And basically everybody's heard, you know, when a duck or a chicken is born, the first thing that it sees, it imprints to that thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So it basically matches and mirrors that and learns from it. Well, as children, we don't even see yet. We learn how to see. Our brain does not see yet. So we're not born with any patterns that have been reinforced through experience. So we learn from our parents to believe what's good or bad, to believe whether we're good enough or smart enough or not smart enough from our teachers.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I believed I wasn't smart enough because of my school education and doing so poorly in school. That was the only feedback you would get. That was the only feedback I had. So I had the report card, you know, I had the, the D's and the F's. If I got any grades, if I showed up, then I'd go home.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
upgrade their identity to match the destiny that they are committed to achieving. They upgrade their knowledge. They upgrade their skills. They upgrade what they believe. And then they take consistent action until it becomes second nature to do the things required to achieve the goals that you wrote down on this document that I know are achievable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
My father would beat the hell out of me because I got, you know, poor grades, which reinforced, I'm not very smart. So now I got it beaten into me. And then, you know, I went back and repeated the pattern until I was 19. So we learn what is embarrassing. So how do we learn? Well, you're on a sports team and you miss a basket. You miss a shot. You're on the spelling bee and you miss a word.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You answer a question in class and you get the answer wrong and your friends go, you're so stupid, right? You come home in some cases and a parent tells you you'll never amount to much. I know you can't believe that, but it happens all over the world in almost every culture. So we start to develop these limitations from zero to about 13. There's something called the neuroplasticity switch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It's the brain's on switch to create and reinforce patterns. Beliefs are patterns. Fears are patterns. Confidence is patterns. Self-image is a pattern. So we develop these neural patterns, which become soft-wired in our brain, and they move into a part of the brain called the cerebellum, which is the habitual part of the brain. So I now develop these patterns from zero to 13, 14.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And then the neuroplasticity switch goes from mostly on to mostly off. Like we're set. We got all the data we need. And then we are in the reinforcement pattern, the experiential years and reinforcement patterns. So now we look for the evidence. And we reinforce it. Our brain doesn't care if it's the right pattern, the wrong pattern, the constructive pattern, destructive pattern, empowering you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I felt like I wasn't smart because my grades were terrible. I would come home and get beaten by my father for having poor grades only to feel like I'm not smart enough, not good enough, not worthy of it, of success in school. And that was the self-image that I developed. And so I hung out with a group of kids that would go across the street to the stores and shoplift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, let me ask this. Because, like, I have two kids, right? And as little kids, my son, Hayden, fearless. Fearless with roller coasters or whatever else. My daughter, Roma, same environment, same everything, same everything. Terrified. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So what's the difference? How does that happen? You're assuming that everything she learned and experienced about roller coasters came from you. Oh, that's a good point. She's got friends. She goes to their houses, homes. She's got teams that she's on. She's got classes she's on. She's got girlfriends, guy friends, and they all talk, and they all share their experiences.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Oh, my God, I went to the park, and we were on the roller coaster, and there was a kid that almost fell off of there, and I was so scared, and they stopped. Yeah, I'm not doing that. That's true. I'm not doing that. That's fair. So we learn how to react. We learn what to fear. We learn all that stuff. I've got two boys as well, 30 and 28 now. And I've jumped out of planes with them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I've gone acrobat flying with them. I've done paragliding with them. I've done diving with them. I've taken them on every excursion. They've tried every type of food so that I wouldn't have that happen. Yeah. you know, to my sons who are willing to try anything now. And they're not fearless, but they don't allow fear to hold them hostage. So we become conditioned programming.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And then our brain just reinforces the programming, which also leads to, you know, you're in real estate, I'm in real estate. When an agent, for example, or a salesperson or a business owner is used to making $50,000 a year or $100,000 a year or $500,000 a year, How many of them 10X the next year? Yeah. Very, very few. Why? We have these cybernetic mechanisms in our brain, these set points.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
We have it for our weight. We have it for our relationships. We have it for our business. We have it for our income. And any deviation in the set point, high or low, like a thermostat. I always use the thermostat. Like a thermostat. I always use a thermostat. Calibrates back to the comfort zone. So we might have a good month, then we sabotage or procrastinate, you know, or we go on vacation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The real estate roller coaster, as I like to call it. The real estate roller coaster. But by the same token, for example, you know, when COVID hit, right, and people were, you know, disrupted in a major way years ago, the people who had to figure it out figured it out. Yeah. Maybe you made a little bit less money in some cases. Maybe you made more. We smashed it. We smashed it. Right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So there are people, for example, that because it's December, they think they can't make a lot of money. Let's say they're in sales. Oh, I love this. I love it. I used to have the best months ever in December.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I will tell you this, this company, we have the best month is December. And here's why I'll tell you why I have this thing. I have this theory that pumpkin spice latte is like anesthesia to realtors. Like as soon as it comes out in October, they're like, Well, you know, Thanksgiving's coming and then the holidays. And I'm going to start working on my business plan for January 1.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
They all go to sleep. Agreed. So there's nobody making calls. There's nobody grinding. There's nobody grinding. And my team grinds like crazy every November, December, and we crush.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
See, that's a philosophy. Yeah. That's a belief. I love it. That's my behavior. Listen, I learned that. Again, I'm going to go back 43 years. So it was the same then. So yeah, I had my best months in December because my broker said to me, everybody goes to sleep during this time. And the people who are smart that are the producers, they crank it out right now. Take off time in January.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The shoplifting led to drug selling. The drug selling led to drug using. The drug using led to breaking and entries. The breaking and entries led me to jail or detention centers, police departments. Kicked out of school, grade 11, I left. Failed English, failed math, and said, I'm just going to keep doing the hoodlum things and surviving this way on the streets.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So I used to work all the way through to new years, make the final deals for the end of the year. Take the first two weeks of January off. Cause Jan one, man, if you're on any type of a call list, it's like first day at the gym. It's like, so, so if we go back to, but this is a mindset, right? This is a mindset, but here's another piece that you're going to.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So when we're dealing with this neuroscience of success, This may shock some people, so pay attention everybody to what I'm about to say. We don't see reality out there. Second by second, our brain is constructing the reality that we already have in here. Okay. Give me an example. So let's say you believe, okay, that December is a slow month.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Your brain constructs a slow December and finds all the evidence for a slow December. Let's say you're used to making 10 grand or 15 grand a month or a week. It doesn't matter. Your brain constructs all the patterns for that reality to show up in front of you. So you don't see what there is to see. We see what we are conditioned and programmed to see based on our map and belief of reality.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So I know, look, you were, you were featured on the secret and that came out. So this is obviously now we're getting into the law of attraction. We're getting to metaphysical stuff, which I love. I think it's great. Your first book I think was the one for vision boards, correct?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
No, first book was called Having It All. Having It All. And it became a New York Times bestseller. And then when was the vision book? The vision board book was the third book. The second book was called The Answer, How to Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life. The third book was The Vision Board. The Vision Board. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And it was The Vision Board Kit is what it's called.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
The reason I bring that up is because I'm guessing that the best way to change your construct or your belief or your view is through tools like vision boards.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, you use the vision board. So if we think about like vision boards are a waste of time on their own. What's the purpose of a vision board? Well, it's a picture representation of a goal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
of a vision what's the purpose of you know a pilot having the coordinates of where she wants the plane to land the city yeah you have to have a map well you got to have the destination first and then you build the map towards it uh if you're you said you were just on a cruise what if the captain when you hopped on the cruise says everyone we're just going to be sailing around for seven days then we'd be on carnival you're like i don't know what they do that right yeah yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Right. So the vision board is an instruction to your brain of this is what it looks like. Okay. This is the house. This is the car. This is the business. This is the income. This is the charity. This is the time off. This is the vacation. It's the clarity for your brain to have a coordinate to lock and load in on.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, the thing I wanted to bring up about it is I look, I've never been a vision board guy, right? I just, it seems silly to me to sit with the magazines and cut the stuff up and look at this blah, blah, blah. Until now with chat GBT, I am all about it because you can make such specific images that are hyper real.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
If you go to my gym in my house, right there on the big mirror, I've got four images that I look at every day and I feel like what to achieve. And one is bestseller of my book. One is a lawsuit settling. And it's a picture of the settlement and the amount that I'm owed. And I mean, all this stuff. And I'm a believer, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
What was the hinge point that made you say, there can be something other than this? Well, there are two things that happened simultaneously that were great. One, I was traveling at the airport. I was going to the airport. And in front of me was this guy and this woman. And I recognized the guy. And his name was Denis. And my buddy and I, who I was selling drugs with, were selling this guy drugs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And I think being really specific with that, the more specific you can be, the better off it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Listen, do you have a goal for your volume of real estate for the year? Yeah, every year we have a goal. Why? Why do we have a goal? Why don't you just let them do what they want to do? Because if you don't measure it, it doesn't get better. But you have to have a target to measure. Yes. And the more clear you are on the target... You can say, here's the number of listings we need.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Here's the number of sales we need. Here's the number of agents we need to help achieve that. And if we do that, then it allows us to be the number one or two real estate company in Vegas. It allows the agents to live great lives. It allows us to take care of the community and to do the charitable things you want to do in the community, to serve the community. It allows us to invest in real estate.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It allows us to to invest our money in our community and to feed the other members of the community. And that makes us feel good because we can do things for the charities here that make a difference. And so we have this vision. Well, so the money is the vehicle. The activities are the vehicles to achieving the vision.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So a vision board just gives your occipital lobe, the biggest part of your brain, a picture of what the completion looks like. Listen, real estate, you don't go to a builder and say, build me a house. No, you pick everything out and do the plans. Well... And then you have a schematic, you have a blueprint. Yeah, you have everything.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So a vision board is just a blueprint of what it looks like upon completion. And then we back off from the vision board and we say, okay, what are the steps towards that? Yeah. And then we set some goals towards that, right? And then we develop the strategies to achieve the goals. And then, so we think, we plan, we take action, we review and tweak the plans, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I think I want to go back a little bit because I should have said, I meant to say this when you were talking about something else. But when you talk about limiting beliefs that hold you back and all of this stuff, I think if you boil it, I don't want to simplify this too much and tell me if I'm wrong, but it really comes down to fear. No, that's not right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Okay, then correct me there. No, fear is fear and limiting belief is limiting belief. We're dealing with patterns in the brain that trigger circuits. And there's stimuli either from external that triggers a circuit or from internal that triggers a circuit. So I can have a belief that I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, I'm worthy enough. And I can also have a fear of failing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I can have a fear of being embarrassed or ashamed. So the fear of being embarrassed or ashamed will override my knowledge and skills and feeling that I'm worthy enough and good enough. I'll give you an example. Somebody goes to Harvard, Oxford, Pepperdine, UNLV, whatever, and they get a degree. Good for UNLV getting put in that category. UNLV, they get a degree. They get a degree in engineering.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
They get a degree in medicine. They get a degree in whatever. It doesn't matter. Fashion, design, whatever it is. And then they ask themselves a question. I have the degree. I know how to do this. Should I open up my own business? Oh, no, I don't want to open up my own business. Well, how come? well, I mean, it's just so much risk and I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the skills.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So now I have the degree. I may not have the knowledge or skills or I don't want to take on the stress or I don't want to fail because I have other underlying issues that override the knowledge and the skills and the belief that I could do my job or career well. So that's why I say we have to really line up all the different pieces of mindset. So you mentioned a growth mindset before.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You can still have a growth mindset and have fear. So fear is a state that most people don't know how to override and change their state so that they are frozen in fear or they procrastinate or they self-sabotage. They don't even know why they're doing it. But fear by its very nature is the sympathetic nervous system that is activated. And the way it operates is fight, flight, or freeze. Right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And most people don't know how to be aware of that state. And then how do I deactivate the fear circuit and turn on the motivational circuit. Yeah, because obviously you don't want to get eaten by a saber-toothed cat. That's right. It's there for a reason. We don't have to worry about saber-toothed tigers. I know, it's there for a reason. So there's nothing wrong with the circuit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
That's like having an early warning detection mechanism in your car. Yeah. You're driving your car. Do you like it when the light pops up under dash says you're low on gas? No. Oh, you left. Well, but, but, but it's helpful. It's helpful. It reminds you. Right. It reminds you if the trunk is open, you're on the highway. You want to know that it's open. It helps. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And we found out at the counter that he was a cop. Oh, boy. So I'm like, holy shit. And what dawned on me was my father said to me, even the best juggler in the world will drop what he is juggling once in a while. And so here I am looking at this guy that we've been selling drugs to. And he's a cop. So wait, was he a cop that was using drugs or was this a state?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
If the left back tire is, is got low air pressure, you want to, you want to fill that up. You don't want to get a flat. So we have these systems and this is where my work around inner size, you know, came in. That's why my fourth bestselling book was inner size is how do I train my brain to feel fear and take action anyway?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
How do I train my brain to feel uncertain, have doubt, have worry and turn off that circuit. Like, let me take better control over my own brain's functioning. And we're not taught this in school. But every child in kindergarten and grade school should be taught self-talk makes a difference. Self-talk activates the focus lens by which you see the world and yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Emotional regulation is just a skill to turn off doubt, fear, worry, stress, anxiety, panic, and turn on confidence, certainty, motivation, okay, and taking action. These are circuits, two different circuits in the brain that operate either together or oppose each other. And so, for example, Wim Hof brought breathing onto the circuit a few years ago, right? Ice baths.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Ice baths and breathing, right? Well, what he's doing, he's teaching people how to deactivate that stress circuit through ice baths
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
to self-regulate your focus and to get yourself to work from the powerful Einstein part of your brain instead of the Frankenstein's monster, I call it, part of the brain says, oh my God, I'm cold, I'm cold, I'm gonna freeze, I'm cold, I don't know how long I can stay in here. You learn to override that part of your brain. Well, why is that useful? Well, don't you have to override fear sometimes?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Don't you have to override being uncomfortable sometimes? Don't you have to override your brain's natural propensity to keep you safe and secure and avoiding pain or discomfort? And the more we can stretch that boundary, right? If you think about stress, right? What stresses you out may not stress me out. The stress circuit is only activated when the demand exceeds your current capacity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So how much tolerance do you have? How much patience do you have? A lot. How many no's can you get before you break? And for me, there aren't enough no's in the world to get me to break. Yeah. There's always another rep. There's always another rep, right? So, you know, talk about, you know, real estate, one of the games we used to play because we have to make these hundred calls a day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
There was Arthur Chang, Leo Ng, Dave, I don't remember Dave's last name, and myself in the office all the time making calls. Oh, and Eve. And every day at like 4.30, 5 o'clock, you know, some of the agents would go away. And there's always one of us, I learned this from Leo and Vern, we're making 10 more calls. What do you mean you're making 10 more calls? We're only supposed to make 100.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Doesn't matter. 10 more. 10 more calls. There's always more. Make 10 more calls. Now it's 530. Somebody will say, yep, 10 more. And somebody would always raise the benchmark. So the people that were comfortable, they left. And then 10 more calls every day or 20 more calls every day is a hundred a week. It's 5,000 a year. Yeah. You're going to win.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
That's the difference between making 50, 60 grand and 250,000 bucks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, that was like on, I was at the pursuit of happiness or whatever it was with Will Smith. We learned if I don't hang the phone up, I can get an extra 2.7 calls or whatever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So, but, but that's a mindset, right? That's a philosophy. That's a mindset. And in life, you know, I find that people either do none of what it takes, some of what it takes, most of what it takes or everything it takes. So if you want to, you want to win big, right? You want to win big. You want to escape the drift, right? Which are you? Are you going to do everything it takes to,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It was, it was, it was, he was, he was trying to sell him more and more and more drugs to find out our sources and all that stuff. So that's kind of like part one. Yeah. Part two was my brother who I've been dear friends with for my whole life. He's nine years older than I am. He was worried about my well-being. One of the kids that was in the little group that I was in was in jail.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
that's me like when i want to get in shape i'm like all in dude i was gonna ask too because i saw i saw a picture of you not too long ago i'm just flipping through the instagram whatever and i'm like oh there's john he's in a pool dude seriously this guy's like 60 and you're like shredded 63 in a six pack all right so the question becomes right are you like this is not about what we're talking about i'm just curious are you like macro counting are you zero nothing none of it
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I don't count my macro count.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Really? Because dude, like ChatGPT is my nutritionist. I take pictures of my food. It tracks my macros. It does all this stuff. The reason I don't is. It's amazing. Thank you. I know I need about 2,500, 3,000 calories a day. I'm a pescatarian. I eat, you know, greens, vegetables, fish, seeds, nuts, protein powders. So I know what I'm supposed to get. And I know my baselines.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I work out six days a week. Before I went on my tour here in Vegas to come and see you, I was in the gym. I had my protein powder and all my accoutrements for my protein shake this morning. So I have pretty much the same diet because I've honed it in. So I don't need to focus on it anymore. I know what my workouts are. I know what that is. What about the peptides? Hold on. Are you on the peptide?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I am on BPC-157 and TB-500. I'm writing these down. And I'm also on testosterone and HGH. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Because I do tesamorelin and testosterone. Yep. And I was going to ask you just because you're the neurological stuff, right? I'm curious. Anything with dihexa? Have you looked into that at all? No. You know what it is?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I don't even know dihexa.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah, dihexa apparently makes your synapses fire faster. Oh, yeah. It's a brain deal. I have to look at it. Yeah, I just didn't know if you... Text me, please.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah, I'm going to. I didn't know if you heard about this. Yeah, so again, you know, 2025, what we're learning about the brain, biology, hacking, cells, mitochondria, right? Like when I was 243 pounds and 33% body fat, I was eating like shit. I was drinking alcohol. I don't drink alcohol. I don't eat refined sugar anymore. I got my diet honed in, released 43 pounds of fat.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I don't have a fatty liver anymore. Good for you. I got myself back into a state of really outstanding health. But I was deliberate. And what I didn't do was saying, it's going to happen in 30 days. When you stop with the alcohol, how quickly did the mental clarity just…
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
ridiculously take a, I don't drink a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Right. I was drinking a bottle of wine at night and two, three, four cocktails. And I was an alcoholic. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. And so a hundred days was when I really noticed, you know, like, Holy mackerel. Like I feel good within two, three weeks, I could tell a big difference. I was sleeping better. Number one. Yep. I was losing fat. I had more energy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So sleeping helped me get more energy, more energy helped me do more things I know I should do. More self-confidence, more certainty, feeling better about myself. And I was feeling okay. It was picking up momentum. And I started this journey, just so we're clear, 15 years ago. At 48 is when I started the, I'm focusing on my health and well-being. And I made a promise to my sons.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I was skiing with my two boys. They were like 14, 12 and 14 at the time. And I was on the chairlift with them. And I was on like run number three. And you were done. And I said to my son Noah, who's sitting next to me, and Keenan was sitting next to him. He said, hey, Peanut, I'm going in after this run. And he's like, Papa? what do you mean you're going in after this run? I said, no, I'm tired.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Another one had died. And my brother and my sister were afraid that I'm going down this path. And I knew what I was doing was wrong. So I knew right from wrong. I knew that what I was doing was illegal. I knew what I was doing could get me in trouble. But there was this amnesia, you know, around, you know, I'm not going to get caught. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I've done a few runs with you. Like I'm tired. He goes, you're always tired. We're on vacation and you're, this is supposed to be our time. And you say you want to go on trips with us and teach us boarding and skiing. And you're always tired. And I got mad at him. I said, no, come on, give me a break, man. Like, you know, I've been working out. I'll give him my story. I stopped myself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I caught myself. This got became where I said, hold on, honey. I thought, I thought, I'm sorry, Noah. First of all, I shouldn't be raising my voice to you. Second of all, you're right. I have been saying I'm tired a lot lately, and this is not fair to you and Kenan. I said, give me one second. I was thinking in my head, okay, I'm 48. He's 12. His brother's 14.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
said, I'm going to make you a promise now. I did some calculations in my head. Here's the promise. As soon as I get off the chairlift, I'm going to call Ari, my trainer in San Diego. I'm going to have him get a nutritionist for me. I'm going to get into the best shape of my adult life. And the promise I'm going to make you right now is I'm going to teach your children how to board or ski.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah. He was 12. So I had to give myself some leeway. I hired the trainer. hired a nutritionist, lost 40 pounds over two years of fat, got into the best shape of my life at 50. My son is now 28. You have kids on the way? Not kids on the way yet, but he's finally, he's in a relationship where, where we have high hopes. That's the possibility. It's been together for two and a half years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It's coming. So my calculation, I'm 63 now. So it might be 65, 66, seven. We're in there. Um, but it was the, the, the promise was because of not wanting to disappoint my son and not being the role model that I hoped I would be for them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I mean, I think that's the catalyst for any big change, though. You've got to find a why that's bigger than your bullshit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Yeah. Why that's bigger than my bullshit, bigger than my fear, bigger than my addiction, bigger than my, you know, my all that stuff. I achieved success in every area of my life other than that and my health.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And so I got into great shape and I've stayed in great shape and I'm just tweaking it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Well, John, I know you got a plane that you got to catch for an hour and five minutes now. This has been fascinating. I love this conversation so much. It's been absolutely fascinating. If they want to find more about you. or more importantly, how to help them with their brain. Because I know you've got some apps, you've got some programs, you've got some stuff that you can really help people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
How do they find you? So listen, if anybody wants the brain, if they want to set and achieve goals, get my book, Having It All. If you want to grow a business and understand the neuroscience and the strategies- That's the answer. That's the answer. Innercise is my latest bestselling book on how to really use your brain better, how to train your brain for success. And I also have an app.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
with over 600 brain training, visualizations, meditations, mindfulness techniques, affirmations for health, wealth, relationships, career, business, sales, leadership. And we have, those are audio trainings that I will be your inner size coach. And I'll guide you through the inner sizes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And then we also have a video training section in there with world-renowned experts on stopping self-sabotage, how to get rid of disempowering habits, how to master your emotions, how to stop procrastination. The app is like a hundred bucks for a year. It's nothing. On the app store. Go to Intersize.com. It's $12 a month or $100 for a year. And get yourself training your brain.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Like you train your physical body to be stronger. Good for teens? Great for teens. Great for adults. Males, females, teens. Train your brain for success in every area of your life. And all you've got to do is, it's easy and it's fun. You put on the headphones. You listen to the Intersizes. And let me guide you through the different techniques to...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And my brother, you know, 19 years old, you know, my brother was concerned for my wellbeing. And my brother at the time was a tennis pro. He had just finished playing on the circuit when he was in his twenties and he moved to Toronto, Canada. I lived in Montreal at the time and he moved to Toronto, Canada. And he was teaching this one guy, his name was Alan Brown, uh, tennis.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
to refire, to rewire your subconscious mind where these patterns are so that you can have a clear path to being unstoppable. And it's so funny.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
People get so consumed with what they put in their mouth when they need to be way more concerned with what they put in their head. Put in their head. I totally agree with you. Get some health food for your head.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Look at John's stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Inner size is the drill. Well, man. Thanks, buddy. No. Guys, if you didn't get anything out of that, there's something wrong with you. I don't know. Maybe you have a limiting belief that you need to listen to more podcasts. But listen. In most cases in life, if you're not getting what you want out of things, it's because you just don't really believe you're worthy of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And I'm telling you, if you start believing in yourself, great things can happen. I'm living proof. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And Alan Brown was a philanthropist in town that everybody knew, a real estate developer, had real estate offices, and was just a really nice guy from what my brother said to me. He said, hey, listen, I know you don't want to continue working in MyCom, which is a subsidiary of Philips in the shipping department. Why don't you come down to Toronto and let's have lunch with him?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Maybe he'll like you. Maybe he'll offer you a job to work in his real estate company. I said, sure, I'll come down. So I took the train. Nothing to lose. Yeah. Took the train on a Friday morning, got the day off from work, and met my brother. And we went to lunch to meet this gentleman, Mr. Alan Brown. He was white hair, handsome man, in shape, probably 50s, somewhere in that range.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
He was very, very, very soft-spoken. And we just started chit-chatting, small talk. And he asked me, what are my goals? And I said, well, I'd like to leave the company that I'm working for in the shipping department because I'm making $1.65 an hour and I hate it. I'd like to move out of my parents' house because they won't let me bring girls over.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I want some independence and I'd like to buy a car because I really don't want to take the subway, you know, and the bus to school or to work anymore. It's cold in Montreal. And she said, that's all great. But what are some of your bigger goals and dreams? So I don't have any. I just want that. $1.65 an hour is not a lot of money. I'm making more money selling drugs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And I don't want to do that anymore. But you get used to making a lot of money. A necessity. So he said to me, would you mind answering a few questions for me? And then we can take it from there. And I said, sure. So he reaches into his briefcase. This is how far back this goes. Briefcase. And he pulls out this document. And it was the 1980 goal setting guide. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So he says, read the questions, answer them to the best of your ability, and then let's talk about it. I said, okay, Mr. Brown. So I opened up the first page and I still laugh. I'm 19. Yeah. The first question was, at what age do you want to retire? I'm like, retire? I want a freaking job. I'm making $1.65 an hour. I want to retire. Nobody in my family is retired. Retire?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I was asking him, what am I supposed to put here? And he said, just pick a number. I said, well- When do people retire? My father is, you know, in his 50s and like, he's not retired. My aunt's an uncle. Nobody's retired. He says, you know, somewhere 45, 50 is a good age from 19, you're 26 years old. So I wrote down 45. Second question, upon retirement, how much net worth do you want to have?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
So I said to him, excuse me, what does net worth mean? I'm like green as green can be. So he explains to me assets minus liabilities. There's a number left over. That's what your net worth is that you can maybe have cash. I said, what should I put there? He said, well, 45, you're going to retire. You're going to need enough money for like 30 years. So it better be millions.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I'm like millions, like millions. The only people I thought made millions were people on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous TV show. And so I said, what am I supposed to put? He says, pick a number. So I said, is three enough? He says, sure, put it down. Put down three million. Retire 45, three million. What kind of home do you want? Four bedroom, two car garage, you know, plenty of land.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
What kind of car do you want? Mercedes-Benz convertible for sure. Yeah. Where do you want to travel? All over the world. How do you want to travel? First class. Who do you want to help? My mother and father would love to retire them. What kind of clothes do you want? Italian clothes. I just wrote down the answers to these questions. Just made up shit, pulled it out of my ass.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And he grabs the document when I'm done. I gave it to him. And he reads it. He says, now, if you could achieve all of these things, would you consider that to be an ordinary life or an extraordinary life? I go, well, Mr. Brown, I mean, this would be an extraordinary life. There's nobody we know that has that and is living this lifestyle. He goes, I'm going to ask you one question.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And the answer to this question will tell me whether you will achieve all of these things or not. And again, 19, cocky. Can I guess? Can I guess? Sure, guess. Did he ask you what you were willing to give up to get it? Nope. Okay. All right. That was my guess. That was my guess. So he asked me a question. He leans in. He says, son, are you interested in achieving this lifestyle and these goals?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Or are you committed to achieving them? John, I'm like, am I interested or am I committed? I'm like, I didn't know the difference. I said to him, feeling stupid again, which I felt a lot in school, what's the difference? And he smiles and he leans in. He goes, son, When somebody is interested, they come up with stories and reasons and excuses of why it can't be done or why they won't do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It says they allow their current circumstances or their past failures and traumas to control their thinking, thereby repeating the same patterns over and over and over again, which lead to the same results. It says, but people who are committed... upgrade their identity to match the destiny that they are committed to achieving. They upgrade their knowledge. They upgrade their skills.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
Back again, back again for another episode of, like it says in the opening, man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, people in the studio, I've got somebody, I mean, living legend? next level thinker, doer of all things. This guy is somebody I met at one of my masterminds a couple of years ago, and I'm trying to get him through, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
They upgrade what they believe. And then they take consistent action until it becomes second nature to do the things required to achieve the goals that you wrote down on this document that I know are achievable. So now that you know the answer, son, which are you? And John, to this day, I was excited. I was nervous. And I don't know why, but I said, well, in that case, sir, I'm committed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And he leans in with a big smile, puts out his hand and says, in that case, son, I will be your mentor. Wow. And I said, wow, what's a mentor? Yeah. And he explained to me what a mentor was. And then he said, okay, listen, the first thing I need you to do is move from Montreal to Toronto. I said, what do you mean move from Montreal to Toronto? Where am I going to live? I only have $50 in the bank.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
He says to me, he says, listen, successful people make decisions first and figure out how after. Mm-hmm. So I said, fine. By the way, I'm giving you the short version of what happened. I said, fine, I'll move. He said, the next thing I need to do is, he says on April 5th, no, May 5th, 1980, there's the real estate class begins. I need you to get your real estate license.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I go, what do you mean the real estate class? He goes, well, you're going to have to go to school nine to five every day, pass a test, get your real estate license. And then I could possibly offer you a job in my company because you have to be a licensed real estate. I said, you want me to go back to school? He goes, yes, you need a license. I said, but I failed English. I failed math.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I don't know anything about real estate. He said, stop. Here you go again, giving me stories and reasons and excuses why you can't. This is the sign of somebody who's interested, not the sign of somebody who's committed. I said, well, but I don't do well in school. I cheat on every fricking test in high school to try and get out of high school. He says, well, are you gonna do it or not?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
I said, fine, I'll do it. He says, and you're gonna need $500 to pay for the course. I go, 500 bucks, I got $50 in the bank. Could have been a million dollars. I have $50 in the bank. He says, well, I know what you have in the bank. You told me. He says, but figure out how to get the $500 and let's get this done. And I am fighting him like tooth and nail.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And he's challenging me to break this pattern and the language and the emotions that go with it. So long story short, borrowed money from my mother, my sister, my brother. Figured it out. My father didn't have any. I figured it out. Moved in with my brother in Toronto.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
He let me use his car to go to school. The manager, what's the manager's name? I've got a picture of the manager. The manager helped me study for the test and he tested me, quizzed me every day in the office after school. Joe. Joe is the name of the manager at his real estate office. And I passed the test on June 20th, 1980. And I got my real estate license.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
And the reason I remember these dates so well The day I passed the test, I started to cry because it was the first time I didn't feel like I was dumb. I didn't cheat to pass a test. And I thought to myself for the first time, maybe you're not dumb. Maybe you're not stupid. You just learned real estate law. So I had the slightest evidence that maybe...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
John Assaraf's Guide to Breaking Barriers
It just never works out. But again, Vegas being Vegas, everybody comes through eventually. And when I saw he was here, I hit him up immediately. I was like, I got to get you on the podcast. And being the giver that he is, he said, I'll be there. No problem. This is a guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh, you come walking in from the back. Oh, yeah, yeah. I landed on starting mine normally, which is very effective. I walk out on stage, and I just pick up the mic, and I go, I'm standing outside of a double door.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
At Embassy Suites in Santa Monica, California. Love it. And in 30 seconds, I'm going to kick that door open and tell the most powerful man on television to go fuck himself. You say that to a room full of people, they all stop and go, well, who's this dude? What are we talking about? Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Can you hear me? Hi, I'm tapping the mic. I'm John. As he said in the opening, I'm from so-and-so.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
now grab their attention well so here's a move that i got from my buddy steve sims that i really like too and i don't know what you think about this right so steve it did backfire on me once it threw me hard for this so steve puts the second slide the second slide he always has a qr code to capture the room and he says look Do me a favor before I get started. Just everybody QR code right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I'm gonna send you everything I talk about today so you don't have to take notes in your phone. You don't gotta take notes. I'd rather have your attention on me. So everybody just do this right now. And it captures the room right away at the beginning of the talk rather than the end. And when I say that blew up on me once in front of about 8,000 people, they pulled that slide out of my thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
When we were on, this is back in for you kids listening. This is, believe it or not, back before the Facebook, back before this. I mean, like MySpace was a thing. I remember they wanted us to get on the Friendster, which is what they were trying to push for us. And dude, what a waste that you had. We were the number one show on television when I was on that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And so I was like, oh shit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, until I was lights, camera, action. And when I told Steve that, he goes, yeah, right before you go on stage, I didn't tell you that part. You need to go to the AV guy and say, hey, let me just double check my slides because I had two versions of this and just make sure what you're working with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I mean, technology has advanced so much since 2011. When did you start doing this? I mean, doing funnels and this stuff. Because you were actually building HTML websites with landing pages at this point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Russell doing pretty good now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, ClickFunnels Live this week. I, it's so funny. I went to a couple of dinners and people are like, did you go to the event? I'm like, bro, when you live here, you can't go to the events. You just go to the dinners, the dinners around the events. Always good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. If, if you don't know, if listen, If you're trying to be in any type of marketing and advertising, Dan Kennedy is a guy you need to know. That guy, Ultimate Sales Letter, is that his book? The first one? One of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Dan is one of the best copywriters ever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I'd say Frank Kern's probably better, in my opinion.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I still think, Frank's just such a lunatic in the best possible. And I know Frank very well. Frank's a lunatic in the best possible way, which is why I think he's better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Really?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Did you teach Russell how to sell from stage? Cause I know that Russell, there's a video up there. Cause I know that Grant loves to play that video where Russell sold a million dollars from stage at the first 10 X 3.2. Yeah. 3.2 million. I just blew him away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
and to have no outlet to capture that traffic like you can through social media today. What a waste.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
What's the secret? So walk me through the secret of selling from stage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It's too hard. It's work. And they just don't, they can't see it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh, sure. Because you're the one they remember.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
See, okay. There's dude, that's a lesson. So rather than going and being the adversary, you want to be the jelly to the peanut butter. There you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So you stop and say, does this look like work? Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. Hey, if you want to learn how to do what I just did, give me 2,500 bucks and let's move forward.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No one's pulling a pen out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I think, you know, it's funny because when the show was on, right? We're talking about your show. Like, it's great you got that into your show. And they got past the edits. It was magnificent. With us, obviously, when you're on like a You Live That Reality show, it's a little different, right? You're just a pawn. They're telling a story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Wait, so you got obsessed with watching other people's stuff, which is the best way to learn.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Dude, one of my good friends.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Okay, well, good. Which one did you watch?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh, yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Hey, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That is solid advice if you want to go buy a car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh, yeah. That's solid advice if you want to go buy a car. You can see that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, that was a good dude. But one of my buddies, Nick Daniel, they have a company called V Shred. It's a giant online fitness thing. It's a billion dollars in sales. It's massive. And they couldn't get it off the ground. He just became so obsessed with watching everybody else's webinar that he would just say, I would just watch hours and hours and hours and hours of webinars.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And I would try to like... He said it was like a mad scientist. I had them all written out on this giant whiteboard on the wall where I was like, okay, I think that's a hook, and I think this is a this, and this is that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. He goes, eventually I kind of came up with a formula that was based on what was working, and that's what we made our final last ditch. We got like 50 bucks left. Let's make one more VSL and see what happens, and it blew up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You can look up and you look it up on the internet. It's funny. So some buddies of mine used to work with Kevin Harrington and they were his guys. And then they split off and started their own info because Tampa is the center of infomercials, infomercial center of the universe. And they split off from, from, from him and started their own deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And I mean, they had Tony little, they had a bunch of the guys that you would know. I mean, a bunch of the infomercials that, you know, were done by blue water media. And so my buddies, they come out here for convention and my buddies, man, we got to use you for something. I want to use you for something. I'm going to find something. I'm going to find something to use you for.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But at the end of it, you do get to do all that press, right? So I was on, you're on the Today Show, you're on Fox and Friends, you're on all this stuff, dude. And I had all this stuff from my tech firm that we were gonna sell this great product we developed, and it was like, okay, what can we sell that people need that we can capture stuff?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I'm like, all right, dude. So they call me up. They go, we got it. We got it. You're going to be the tax sale guy. And I'm like, huh? I go, I don't know shit about doing tax sales. He goes, I know, but we got the guy who knows everything about doing tax sales. And you're going to be the guy. You're going to sell his thing. It's going to be you. Let's do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And I'm like, all right, dude, I'll be the tax sale guy. I don't care. Let's go. So they fly me down to Tampa. And I get there, and in between the time that conversation happened and I got there, they were like, we got a problem. I'm like, what's the problem? They go, well, the actual tax sale guy wants to be the tax sale guy, but he is not that exciting.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So we still want you to be in the infomercial and try to extrapolate some of, get anything out of him, but try to get some of you into him. Because otherwise I'm going to work. So we shot this infomercial over two days, which if you go online and watch it, it's like the world's worst pool party in Tampa. And yeah, and it did not do well. It just did not do well. So not all infomercials do well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Welcome back to the program, everybody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And we used their formula.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, this one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, let me ask you this, man, because this is something that I would think, and I don't know. I don't know. I'm guessing that if I had as many programs and courses and stuff as you do, I would be kind of concerned about what AI can do. Because, for example, when I need to copyright something now, like I straight, sorry, Frank, you're going to break your heart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I straight tell AI, you're a copywriter, in the voice of Frank Kern, in the style of Frank Kern, write me this hook, write me something for this. And I get pretty close. Pretty good stuff. It'll go out, read all Dan Kennedy's books. It'll read Frank. It'll read all those. It'll read all that stuff and then generate in that voice.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So as somebody that does what you do in coaching, and this can be any coaching deal, Right. Does that worry you a little bit that kind of this computer can get out there and find any PDF that you've ever put out or any book that you've ever published, read them all and then manufacture something in your voice? Is that scary?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So we developed, and this is back in the day, this is 07. So we developed a product called Web Popper, which was really just, you could pop up a website. It was very, it was like an early version of Wix, what Wix would be now. Easy website builder, easy domain registrar, the whole thing. I'm like, I'm gonna push this thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Good answer. That's a great answer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I think that brings up a real interesting point.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, that brings up an interesting point too, what you just said, which is, you know, there's somebody that's listening to this right now and is thinking, man, I'd like to be a speaker, but there's just so many people already doing this. There's so many people in coaching. There's so many people that's, and I don't know if it's just because it's kind of what I do and kind of what we do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
My algorithm on Instagram is just full of nothing but essentially me. That's all I see all day, right? People that do this. And if you are thinking that it's saturated, to me, I would say, man, message is about frequency, right? Even if you have six people with the exact same message, the frequency in which they deliver is going to be different.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, your personality. So you may resonate with somebody in a way that other people cannot. So just understand that even if the information is the same, like you just said, people can rip my program off all day. They can't rip me off. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, now they kind of can. They kind of can with AI, right? They kind of can now. But in general, your frequency and how you connect with people, you can't duplicate that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And my first interview that morning was, was it MSNBC maybe, Power Lunch or something? It was one of those, whatever.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Make their life easier.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I got to ask this because you've been doing this so long.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Started at five, right? With Instagram and all of that stuff, dude, there are so many just – Bake fake gurus out there, which I'm one of my favorite accounts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
and i get on there and you don't realize how fast those interviews are and it's like dude before like all they want to talk about was how much i look like vince vaughn and literally that's all they talked about they put a picture of side by side with them and i was like making a joke about it and then it was funny and we're talking about a little bit about the preparedness and then and then it was over right and i was like holy i just wasted like this whole audience so yeah being able to capture attention and really understanding how to harness it
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
One of my favorite, one of my favorite accounts is baller busters. If you don't follow that, I don't know, dude, I love baller busters. So baller busters, essentially just these people that are just kind of frauds, just, just pokes them out. And it's so funny, man, because I went to, um, I went to dinner with somebody, let's just call them a large, large fix and flip lender nationwide. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And, um, it's, it's a guy that I know. And we were just chatting over a couple of drinks and, um, and he made the comment to me. He goes, yeah, dude, cause we're just talking about this influence or that influence or this and that. And he goes, buddy, he goes, I see there. I'm their bank. I see, I see what these people do. He goes, most of these dudes are selling real estate courses out there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Can't, can't show me a bank account with 10 grand in it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
They're unbankable. And I'm like, how is that possible? And he's like, dude, I see it every day. People names that you would know, you know, obviously he's not going to go so far as to tell me who they were, but he's like names that you would know. These dudes can't put 10 grand together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So what, I mean, give me some advice for if I'm somebody looking for a coach, how do you effectively in this day and age of all show and no go, how do you effectively vet that person to be real?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It's the same way we do. It's like I know and just – I know a call is gonna go miserably when it starts out, when somebody tells me how long they've been selling real estate. It's like, bro, if that's your claim to fame is you've been doing this for 20 years and you sell one deal a year for 20 years, that means you've done this 20 times. It doesn't matter.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Like most people, to build expertise, it doesn't matter how long you've been doing it. It's how much of it you've done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You know, it does matter, especially in real estate. If you're looking for real estate news, Simply Vegas Real Estate for all years. That's my shameless plug for the company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I love it. So it's so funny when we agents want to join the company here, right? They come over. I know that they've gotten these dog and pony shows from these other companies with like you know, let me show you how our pyramid works. And let me show you why you're going to be a gazillion. Let me like all this random stuff they're showing them. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I just go, I start the presentation with new agent every single time, not new agents, but hire new agents. But an agent new to me is this is I just fire up the MLS and I go, Okay, this is something I can see that you can't because I'm a broker. This is the ranking report. This is every company. This is every company in Vegas. This is where they currently rank. See that one right there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, that's me. That's number one. See this office? Yeah, that's me. That's number one right there. Pretty much, that's my pitch. So what can we do? That's it, because I can't cheat that. It's real-time data of, here's the MLS, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That's the dude that can't put $10,000 in. And that guy is everywhere.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But look, I rented this really nice car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And I can rent this house maybe sort of, I don't know, dude, it's just so like the speaker trainer stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Those who can, can, and those who can't teach. There you go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I love it. Well, let's talk about these books, man, because you've written a bunch of them. This is the newest one, I'm assuming, Millionaire Success Secrets. Oh, that was a few years ago. A few years ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Is this to the kid?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You realize that Hayden is my 16-year-old son.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Dude, I'm telling you. Dude, I love that. I love that. My son, we just did the West Coast tour of schools.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Shortly, we're going to go do Vandy and Notre Dame and then some of the Boston schools we're going to go see. Oh, nice. He takes after his mother in that diligence with the grades. Did get that for me. Didn't get that from me at all. Didn't have it. Yeah. I almost got, almost got in the back of the new role, C student, or if I could, or C plus that, C is 2.3 at AVG is what I was going to get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
C your way through school. I love it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
My child, I beat up your honor student.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
My child gave your child something to cheer for during sporting events. We'll just say that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. You know, social media is such a funny thing, man. And that's, you know, honestly, people ask why I do the podcast, why we do this. And it's to grow the network, man. I mean, you live here. I live here. Like, we should know each other.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. I live 90 seconds across the street, which makes it lovely. But yeah, that's why I do this. And again, that's why I push people all the time. You should be doing a podcast because it's a great way to grow your network, to get to know somebody and really talk about them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I already see that coming down the pipe, my man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
We literally just signed the deal with Diversion. I just signed it. I went with them over Ben Bella, great guys of both places. God bless everybody. Went with the guys at Diversion. They're an imprint of, like I said, Smith Schuster, just because they could get me out in the fall. Like I've been working on this book for like two years. I mean, it's,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
you know, it's evergreen, but there's stuff in there where I'm like, ah, I need to probably do something different in that situation else. There's going to be some tweaking. Oh man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
The levers are there. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Dude, I love it. Well, let's talk. You've done so many of these books, so many. And now it really is easier than ever to put a book together. It really is easier. There's tons of self-publishers out there. You don't have to go my route and get a big publisher. I really just wanted to do the one book with them or the first book, and we'll see how it goes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That was my deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Cause I let it, cause, cause I'm, I'm a big, uh, law of attraction guy, right? Not, we talked a lot of attraction, not so much, but I'm a vision board guy, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It's a secret that was a little, yeah, it's a little goofy, but, but, but so that's one of the things I use chat GPT for like, like effectively. And people don't like people I love when they're like, I'm going to, we're going to do a vision board party and let's bring all these magazines. It's like, why are you bringing magazines to try to hunt out something? You may, you may want, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
All you gotta do is go to chat GBT and describe exactly what you want in incredible detail. And it will generate an image. So I have a picture in my gym of my book in Hudson News. It says bestseller. Sitting in Hudson News. And I look at it every day. Every day I look at that. So part of my deal was it'll be in Hudson News.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That's smart that you did that. Yeah, I want to be in the airport and hold my book.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do, I do. I want to say, top of my head, it was 40% is what I pay for it. So it's not, you know, it's okay. 40%, they think it's at $29.95. Obviously hardcover they're coming out with. Yeah, of course. And they also want to do all of it at once with the audio and everything. Nice. Good, a lot of work to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
they say fall 25 which is why i did that so fourth quarter this year did you write it yet yes no it's yes oh god are you kidding me oh my god you know zero chance it would come out no people think it's like it's kind of like uh many many you know a couple of years ago uh i was involved in a deal and we bought a jet right because we're going to do this jet charter business we bought a desalt falcon 50 and people are like man that must be cool on a jet it's like
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You don't go buy it and then you get to take it up. There's a lot that has to happen before it goes. And when I got in the book thing, I started working with some editors that were helping me in New York, Kevin Anderson Associates that have been great. And they're like, okay, here's the process. This is gonna take a while. You're gonna write, we're gonna edit, you're gonna write, we're gonna edit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It could take a minute. It took almost two years to get it done. And part of that's on me, but to get it done. But they're like, yeah, but then a publisher, once you get a deal, It's going to take like 10 months to a year and a half.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. I'm like, well, why does it just, why can't they just like print it and like put a picture on the front and like put it on some news? I'll drop it off if I have time. I don't care. No, it takes a long time to get it done. I was shocked at how long that process is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It doesn't help.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, you talked about Trump. That's why I speed delete here, right? Like, yes, The Apprentice was a million years ago, and I don't talk a lot about The Apprentice in the book, but I do talk about it because with him continuing to get elected, it's a gift that keeps on giving. He keeps showing up and getting elected, and I have something to talk about, which is good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It's a little bit like Al Bundy talking about how many touchdowns he scored at Polk High at this point. A little bit like that, but yeah. I've done a lot of good stuff since then.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Possible. I still have people very close to him, which is good. So that's a possibility.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, I have that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, no, no. I have it printed. He said, because when TV Guide... See, kids, back in the day, there used to be this thing called TV Guide that would tell you what was on television, and if you didn't have it, you just had to kind of guess when stuff was coming on. Okay, back to the modern ages, as we like to call it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But in TV Guide, when The Apprentice was coming out, they had a big article on it, a big spread about The Apprentice, and it had quotes from Donald Trump about each of us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And he just said about me, really, really smart. Donald Trump.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Look at that, dude, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, no, no, no. Yeah, man. That is, uh, that's wild. That is wild stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But I have that in print quote about me from him.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
They're running a whole event.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
The smartest human I know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh my gosh. That is magic. Unfortunately, most of the stuff that people say about me, that's a good, I can't use it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That's a good point. Yeah, that is going to be a call right away to make sure we can do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
If I can't get a new one, which honestly, I think I might could. I still have some, I got some relationships still pretty close to that. We helped the campaign a little bit back in 2016 here in Nevada. So, yeah, man, that's a maybe.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Let's go back, man. So how did you get started? Like, what's your backstory?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Very, very smart in print right there. I got it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Okay. So there's not one there. There is a photo of my office. I'll show it to you. And it's actually the photo that got me fired. Um, so I'll tell you the story because I've never told this on the air. I don't think so. People ask me like, why'd you, why'd you get fired? And I'm always like, cause I'm too tall. And they're like, what are you talking about? Okay. So here's the story. So
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
The first couple of days that we were there in New York, we're shooting press. You shoot all of the marketing for the show. It was a really weird couple of days because you're not allowed to speak because they want the first time you to meet each other to be on camera.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Oh, so really the first time that I'd met these people on camera, I'd spent three full days shooting all of this press where you're like posing like your best friends and you have no idea who they are. Everybody's just dead silent. All right. So they're shooting the pictures for the marketing pictures in the suite.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And the first time we ever saw Donald Trump, first time we ever saw him, they line us all up for the photo and there's a big X on the floor in the back. And obviously I know who that's for. At the time, I'm shrinking now. I'm probably 6'3 now. See kids, when you get old, your discs start to squeeze in together and then you get shorter. That really happens. So I was probably 6'4 at the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Now I'm 6'3. So they put me in the back. And in walks Trump. How you doing, everybody? How you doing, everybody? How you doing, everybody? Good to see you. Mr. Trump hears your spot. Then he's right next to me. Photographer Kevin goes up the ladder, takes two photographs. Click, click. Trump walks out of the photograph. And then literally, like, we're not there or we're mannequins.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
He goes, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. You got to move this guy next to me. He's taller than me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So the guy comes down the ladder and he goes, let's try something different. I don't know, I'm a you. And I'm like, oh, really, me? He's like, yeah, let's move you around front. Let's move, let's move, move, move, move, move, move, move. We go back into the photograph and then he goes back up and he proceeds to take a thousand photographs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. And what do they use for everything? One of the first two. So if you look at that picture of my office. You're taller than him. I'm taller than him. And I'm thinking to myself, I knew I was screwed from day one. I was like, man, because they had just hired two white dudes in their 30s in a row.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Because we were watching the finale for season two the night before we started. And I'm like, oh, another white guy in his 30s. No chance that's happening again. Not to take anything away from my dear friend Kendra Todd, who in my season that I was texting with this morning, not to take anything away from her. But I just knew it wasn't going to happen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And yeah, after that, I was like, dude, he's going to get rid of me as quick as he can. And I didn't give them a reason until about halfway through the season, but that's it. So there you go. But I love that photograph. That one is framed in my office for that reason because I just think it's a fun story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, you know, dude, it's funny. You know, the people that walk in here, we do a lot of very high-end homes. We sell probably, like we have the highest average sales price of any big company. because we sell a lot of homes over two million bucks. So it's not uncommon to walk through that lobby and see somebody that you would definitely recognize sitting in one of those conference rooms.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Just be like, that's this person who's very famous because they're buying a house. It's not out of the ordinary here. So I don't know, some of those people, because a lot of them are in the entertainment business being where we are, I don't know how that would fly. I tend to try to keep my politics as neutral as I can because I don't understand. What's your philosophy on that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Let's talk about that. We're going to finish with this little topic because I think it's a good place to stop. I always think, man, if you go heavy into your politics, you are eliminating 50% of the people who are deaf or blind. But some people conversely say, well, if you go all in on some of your politics, then half the people are going to love you and definitely want to work
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Like, you know, it's, it's Thanksgiving dinner table. You keep it there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
No, no, no, no. I'm good. That's all I need to know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. I got to tell you, I tend to mute people on social media that are loud on both ends of the spectrum. Sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
I don't care which side you're on. If you're loud about it, I'm going to mute you because I'm just not interested.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, everybody's an expert on social media.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Well, James, if they want to find you, how do they find you? If they want to learn how to speak, if they want to learn any of this stuff, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And man, like the opening says, getting you from where you are to where you want to be. And today in studio, I got a dude that, you know, I'd say he's a millionaire, but, you know, he's an undercover millionaire, meaning he was actually on that television show, The Secret Millionaire. He's twice named the National College Speaker of the Year. This is a dude who is an expert at going on stages.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
It doesn't matter if you think the market is saturated. It doesn't matter if you don't think you're experienced enough. If this is something that you want to do and you want to pursue helping others by being on stage, you can do it. You just got to learn how to do it. See you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
until his knee got broken in 50 pieces by Lawrence Taylor, I think.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Still one of my favorite stories. You know the story. If he's one of your best friends, you know the story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But what Lawrence Taylor said to him in the hospital, he said, hey, man, I hope you get well, but if I get a chance, I'm going to break that thing again.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, never go half speed. I'm going to break that leg again.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
A million bucks a year.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
But it based off your skill set and success as a stockbroker.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Really?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So your skill actually was simply speaking. Yeah. You just developed that skill.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
All right, well somebody's listening to this right now and they're thinking to themselves, I could do that. I could do that. So let's go, start with me. Let's say I can do that, right? So what are the keys, number one? So what are the steps to this? Where do you start?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And selling from stage, teaching other people how to get on stages, and really just, the guy's written more books than you could, I mean, it's like over 20 books, I think it is. I mean, this dude's like a walking library of success. And he's here to share his secrets with you today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the studio, this is... This is James Malinchak. James!
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, no kidding.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
My wife's first job in high school was selling t-shirts for Wayne Newton at the Tropicana. That was her first job. I remember seeing him. What a Vegas thing to be able to say, right? That's my first job. Mine was not that cool.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And it becomes probably more appealing because you save them on the travel cost.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, sure. Mark Jeff Hansen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Victor Hansen. Jack Campbell.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Blending them together.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So there's a market for it. I knew that's why you people were listening. There's a market for this. It's proven.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So how do you, now I agree with you completely. And I talked about this before on this show, but I love how people could collect trophies in their office, like all their awards and stuff. I have like a wall of failure in my office. I have a $100,000 bottle of vitamins in my office. I love that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Because 25 years ago, me and my sister started a nutritional supplement company without asking if anybody wanted to buy them. And we just filled up a warehouse full of nutritional supplements. They ended up all pretty much going to the trash with the exception of the one bottle I have in my office to remind me to test the market before you invest in the product.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
So how do you test the market for what you want to talk about or what you think they want to talk about? How do you test the market?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
How are you, man? Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, it is. And, you know, I was laughing with my assistant when we were talking about you coming on about how you parlayed your experience on ABC's Secret Millionaire way better than I was able to parlay my experience getting fired by the 47th president of these United States.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah. So you literally just go see what... What the big boys are doing, or big girls, if you will.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Who are getting paid, yeah. Not free talks, paid talks. Who are getting paid. Yeah. And then you see where you can plug into that. Yeah, and you model. Okay, so let's give me the framework of a good talk.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
And how much of that, because I think a big mistake that a lot of people make from stage that I see is they sell too much. What's a good mix of helping and what's a good mix of selling percentage-wise?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
Yeah, so 80-20 is about what you're doing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You know, so when you walk out on stage, now, because I had... when I was doing a lot of speaking, I had a coach that helped me set up and craft those talks. And it was never walk out and say, you know, his, his thing was never walk out and say, hi, my name is John Gafford. Just assume that, you know, just you need to grab their attention in 10 seconds and you walk out and you just start talking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
You just hit the ground running.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Transforming Publicity into Profit with James Malinchak
That's it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And I want to talk about that too, because we have a lot of real estate people listen to this. And the biggest mistake that realtors make is they stay transactional. They don't realize, you know, for me, I talk about all the time, the transactions is, is the gas for the engine. It's not the car. And too many people treat it as a car.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Talk about, so you started selling, you're beating everybody in your office. What was the catalyst? Like, how did you start? How did you make the switch to like, okay, I'm going to start maybe being investor, maybe flipping, maybe doing this all the way to develop.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So how were you figuring this shit out? That's my question.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
See, I'm actually applying for the job. I want to be the warm-up dude when you go speak.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I just want to get them hyped up like Flavor Flav.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And it might not be. But I think what's happened with... You know, having the world's collective genius online in consumable videos has done two things. A, it's taught some people some stuff that isn't true, which I agree with what you're saying, but it also has made people lazy. Like, how many people are going to go do that now? Nobody would.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I could be the Flavor Flav to your Chuck D, right? Like I come out and jump around like a monkey and you drop the knowledge.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I love that. So let's do, look, for those of you, if you don't know who Sean is, this dude is a beast in the insurance world. When I say beast, I'm talking about king of the jungle type stuff. But how did you get started? And like, well, you know, I don't want to go further back than that with you, dude, because I'm always a big interest of nature versus nurture.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Dude, it's so funny that, you know, like the Chinese, when they were buying here in those times. I mean, see, I had the exact opposite experience, man. Like when 2008 hit, this was ground central for foreclosures. I was the number one, like LPS was the foreclosure house. They were the biggest one, the robo-signing guys, right? They were the ones we had for that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I was their number one agent in the entire United States. I was going to work with fucking board shorts on and flip flops and turn the computer on and there'd be 30 new listings. And then we were just kind of slinging them. But at one point, a bunch of Chinese contacted me about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And then it was like, it was still to this day, outside of Shania Twain, probably one of the wildest experiences I ever had in real estate, which was, it was a bus full of Chinese people. And we would, I just put them all on a giant bus. would pull to a house and they wouldn't even go across the threshold.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
They would literally stick their head in the front door, look left, look right, and go, yep, we buy this one. Yep, we buy this one. Yep, we buy this one. And dude just, and it was crazy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So like, what's the background with you? Do you have like that terrible David Goggin story or just what made you, you do you think growing up?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, plus too, dude, when you get somebody to verbalize something like that, like, no, I am never going to not pay my rent. Like people, dude, it's so for the psychology of that. It's the same thing with a tie down in sales. But like people just have this need for people to know, like, and respect them. And they're like, I told this guy I was going to pay my rent, even though the lease says it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Even though it's assumed you're going to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Did you get in trouble for the work?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Okay. So I'll tell you a funny story. So my brother-in-law inherited from his father in North Florida, a trailer park, like not a good trailer park, like trailer park. And he goes out there the first time and he meets the property manager, Skeeter, whatever his name was. And he's like, yeah, you know, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And this was one of those joints where like they had a utility grid that they could turn the power on and off each individual trailer by the week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And so he goes up there, and like the first or second time he went out there, Skeeter's like, man, yeah, these dudes out in trailer two, man, they ain't paid in a while, so we got to get rid of them. And he's like, hey, get rid of them. And this is a true story, I swear to God. He opened the front of the door. They wouldn't answer.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So the dude opened it with his key and sent two fucking Rottweilers in the trailer. And out the dudes came fumbling the back window, blah, blah, blah. And my brother-in-law's standing there like... holy shit, like, we can't be, like, this can't be, they're going to call the cops. And Skeeter looks at my brother-in-law and goes, Mr. John, he goes, man, people rent trailer by the week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I ain't calling the law.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And he ended up, they ended up turning the power off on somebody else's trailer. And he did get arrested for it. So my brother-in-law ended up having to go, what was funny at the time, in front of my dad. a judge over turning the power off in some trailers. That's why I asked if you got trouble.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, let's get, dude, let's talk about it. Let's shift into insurance, dude. Cause that is a business near and dear to my heart. I made a bunch of money in that business early in my career. So how did you get started there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
What was the first contract you were on with him?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
90, 10, seven months advance. What was it? Are you kidding me?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
On that split?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Were you taking a seven-month advance or no?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
After five years being one of their top people, you barely broke 200 Gs in that business. Correct.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, hang on a second. So your expense, were they providing you leads or were you generating your own leads?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
It's so funny, man. It's like in some of the businesses we're in, we compete against Bemis. You know, we're out there. And, you know, we're competing for talent or talking to people. It's like in those interviews, I'm always like, look, you can go work on a cruise ship. And it takes really slow to do it, you know, really slow to get anywhere, really slow to turn, really slow to do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Or you can come jump on the pirate ship with me. We are fast and nimble and we love to take shots at the cruise ship. And we will steal from them. And it's that same idea. I love that. Because you need, I think, to have a good startup, you need people that want to be on that pirate.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
People treat you exactly the way you treat them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Exactly the way you let them do it. So you started out this in how many ages? So, I mean, how did you start? Walk me through the evolution of this business. So in most businesses like yours, there's got to be a lead source. So did you establish a lead source first? How quickly did you vertically integrate lead source? Because I'm assuming you have got to be vertically integrated.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So you're doing it's all Zoom now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Did you have a scaling plan? Do you use EOS? Are you running anything like that in your business?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, let's go backwards because obviously once you become the biggest or you get size your company, it almost becomes like a vacuum and you create just create gravity to your company. What was the hardest thing about getting the first 10 to commit?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, the first 10. You're in an office. I'm open. Let me get my first 10. And I'm not talking about the 10 you already knew that followed you from the company. I'm talking about the real first 10.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Was there a collective effort to fuck you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Dude, it's so funny because people don't realize when you, especially when you're in a business like insurance or real estate, any service business where there's some large players. When you make that transition in anything through vertical integration or whatever from customer to competitor, bro, it's like some days I wake up and it's like, fuck, I feel like I'm North Korea.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I love it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, it's like I was telling my kids, it's like, it doesn't matter if we're talking good or talking bad. It's when they stop talking to you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And I think that, you know, back to what you said about the letters from John D. Rockefeller's son. I mean, I think if you got kids, there's a series called the men who built America on discovery. Like that should be, that should be in school. Like that should be playing in schools. I don't care if my kids.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Unbelievable stuff like JP Morgan's and those guys doing that. And that's you, dude. I mean, that's, dude, to get to 30, I don't think people can understand the scope of 37,000 independent real estate agents because like, it's just, it's insane because when you think about like the difference between like what I do here in our company, like we have 585 agents and that's a shitload of people, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Wow. But like we have this place where they come to work every day. Like you have 37,000 independent people that wake up and all of them don't do this, but a large percentage of them do with your sales are self-motivated to get up and perform the jobs and tasks they have.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
The only problem was that guy was me because I was the CEO and the sales guy. So I had to say like, shit, I got to get some middle management in my life, which became my phone. And ever since then, if it goes to my phone, that's just it. I don't care anymore. What happens if it's in the phone? That shit is going to happen, which is crazy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So the fact that you got that many people performing at that level is amazing. How do you build culture in a remote work world?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
That was my deal. Well, real quick, I want to go a little bit deeper on what you just talked about. So, you know, having that mom that had to work all the time, right? You guys were kind of left to fend for yourselves. There was a lot of like, okay, dinner's on the table or figured out the can of spaghetti is whatever it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And then it's like, hey, man, we just like- It was zero overhead expense other than a small rental. Correct.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode. episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So when you're looking at a market that wants an office, do you get letters of commitment for office rental space? Do you just provide it? I mean, are you subbing it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I D is you've got to just have a tremendous amount of resilience growing up in that. And I find that interesting that your resilience has got to be very high, but you said your brothers wasn't correct. So what do you think was the disconnect there?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, that's always been the philosophy we've kind of had here, which is like I treat our office spaces for our company like a restaurant, right? Which means I'd rather be the dude where it's impossible to get a table because I don't have any open offices than the dude that's looking around at a bunch of empty offices like I hope somebody comes in today.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
We're squeezing in best we can is always my philosophy, too. I want to go back because you said I don't ever get rattled. And I love that because I could see the passion in your eye when you said that. Right. Walk me through. Walk me through your process when adversity strikes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
How do you deal with somebody when they let you down?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
You know, it's funny in the book Beyond Entrepreneurship, they were talking about there's a chapter where they talk about people are either really trusting or really untrusting. And it's just kind of a choice that you make. And the guy's mentor was like, look, yeah, I've been burned, but I just choose to see the best in people until they let me down. And he goes, when people don't let me down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And I thought this was so interesting. And obviously that's why I asked you this question, because he says, you know, it's either a crisis of character or a crisis of incompetence. And if it's incompetence, I have to ask myself, is this something that I can teach this person to do? Or do they have the aptitude to do it? Or if they just, you know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
whatever I need them to do, just outgrown their seat? Or is this something that they just did this because they have bad character? And that's kind of the hardest thing to judge people. So how good of a judge a character on you? Is it something you go through experience or how much of its gut?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
100%.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, I love that. I love that hiring with core competency, not a skill set. I love that, which is good. When you look for people, like... Again, I'm going to take that a little deeper. How do you know somebody's going to make it? What's your hit rate on people? Because as much as I wish I could say mine was 100%, it never is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, just keep your business card.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
do that CE and keep that license alive. That's all you had to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Dude, you mentioned earlier, you got a BA in psychology, right? And so many of your answers today with how you deal with people and how you do things are so very well thought out in the way that you approach people's emotions first and touch them in a way to get them to perform. How much of that is utilizing the education you got through that psychology degree?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And how much of it is just, you think is just having that touch with people?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
All right, well, let's last question then. You've got one avenue, one skillset, one anything, one thing, one thing. that you would advise people to perfect, to study, to get good at for success in overall life? What is that one thing?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah. Well, brother, man, if you didn't get anything out of that, something's wrong with you. I'm just going to tell you real quick. If they want to find you, Sean, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I love that, man. I love that. Look, if you're out there and you're drifting along, I mean, this is a dude that, I mean, if you think about it, this started 2013. That is not a long time. That is 11 years in, in the fact that they've been able to achieve what they've done in that time. Really. Just by having a higher expectation of what's possible.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
All those competitors are trying to do 50 million. This dude goes, sends out to set a billion dollar company and blows by everybody. There's no reason he can't do the same thing. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
I mean, obviously angry at this situation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Well, it's just interesting because, you know, you said around the AP classes, like, you didn't fit in, you feel with those people, but yet, deep down, you're aspiring to be those people. 100%. So it's kind of in a weird way. It's a stretch a little bit, but it's kind of almost like the obstacles away, like that modern stoicism take from like Ryan Holiday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And that's why it's also interesting that for so many in those poverty-stricken countries, parts of the country sports is, is the way out. It was the only way out of the gateway. But on the flip side of that now is, is, is a, your kids never knew that struggle. So I'm sure you utilize sports the same way we do in our household as manufactured diversity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Like it says in the opening, man, the show to get you from where you are to where you want to be in. Today, people in the studio, I'm talking again, man. Again, just baller after baller after baller rolling in here lately. This dude is has done something that I appreciate in a way that it's greater because I used to be in this business, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Was your mom an absolutist like that? Because like, dude, my wife's mother is like an absolutist. Yeah. got drunk and threw up when she was 21, never touched alcohol again, got married, got divorced. I never dated anybody else ever again. Like, like just checking off the box. And I've always thought like, Oh my God, that what a terrible way to go through life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
How much joy do you take in the fact that you broke that cycle?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Who else has a similar story to that? He's in Florida now too. Wow. Shit. What's his name? Did rehab clinics in, in Connecticut or in, in new England. Lives in Miami now. Eric, Eric Wolford.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
You guys got a silver story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And this dude took it so far beyond anything that I would have even thought it was possible. It's crazy. He literally has built a billion dollar insurance company. It is a massive team of 37,000 salespeople. He is a key. I mean, the dude's a bestselling author and this guy's Mr. Everything. He's got his own unbelievable podcast. that blows up everywhere.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Okay. So weird question. Do you think that that it's like you mentioned having issues with alcohol and drugs, whatever, and earlier in your life, many moons ago. Yeah. That level, because I find some people that I know that have issues with that, right? Some people are addicted to those things because there's a hole in them. They're trying to fill a hole up, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And then some people are just addicted to it because it's fast and it's fun. Do you find that maybe your addiction level to that stuff is carried over and just changed the addiction into now service?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
Yeah, I love that. Dude, and here's the thing, man. You never know. I mean, so literally over the weekend, in the last week, two friends of mine from my friend group in Orlando, like when I lived in Orlando, I lived there for a long time, and two of my friends passed away this week from that group. And I was talking to my phone. I'm like, that's six people that I would consider. And I'm not old.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And I'm 52. And that's six people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
So, like, you get it. Like, you hit a certain age. There's no candlelight vigil anymore. There's no, like, you know, they don't light. You know, there's no like special thing. People just like, I mean, my buddy just went to bed Saturday night, didn't wake up. So you just never know how that is. And I love the idea of kind of letting go of some of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And you're never I don't think you're ever going to replace that addictive personality. You're never going to place it. You've got to you've got to put it somewhere positive. And I think putting it in that idea of. of your client to service to others is, is fascinating to me. And I, and I love that. So you were doing real estate. Let's, let's pick it up there. You're doing well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
And then what happened then?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
From Adversity to Triumph: Shawn Meaike’s Journey to Building a Billion-Dollar Insurance Empire
You've seen them everywhere, Fox News, everything else. Guys, we are so blessed to have in studio today, this is Sean Mike. Sean.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
from the podcast to get you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop back again everybody for another episode of the weekly drop my solo pod from the podcast to get you from where you are right now to where you want to be man escaping the drift
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And again, they do change from time to time, but these are the ones that, man, a lot of these I come back to. I've read a couple of these several times. I go back to them a lot. And I'm going to start out with my number one. Number one on the list with a bullet, dude. This is what I tell people to read this all the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
If you've listened to this program with any type of frequency, you've probably heard me say it. But my number one favorite book is The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
It is a book where Ryan takes a modern look at classic Stoicism, where he looks at famous historical figures like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, all of the famous Stoics from ancient Greece, and takes their work and lays it out in a way where it makes sense to you. This is, I will say, the book that had the biggest profound impact
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
Influence on my life as far as like reading something and having a moment where I'm like, whoa This is stuff that I need to implement now And really change The way that I look at things Because I was the dude that meant I would go really high and really low Like if you're if you're one of those people like when things are good, you're like yeah, and when things are bad You're like I can't get out of bed
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
If that's you on an emotional rollercoaster about the situations that life serves up, this book is for you. Because essentially what you're trying to do by adapting a stoic look or the stoicism type philosophy is you're trying to avoid those mega highs and those mega lows. It really comes down to just being even keel.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And as problems arise and as they occur, like they always do, it presents you with an opportunity to say, how can I take this and turn it into a win? This is the way. And it really, it makes you dive into challenges in a way. that are different instead of maybe shucking away from the hard path or shucking away from things that don't make a lot of sense or seem scary.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
Glad to have you today, man. And as you know, it's the new year. It's, you know, the new year's in full swing. And I always get the same questions around this time here. You know, what should I do for success? As people start business planning and start planning everything out, doing vision boards and all type of stuff. And, you know, inevitably it gets around to, hey, what books should I read?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
It's like, man, success is on the other side of that. So I cannot recommend that book enough. It will help you in like this podcast, life, money, business, life, money, success. It'll help you in all of those things, all of those things. But You're never gonna have any type of success if you got bad habits. My second book is Atomic Habits by James Clear. This is really...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
It's a manual for how to break the crappy habits in the limiting beliefs that are holding you back and replace them with better habits that will lead to success. And really the theme of the book is learning how to implement small incremental improvements that will just compound over time. And if you do this, it leads to significant results rather than trying to make drastic changes right away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And if you're a person that wants to focus on building better habits, there's just nothing more I can say about that book. It just is amazing. Now, if you got good habits and you understand that the obstacle's the way, well, you're gonna need some people around you to maybe level up and get to the next level. And that's where probably the Bible of relationships
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
is my number three on the list, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. If you've never read this, I read this book religiously once a year. It comes up, it's almost like on a schedule for me to try to remind me how to interact with other people. And this book has been around for a really long time for a reason.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And we're still talking about it because the concepts that, that Carnegie teaches in that book, things like active listening, you know, look, telling you to, if you want people to be interested in you, you gotta be interested in them. And, you know, just walking you through how to make people feel valued. If you start implementing some of the stuff that happens and,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
you're going to see that the success in every aspect of your life will grow because all success really depends on how well you connect with other people because you're never going to get there by yourself. You need a tribe of people to go with you. So focusing on things like empathy and kindness and understanding how to deal with people and making yourself more likable is is clutch.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
One of the reasons I wanna do this is because this book made it back to the top of my list today, because this is a true thing about me. I woke up this morning At 5 a.m., I woke up this morning. And no, I'm not an alarmer at 5 a.m., get up and run 20 miles. Yes, I did work out this morning, but that's not part of my routine. The 5 a.m.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
was one of those rando, clock goes off, eyes go super wide, holy shit, 5 o'clock in the morning. And I just immediately opened my eyes, and I had this impending sense of dread that my public persona had become incredibly unlikable. I don't know why I had that feeling. Nothing happened. I had no interaction with anybody else that made me believe that this is true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
I get asked this question probably more than anything else, honestly, which is cool because it's a good question. I like the question. I love when people send it to me online and ask what should I read. And this does change for me from time to time. There's a lot of books that I go back to a lot.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
There's no story behind it, but it just, it just one of those things where I opened my eyes at five o'clock in the morning with this unbelievable feeling of dread. And so I immediately, you know, me, because the obstacle is the way I believe in that. I'm like, okay, let's dive into that feeling. And how do we do that? Let's not let, let's not burn that. Let's use it as fuel.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And so I'm immediately like, I got to go back and it's my time of the year to revisit how to influence and influence people to make sure that, that. And that nonsensical 5 a.m. feeling of dread is not a real feeling. And who knows? If I've become completely unlikable, feel free to tell me in the comments. I don't know. Maybe I'll just stop if I'm completely unlikable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
But my next book on the list, number four, is a book that actually I'd never heard of until my friend Brad Lee said I should read it. And it was The Four Agreements. And since I read it, I've had all my kids listen to it. They didn't read it. They listened to it in the car. The best thing about having a house in California is the four-hour drive.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
When you're driving, you can control what everybody listens to. When it's just me and one of my kids, we are 100% listening to audiobooks. I am force-feeding them good knowledge on the way back. But the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is based on an ancient, what is it, Toltec wisdom. And essentially, it's just good rules for living a good life.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And there's really four promises that you make to yourself. The Four Agreements are four self-promises that you make to yourself. And essentially what they are, actually not essentially, exactly what they are, is be impeccable with your word. It's don't lie. It's don't mislead people. It's don't say the wrong things when you know you're saying the wrong things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
The next thing is don't take anything personally. Man, if you can agree with yourself, just not take anything personally. I think this is probably a huge shift for me in the last couple of years as well. When people, you know, When I maybe hear somebody says something unkind about me, I don't even react anymore.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And the reason I don't react is because I realize that everybody is the star of their own movie. And I'm just a bit player in their movie. I'm not even like a supporting actor. I'm a bit player. I'm like a background. I'm like a, what is it? A computer played player, whatever it is. That's all I am. I'm a blip.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And if for whatever reason in their life to get to the next level, I got to be the villain. Okay. I'm fine with that. If that's what they need to do to vilify me, then that's on them. But I don't take anything personally anymore at all. The next thing is don't make assumptions. Think about this, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
In your relationships and all those things, how many times or how many things in your relationships have gone south because you assumed somebody else was going to do something? You assumed something was going to be a certain way. I mean, I find this, I bet more marriages fail because spouses assume the other one is going to do something for them and they don't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And I'm always adding new stuff as I'm always trying to read and listen to Audible and do what I can to kind of fill my head with stuff. Just so you know. my little system for doing it is, you know, I like to use the headway app is what I like to use. And I'll read like the little synopsis of a new book and I'll see if it really interests me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
Like I found in my marriage, you know, one of the things that makes it so healthy and so good is my wife and I both, if we need something, we ask for it. We don't wait around. We don't assume the other person should just know that this is what we require to be happy. We straight up ask for it. So don't make assumptions. And the last one is always do your best. You know, like my father said,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
how you do anything is how you do everything. So always try to do your best. But I think if you read this book, I mean, great. That was a very short synopsis. You're like, I don't have to read it now. I got the four agreements. I know what they are. No, give it, give it a, give it a little spin, man. Give it, give it. It is a book that is worth investing with.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
Not just you, but I love this for your kids. I love this for listening or reading this with your kids is amazing. And the last one is the millionaire next door. by Thomas J. Stanley and William Danko. Unbelievable book. You know, this, I thought about this book and I added it back on the list because I had Dave Risky. I was a major league pitcher on the podcast last week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
You can go back and listen to that episode. And we were talking about, you know, the dumb shit that like rookies do when they get paid in major league sports and why, you know, athletes are broke so quickly going into, you know, their contracts. And
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
I think if more people read this book and understand it, how to build real wealth and how wealthy people actually build wealth, you would be much better off in life. So don't wait until you have some success to know what to do with money. Don't wait till you get some money till you know what to do with money. If you really want to hang on to it, understand what to do with it before.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And I think that book on living amongst your means, prioritizing savings, avoiding lifestyle craziness, try not to buy stuff to impress other people, all of that stuff, man, all of those things, how real millionaires live and not the Insta flash guys that are rolling around in rented cars and fake watches and whatever else, I think that's gonna be the difference maker. So listen to that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
So I hope that helps you. Those five books, again, to summarize, for mindset and resilience, I would go with Obstacles Away. For habits and systems, Atomic Habits. For relationships and influence, How to Win Friends and Influence People. For personal integrity and freedom, The Four Agreements. And for financial discipline, I would listen to The Millionaire Next Door. See you next week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Books That Transform Lives and Build Wealth
And if it does, then I go back and I read the whole thing. But this is kind of a way that I can get a little taster of everything out there. But today on the program, what I want to do is I want to just try to help you as best I can by giving you my top five books that that I would read going into this year, 2025, if I wanted to have a more rounded, successful life. These are my top five books.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
lovely so i wish you could have come out to las vegas but i'll take the second best which is obviously having you on here look forward to having an excuse to come out and hang with you guys you do so i i know that look you've done some amazing stuff reading the bio here and going through it and i always like to say think that success leaves clues and i'm always interested in the nature versus nurture where i almost always start these these interviews so tell me about a young paul ollinger tell me about young paul the uh the either the hero origin story or the villain
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, but I think even then, I think your upbringing showing through right there because I think you were probably, you left your tribe at home and that side of it's always been appealing to you even in business. I mean, look, as humans, we always seek a tribe, right? But I just can't imagine. Like, I had two older sisters. We were all three years apart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
So, you know, the one I'm fairly, you know, growing up as kids, yeah, I'm sort of close to the one because it's three years. But my older sister was gone to college by the time I was, you know, she left early. But, yeah, dude, I can see how that need to be in a tribe for you would be more important almost than a financial opportunity. That's cool. Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Can I ask about that? Because I think with right now the economy doing what it's doing, there's a lot of people, especially here in Las Vegas, the casinos are laying some people off, trying to consolidate for their shareholders and turning good reports. You know, I've never luckily, I'm chronically unemployable. I've always kind of been my own guy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
I've never been in a corporate setting where a layoff was a probability or even a possibility. What advice would you give to somebody as somebody that's navigated those waters? What advice would you give to somebody to keep your chin up or how to avoid the ax or whatever?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
It is my firm belief that ever since COVID, there's just a level of apathy that's run through everything. I mean, in every industry. It doesn't just have to be investment banking. Everybody wants to find a way to make a million dollars online and not have to actually put forth the effort. That's the new dream.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah. Well, I always laugh with my wife. Apparently, being here in Vegas, you look around, apparently there's some magic meeting where they just give away free money and we don't get invited to it. We actually have to work for it. Oh, they do. They do give it away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, let's get to that. So was there a moment in your career and obviously in your professional life where you were just like, look, I'm just burnt. I'm just cooked. There's got to be a better way because I'm just not finding what I need.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
You're talking about the one at the mall.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, let's back up just a little bit, right? So here you are. You're an MBA from Dartmouth, and there's this burning feeling to be a stand-up comedian. That's correct. What was it? What about that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
When did you know you wanted to do this? When did you know you had an interest in it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Was it last night or last week? Conan got the Mark Twain humor prize.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, you're the best. You're the best golfer at your club, but you're not going on tour anytime soon.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And what'd you do in Atlanta when you went back?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
The rough streets of the Upper West Side, man. Of course. Of course. It never stops.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Now, when you say gang, is this like, are we talking about like little rascals? Like this is what you called your friends or is this a real gang?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
What you're looking for is my good friend, John Ashroff. Are you committed or are you interested? And I think everybody's interested. Hey, we want to put you on stage for 15 minutes. Everybody's going to laugh at what you say. I'm totally interested in that. You've actually got to go do the work to get good at doing it. Oh, I don't want to do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
I think Bill Burr is, uh, Bill Burr is, is by far not even close. He's my favorite because I love him so much because whether it's part of the act or I think it's genuine to him, he really does not give an absolute shit what you think about what he's saying.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
I want to be on Mount Rushmore of comedy.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
You know, it's funny. I have a friend of mine that, you know, a good friend is that guy that calls you out when you need to be called out. And every time we talk about goals or talk about, you know, what we want to achieve, it's never what are you going to do or what are you willing to do to get there? The first question is always, what are you willing to give up to get there? Yeah.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Like, what are you asking? Because you can't be, if you try to get to two places at once, you're not going to get to either. And that's always the first question.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
to figure out in your world yeah well so yes i i mean in in real estate which is what we are here in vegas and you know it's how am i going to put this it's you just you trade on reputation everything is reputation and every deal gives you an opportunity to improve or diminish it And the better you, the elite people in my business, I don't think are any better at marketing properties.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
I don't think they're any better at writing, especially now in the age of AI of writing descriptions or brochures or pamphlets or any of that stuff. I don't think anybody's any better. I think they are masters at managing their reputation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And I think that's what makes the elite of the elite in my business, especially in between here, you know, a lot of friends in LA in this business and a lot of friends here in Vegas, because now our markets swap high end clients so quickly back and forth. But the better you manage your reputation, the better you are. And again, it's about perceived value, because what is perceived value?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Perceived value is what people say about you when you're not there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah. Yeah, that's everything in this business. Because I know some people that are very skilled at what we do, very knowledgeable. They understand the math of the market. They understand leading indicators in different parts of the stock market, the bonds that affect our market in a different way, but yet they don't sell the most houses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
They make these amazing YouTube videos about what's happening in the forecast for what's going on, but they don't do the best in the marketplace because... This particular industry respects reputation more than anything else. The best person is not always the best person here. It's all an illusion.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
To me, I genuinely believe a high-end client is looking for the person they genuinely believe is going to get them where they want to go as far as accomplish their goals with the least amount of friction. And in the high end, especially, they don't want to educate anybody. You have to kind of understand how high net worth people work, how they think, what their expectations are.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
They don't want to educate you to their needs. They just want somebody that understands those things. And I think that is the key to it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
With the least amount of friction. That's exactly what I just said.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, you know, it's funny. The one question that all of our people – we have a lot of people. I've got 585 agents that work for us here. We have a very large company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
But the number one question that I teach our people to ask that I think gets us more business – then anybody else, because nobody really asked this, is everybody in this business gets so concerned with the first time you talk to a client on the phone. Let's say they're looking to buy a house. So what do you want? I want a three, two. I want this. I want a pool. I want it here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
What's your price point? What's that? They're just going through this mental garbage checklist of the house and it's done. Well, you have to get all that information because you have to know what people want. But at the end of that conversation, the last question we always ask is forget the house.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
you're moving your life here you're relocating your life here what else can we find out for you that you need to know about living here i mean do you need to know what the best club baseball team is do you have to know i mean is there a special needs program at this it's a particular school for your child what else can we chase down what where where's your church where's your gym what clubs do you want to be in tell me about your life moving here and let us chase all that down for you and all of a sudden it's like whoa because it stops being about the house
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
and becomes about the client and their actual needs.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And that's the answer that I always give on, are you worried that AI is going to replace real estate agents? And I'm like, not at all. Because I think that people, yes, a certain percentage of the public with high financial IQ and just the time to deal with it can make their own decisions and figure it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yes. The reason it hasn't already is because blockchain is not perfect.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
It's so funny when I run into people, I'm like, oh yeah, I use AI every day. And they're like, yeah, use it to give me social media posts. I'm like, dude, I took our PNLs and all of our numbers for the last three years. I upload it, had it completely analyze our business models of all of our stuff. give me fine areas where we weren't paying attention and could improve it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
That's an interesting thing you just said about your father having kind of a plan for teaching you guys how to communicate with each other. What did he do? What did your dad do?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And it did what a consultant 10 years ago would have done in a month. It knocked out in five minutes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Why am I picturing Larry David with a fable on the end?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
It does. But the point that we were talking about earlier – with AI not replacing that connection. Like, you can use it to write, but it can't create your tone, and it can't deliver that material in a way that you can.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Matt Rife.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Let me tell you why you're safe. I'm going to tell you why you're safe, Paul.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
the same reason i'm safe and i tell my kids this every day and if you look at if you look at the generation of teenagers right if you look at a teenager you can't see their face because all you can see is this as they look at i got two of them yeah and all they do is look at their phone i tell my kids if you want to have a competitive advantage you want to have that thing in 15 or 20 years that's going to make you better than everybody else it'll be the ability to look in another human and connect with them on a one-on-one personal level
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
because most of your friends that are spending all of their time staring at a screen won't have it i think your father knew that at that dinner table but he was making everybody ask questions teaching you how to communicate and connect with others and i think and i think being a great communicator in any industry is going to keep you relevant regardless of what ai's does and i can't imagine a a field where it's more important to be a great communicator than comedy
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah. All right. Well, let's switch gears a little bit. If you could go back, because literally my whole podcast is a love letter to my dipshit 27-year-old self and trying to – I got a book coming out November 5th called also escaping the drift. It is a user's manual to my dipshit 27 year old self.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
But if you could go back and talk to young Paul hustle and bustle, what advice would you give him now that you've lived through the life? What would, what would you tell him?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, I'm guessing with six siblings, right? Like that had to have instilled in you, like, I got to hustle a little bit. I got to speak up if I'm going to be heard. I got to stand up.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, dude, that's why I love Alex Ramosi. I love his message that he puts out now. He put something out yesterday that says, normally the most successful person in a room is the person that's willing to look stupid the longest. Because they're willing to make those mistakes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, to that point, to that point for everybody, listen to this. That's got some dream, whatever it is that they have pushed to the side, chasing the conventional way to the almighty dollar. What do you think your, and I'm not talking about where would you be working? I'm talking about what would your satisfaction in life with your life?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
What would your relationship with your wife and your kids be? Had you not chased this dream?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
And I think that's, we'll wrap it up with that. Paul, if they want to find more of you, man, how do they find you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
search for me baby well man we we will and if you're ever well i'm sure you'll be in vegas man that's what you do when you come out make sure make sure you stop by and say hi i sure will thanks for having me well man if guys thanks for joining us today with that and if you listen to that man what i'm taking away from that is we get so focused on chasing the almighty dollar on chasing the things that we think we're supposed to do but as long as you can maintain two things this is what i'm taking away from paul number one
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Never lose sight of that thing inside you that is calling you that you always want to be part of. Go try it. Do it. Because what's the worst that could happen? And as long as you hang on to eternal optimism, that no matter what happens, you'll just kind of be able to figure it out, you're going to be okay. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, you should have just gone the designer imposter perfume route. Like if you like it, like he's unobtainable because you're a freshman. But if you like him, you can have you can have me. Yeah, you can have the halls available.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Well, let's ask this because, yeah, braces is a huge deal. And I had one kid, my older son, right? He was in and out of braces in what seemed like five minutes. My daughter is on like year three of this siege with braces. And poor thing, man. She is... She's a freshman in high school now and she's like, when am I getting these off my face?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
So finally I started asking my wife, I'm like, are we paying by the month with this? Do we need a second opinion? What's going on?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
So let me ask you this, your older siblings, did you have any overachievers that made it very difficult for you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
back again back again for another episode of like it says in the opening man the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be and today on the show look we will always talk about being successful and reaching for that brass ring reaching for the thing that's gonna get you to that next level but my guest today is somebody that that when i saw this come across my desk i thought what a great message to share with you guys because this guy
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, I love that. When did you, so after, where did you go to college?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Okay. So that's a great education, obviously, which led you to be, I think you were one of the first employees at Facebook or one of the first key.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
were used in those early days with those companies. I mean, you're coming out of Dartmouth, you've got an MBA, I'm assuming, where you went to B school there, yes?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
as it figured out that he can help you find happiness or believes you should be happy wherever you are on the journey, not just waiting to some mythical brass ring at the end to say, today I'm happy. Our guest today is a comedian, a speaker, an author, and the host of the Reasonably Happy podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Paul Olinger. Paul, how are you?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
I mean, that's got to be, so here you walk into a job, even though you've got the Dartmouth pedigree, walking into a job that maybe, you know, is in an industry you don't know a whole lot about, that's got to create a tremendous amount of pressure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Did you feel any type of, I mean, I don't want to say imposter syndrome, you just went that came out of B school, but did you feel a lot of pressure on yourself to perform quickly?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, no, this is okay. I'm fascinated by this story. This is, this is really interesting because do you think it was lack of effort? Because you said you went to 85 hours a week. So you were probably just kind of doing whatever you were doing before. Was it effort or skill or a blend of the two? And if you can think back, what did you do to sharpen the knife?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
How'd you get better in your skillset? Because look, I don't care. You can, you can put all the effort if you want, but if you don't develop a skillset and whatever you're doing, you're never going to be good at it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Paul Ollinger: From Sibling Rivalry to Comedy and Career Success
Yeah, man. Glad to have you. Where are you in the world right now?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop welcome back to the program everybody this week on the weekly drop we are talking about core values what they mean why you should have them
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Grains of sand coming through the hourglass, the world turning a certain way, the butterfly effect, whatever it was, we had a very high profile crime that happened at the club and it put it out of business. And when the club was going, I remember there was not one door that was shut to me in Atlanta. I could go to any restaurant, any table, any bar, any nightclub, and everything was always comped.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
The ropes always opened and whatever I wanted was always provided because I was the guy running the coolest spot in town. And there was a new bar opening up downtown in Midtown in Atlanta. My friend Ray was opening a new place called Lava Lounge. And this is after our club had gone out of business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
And I was kind of a little bit lost with what I was doing, trying to figure out what I was gonna do next. And it had been a minute. And anyway, my friend goes, we should go to the opening of Lava Lounge. I said, okay, yeah, let's go. So much like I had a million times before, I didn't think to call anybody. I just figured I'd walk up and play nice. And there it was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
And I walked up to the front of the line, which was a mile long, wrapped around the planet. And there was a bouncer standing there that I did not know. And I knew most of the door guys around town. I did not know this guy. And as I walked up, Said hey man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
I'm John from cobalt and the guy just looked at me with this blank stare and said Matt bars been out of business for like three months, you know, whatever back of the line and in that moment I know it sounds stupid and you may listen to this and think it's crazy but in that moment my Identity was completely destroyed because I had wrapped up everything about who I was based on what I did and I
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
If you do that, especially if you're in a situation where things can change in an instant, you're gonna set yourself up for failure. You're gonna set yourself up to have a crisis of identity, or in worst cases, not be your true authentic self to anybody that's out there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So how do you take that story and what Steve was talking about earlier and really protect yourself going forward from doing that? And it's to identify your core values. Now, in business, if you look at this, A lot of companies have core values. You see those motivational posters that are written on the walls.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So I was just surfing through the old interwebs, as I do sometimes, and I ran across a post by my good friend Steve Sims, who is fighting a battle with cancer right now. He is aggressively fighting it. I like to say that he's winning. It looks like he's winning. But he's kind of in those throws where...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
A lot of companies just have, this is who we are, and they put it up there on the wall, and then they don't ever look at it again. The employees, if you ask them, couldn't tell you what they are. They have no idea. I try in our companies to develop core values that everybody knows, and then we make all of our business decisions based on those core values. But more importantly, you should identify
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
and pick out core values for yourself. Because if you don't, your identity is always gonna be wrapped up in something that's shaky or can go away. Another time in my life when my identity got a little rocked was I'll never forget the last time that I told people instantly that I was on The Apprentice, that show.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
It was, we're in, we're in new Orleans and this girl walked up to me and she's like, you look familiar. And this is before I was married. So I'm allowed to have this conversation before I was even dating my wife. So I'm allowed to have this conversation. So she walked up to me and said, you know, Hey, you look familiar.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
And I said, uh, oh, well, you know, you may know me from season three of the apprentice. And this girl looks at me with this Southern accent. She goes, I thought you went to memory high school. I don't watch that shit and just walked away. And I was like, wow, okay, that is no longer going to be part of my identity to say that I'm on this television show because that's over and it's behind me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
It doesn't work that way. So when developing your own core values and when should you use these, right? Let's talk about when you should use them first before how to develop them. Number one. I talk about it in networking. When people come up and ask, you know, in those networking events, I would rather tell somebody who I am as a human rather than just rattle off a resume.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
I find it much more interesting. And I want to hear about, I would rather hear somebody's core value than what they do for a living because I don't care what you do for a living. If I don't respect or I don't resonate with what drives you or what you find important in life as a human, I don't really care what you do because we're probably not going to do business anyway.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So understanding how to use that, understanding what it is, is very, very important. Now, obviously one of my favorite books is Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. He talks about the importance of having the end in mind.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So when you're first thinking about developing core values, think about where you're trying to get, not necessarily where you are today, but where you're trying to go. You know, I think core values should inspire you. So you aspire to something greater than what you are currently are. So you've got to make sure that you're aspiring to something great. So
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
A good way to start figuring out what a core value is for you is think about defining moments in your life. Think about moments in your life when you were like, wow, this major point of adversity, something terrible happened, something pivotal that happened and what that taught you. And think what mattered most to you in those times. Was it the relationship with your family?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
A lot of his identity and what his post about was today was about losing his identity to chemo. And he says, my identity was always kind of wrapped up in riding motorcycles and drinking whiskey and having a goatee. Well, right now, obviously, because I'm in the hospital, I can't ride motorcycles and I can't drink whiskey. And because the chemo, now my goatee is falling out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Was it the support of your friends? Was it... Your ability to stand on your own two feet and persevere through really, really tough and troubled waters. What was the thing in those moments, of those defining moments, that really, really was important to you at your core? Another thing I can say is look for role models. Look for people you aspire to be. What's important to them?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Consider the people that you absolutely admire. What values do they embody? When you think about the people you admire the most and you have to sum them up with three words, what are those words? Is it truthful? Is it honest? Is it steady? Is it strong? Is it vulnerable? whatever it might be, that's a great place to look.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Because again, these are not just meant to inspire you, but you should aspire for greater things through these words. Once you start laying them out and you have all these words down about who you are and your core values and what's important to you, You wanna narrow this down to like three or five. If you have, my core values are 20 things, it's crazy. You're never gonna do anything with that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
But just get down to like three or five, three to five things that are hyper important to you that are your non-negotiables, which is how you do things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
There's a book called Dare to Lead that's out there by Breen Brown that says the reason you should do this is because if you don't, there's a whole section on this in that book, but it talks about if you don't do this, you're gonna become overwhelmed and you lose clarity. And if you don't have clarity with your core values, what are you doing anyway? You shouldn't have that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Once you get these things down and you think, like, this is my core values, this is what I believe in, I believe in truth in all moments, I believe in, you know, I believe in strength, I believe in whatever it is, whatever those things are for you, you need to audit your actions and ask yourself, if this is what's important to me, am I living this life? Am I living true to these words?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Is this something I wish I was? Or is this who I really am? You know, in the book, The Four Agreements, One of those agreements is to be truthful at all times, is to be impeccable with your word. And that means honoring and doing all things, guiding by your core principles, by your core values. You can't just sway in the breeze. That's not being honest with yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So ask yourself if your actions are, Do they jive with this? Or is this just something you're doing as an exercise? And if they don't, you got two choices. You can either change your core values to what really reflects who you are. But if you don't like who you are, maybe you got to change your actions to get more in line with what you wrote down. And then once you have these, start living them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
When people ask you who you are, like for example, wouldn't it be better to say, you know, the things that are really important to you as core value. I'm a great father. I'm a great husband. I'm a wonderful mentor to the people around me. That's who I am. Because here's the thing. A lot of things in life can change, but your love for your kids probably won't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
So everything that I would have said is my identity is now gone away. And I wanted to kind of take that a little bit further than what Steve said today. And because I tell a story in my book, which is when I talk about being very careful with what you make your identity out to be, and especially what you can't do is make what you do your identity. I tell a story in my book about
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Your ability and your desire to mentor others and see them grow won't. The situation in which you apply that skill might change. However, that at its core will not change. And then you got to live this stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
You know, when you're faced with a difficult choice or you're facing a crossroads or trying to make a decision, you've got to look at your core values and ask yourself, does this work with what I do? I use this in business every single day. Every single day, we ask ourselves that we make decisions in all of our businesses based on the core values that we've set forth.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Things that, like Simply Vegas, my real estate company, things like integrity above all other things. Does this jive with that? Is this person that we're talking about maybe having to get rid of, are they living that? And if they're not, they have to go. They cannot stay. Culture of collaboration. Are all of our people bringing something to conversation? That's important to us. Easy exit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
Is this the easiest part? Do we ever give anybody a hard time about leaving our company? Absolutely not because in our core values not to do that. We live those things because A, it makes everything better, but primarily it makes your life easier because you don't have to think as much. You have this set of internal guidelines, this barometer of what works for you and what doesn't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
And as long as you're using those core values to manage your day-to-day decisions, your life will fall in line with them. So I hope that helped. Man, if this helped you, please share it with somebody else. Please like, subscribe, do all those things that help us with the advertising that pays for this thing. It keeps it going. We appreciate your support so much, and I'll see you next time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Anchoring in Values Through Life's Turbulence
That's coming out where I talk about many moons ago, I was running a very hot nightclub in Atlanta. I mean, Esquire magazine had called us the number one nightclub in the United States. It was a very swanky spot. And then because of some random, you know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. And back again, back again for another episode of The Drop, man, which is my little solo pod brought to you by...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And one of the things I'm gonna give you when we're done today is if you're watching me on Instagram, you're listening to this or watching this on the gram or you catch it later. If you go to the link in my bio, the very first thing you're gonna see is a free business planning course that I'm gonna give you. And it's not just about business planning.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
You can literally use that one page system, the system that I use to plan anything in life. You can use it to plan, How to lose weight. You can lose it to start a new skill, to start a new business, to do whatever you want to get better at the job that you currently have. And it's free to get. You can go right in there and grab it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
But you're going to see how a lot of the stuff that's in that one page business plan, that course that I'm giving you for free, you're going to see how a lot of that stuff translates back into everyday use by building good systems and understanding what it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And if you look at atomic habits, when it's talking about not having the right idea or having good enough systems, it's because you don't set your goals right. You know, I hate the word goal. I've always said that I hate the word goal. And the reason I hate it is because, you know, look at football, right? We're coming to the playoffs right now.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And at the beginning of the year, every single one of those coaches for those football teams, those pro football teams, they asked them at the opening press conference, coach, what's your goal for the season? And they all said the same thing. My goal is to reach the Super Bowl. They knew at that opening press conference our quarterback sucks. They knew they don't have a good defensive player.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
They just knew it. But yet they still come out firing saying, my goal is to win the Super Bowl. So for me, I don't even call the things that I want to accomplish. I don't call them goals. I call them objectives because that's something I'm going to achieve. I just make a decision, a conscious decision to achieve this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
The same podcast you listen to every week that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. Today is going to be the first show of the new gear. This will actually be coming out on Thursday. I'm streaming it for the first time live as we do this on Instagram, which is kind of cool. But today, what we're going to talk about is the five reasons, the reason why most people don't accomplish.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
So when you're setting goals or objectives, they should be smart, which means they should be specific. They should be measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. How often, I think the last part of that is probably the most important thing. Give yourself a timeframe because how often, dude, do you do these things where you have
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
You know, you just have a never-ending amount of time to get something done, and it takes every second of it. If you have teenagers, this is the way of the world. If I give my kids 30 minutes to clean their rooms, their rooms are clean in 30 minutes. If I give my teenagers all day to clean their rooms, their rooms are cleaned at 11.59 a.m. PM, one minute before the day goes in the next.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
So making sure that you have those measurable goals are so important. For example, if you have a goal, let's talk about getting healthy because what everybody wants to do is lose some weight into the new year, right? Let's talk about that. So if you set a goal as my goal is to get healthy, well, that's not measurable because what is healthy? What does that mean?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
A smart goal would be my goal is to lose, or my objective is I'm going to lose 10 pounds by this date. I'm going to weigh 10 pounds less than I am now. And then using that information, you can go into ChatGPT or anywhere else and you can come up with an exact plan based on your BMI, your age, your caloric intake, how much output you put and all of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And you can come up with an exact system of what you need to do to get you there. Now, I'm also a firm believer that of coming up with multiple routes to get to the same place. And when you look at the, like I said, the one page business plan that I gave you in my link, when you look at that, or if you're listening to this on a podcast, just go to thejohngafford.com and it's the first one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
But when I do this, every single one of my objectives, which is my strategies to reach my objectives, each one of them individually, I always go with three. I come up with three different strategies to get to the objective I want. Now, each one of them as a standalone idea could get you where you want to be. Each one of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
But I figure if I do all three of them, then now I can absolutely reach. hit what I want to hit. I'm kind of guaranteed to 3X it. And if one of those things falls flat or one of those things goes awry, now I can absolutely get to where I want to be. So for example, if my goal or my objective was to lose weight, one of those would obviously be my diet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
So rather than say I want to eat healthy, which is bullshit, I would say by this date, I'm going to research exactly the caloric intake I need, exactly the macros that I need. And you I would set a goal to every Sunday I'm going to meal prep. There's nothing you can do to help you eat healthier than by preparing all of your meals for the weekend one day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
Just make the sacrifice and make the commitment that on that Sunday you're going to do that. So there's my health strategy. There's my eating strategy, right? Now, obviously to lose weight, I also have to have some sort of physical exercise. So then I would have my physical exercise where I would say, I'm going to work out Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
I'm going to walk 10,000 steps a day every single day. And I would have measurable things that record that correlate back to days that are going to get stuff done. Because again, things have got to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. The next mistake that I see a lot of people make and why they're not achieving their goals
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
their new year's resolutions, man, why people fall down when they make these resolutions and they don't get to what they're going to do. And I'm going to give you five things that you can do to have a lot of success in that with what you do. And we all know the story, man, January 1st, tomorrow, if you go to the gym, there's going to be 9 million people sitting in the damn gym.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It's simply because they throw the towel in, man. They give up. Things are hard. Oh, it's hard. It's inconvenient. Man, it's so much easier just to sit on the couch and do nothing. Why would I want to work hard? Why would I want to do that?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And if you struggle with perseverance, if that's something that you have an issue with, then I highly recommend you check out the book Grit by Angela Duckworth, where it talks about having perseverance and passion in what you're doing is super important. And when I talk about Again, back to the one-page business plan that I'm giving you guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
When I talk about that stuff, the very first thing that we talk about in that plan is your vision, is understanding why you're trying to do this. If you say, I want to lose weight, the idea of you doing that is pretty slim. You know, unfortunately, I've had several of my good friends pass away in the last month, give or take. I know that seems crazy, but it's true.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
When you reach a certain age, that kind of shit just happens. And, you know, for me, being in the best health possible has nothing to do with vanity anymore. It has to do with the fact of being there for as long as I can for my family. So if I was writing a vision statement that was regarding an objective of losing weight
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It would be based on my daughter's 30-second birthday, whatever it is, I'm walking her down the aisle at her wedding. When I'm 75 years old, I'm playing actively in the yard with my grandchildren because I want to project myself to a specific point in the future, out in time, a specific place out there. And I want to draw a picture that means something to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It doesn't have to mean anything to anybody else, but I want to create a visual of my vision of why I'm trying to get to where I am. Now, this vision, what it's designed to do is to get your ass in the gym, is to make one more phone call. It's to do that one extra thing that's going to get you to persevere when things get tough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
To have that conversation with yourself that I just going to get one win today. I just got to get one win. That's all I got to get. As long as I get one win, that's all I care about. Just give me the one win. If I can get that, I'm chalking it up as a win. You know, the next reason that people fall into a trap is because they go the all or nothing. Things are either working or they're not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
In The Power of Habit by Charles Dung, he highlights the need to anchor new habits to existing routines and focus on small, manageable changes built at a time. For example, this is why I got to tell you I'm not a huge fan. I have a lot of friends that have done it, but I'm not a huge fan of 75 hard because I think there's so much failure in that. I think there's so much.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It's such a shock to the system. People are like, no, it's good. It's mental strength. Look, I get it, dude. I get it. But don't set yourself up for failure. Maybe set yourself up for incremental improvement instead of all or nothing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
Because if you're like, I'm not going to eat any sugar at all, if that's what you're saying, I'm eating no sugar, well, then the first time you eat an Oreo, you just blew everything you're doing. Now you're completely screwed. And you've got two choices, which you can either start over or get back in the game or do what most people do and stop going to the gym in February.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It's going to be impossible to get to a machine, but by mid February, everybody's going to be gone. And why is that? Why does it go so quick from February to nobody being there? Why does that happen so fast? And if you read this book, this is one of my favorite books. It's called Atomic Habits. I love this book. And then James Clear talks about motivation's not enough.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
So having and focusing on systems and not outcomes, again, that is the key to a lot of this stuff, to avoid those last two things. Focus on the systems, not the outcomes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
If you focus on, if you're trying to improve your business and your business is making contacts, in real estate, I tell people this all the time, the number one thing I focus on when I coach people and when I train people in real estate is you focus on appointments. not deals, not escrows, not closings, not open house, focus on appointments.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
If you focus on nothing else other than that one thing, that metric will move the needle for you so much because there's nothing, there's no such thing as a bad one-on-one appointment with anybody. It's just not. So find the metric that's going to move the needle for the most, for whatever you're trying to achieve and focus on that. You know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
The next thing I would say is people don't focus on incremental success. They just look for the big thing. I wanna lose 45 pounds and they're not gonna be happy until they hit 45 pounds. I wanna make $250,000 and they're not gonna see success until they do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
It is so important to measure those incremental things as you go along, those incremental moments of success in whatever objective you're trying to hit, that you've gotta take a second and understand those daily wins. Moving that boulder one inch a day will eventually get that thing rolling down a hill. But you've got to be willing to celebrate that one inch as much as the end of the line.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And the last thing, and I would say reasons why people fail to hit their stuff, is definitely procrastination. I mean, this is probably, in this day and age of instant gratification, of everything's right now, of I can just literally sit on the couch and watch the wealth of entertainment that's ever been on planet Earth in the palm of my hand. Man, it is easy to put off what's hard.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And I had this conversation yesterday with my son. You know, we were talking about something that he's struggling with here at work that he's having a hard time with. There is a lot of rejection in that. There's a lot of rejection in what we were talking about. And I said, man, the great is in the hard. You got to embrace the suck. You got to lean into the stuff that's hard.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
And for that, you know, I would say again, I've said it many times on my podcast, for me, the greatest book and the first thing anybody should ever read is The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. I love that book. I think without being able to lean into what makes things hard is what makes them great, nothing is going to be accomplished. So again,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
I hope you take that advice for the new year, man. I wish all of you guys, it's been a great year here for the podcast. We've had some unbelievable guests over the last year, got some unbelievable guests already booked for the new year. The guests just seem to be getting bigger and bigger and bigger and more important. I can't believe some of the people that say yes to this thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
I'm so grateful for each and every one of you for listening to us. And again, If you're trying to plan anything, jump in there and grab that planning course. I put it up there for you guys. There's no charge. There's no add-ons. There's no anything else. Just grab it. Just grab it and do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
So as we head into the new year, just remember, man, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to, but you've got to set your mind in a direction that makes sense. We'll see you next time. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Journey to Sustainable Change
You know, motivation is like a shower. It's something you require every single day. And if you're just depending on motivation to get you through to where your habits need to be, you're going to have a problem. What you have got to do is you've got to, instead of relying on the motivation of I want to get better, You have to set up systems that will support that end goal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you wanna be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. Back again for another quick, man, little weekly drop. Just me on my solo pod here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And if you're somebody out there that is lacking confidence, you're probably going to have a problem. This is something that I have probably been accused in my life of having too much of sometimes. So I probably can speak from a place of expertise on this stuff. So the first thing that I'm going to say is,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
That mindset of confidence can be shaken so easily, not just in sales, but in life, in dating, in everything, in every aspect of life. The thing that shakes confidence more than anything else is going to be rejection. It's when you get rejected. And you look at, you know, there's millions of stories you can recap. Michael Jordan got cut from his basketball team, his high school basketball team.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
J.K. Rowling got turned on by 12 people before she finally published Harry Potter. I All of that stuff is great. But the difference becomes in the lesson from all that is learning how to turn those negatives and that rejection into fuel instead of baggage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And one of the things that I teach to all salespeople, and I think you could probably apply this to all walks of life of whatever it is, is to value the no. I mean, I don't know how you could do it with dating because I don't know what the no, I don't know what the yes would be or the value of it, but...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you wanna be. And this week, we're gonna talk about confidence. Because it is, in my opinion, the most important thing when it comes to success. Yesterday I was sitting in my office and my office is adjacent to where my real estate team is. And I can hear the people that work for me and they're on the phone.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
If you're in any type of a situation where you have to sell something or make a bunch of calls and you result in the end with a sale, and there's a certain number of calls or touches or whatever it is that you have to make before you get a sale. And the problem is, especially if you're using the phone for that type of sales, is there's a lot of serious negativity.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
When you call people, they're like, you know, suck it, you know, F you, whatever, and they're hanging up on you. And that can start to wear on you. But you've got to do two things. And the first thing I'm going to say is you've got to reframe that in a way where you've got to understand that, especially if you're making calls, they're not hanging up on you. They don't know you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
They don't know you're a good parent. They don't know you're a great spouse. They don't know you're a hilarious person to go out with. You're just somebody that interrupted them with a phone call. So if they're hanging up on you, they're not hanging up on you. They're hanging up on the phone call. So first of all, reframe it that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
But the most important thing to me that you have to do is you have to value the no. And what I mean by that is this. Let's say that you've gotta make 100 phone calls before you get a yes to whatever you're selling. So that means you make, you get 99 nos, and we'll call, we'll say you gotta make 101 calls. So you have one call that says yes and 100 that say no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Now let's say that when somebody does say yes, you make $1,000. So that means that every single person that told you no, you made 10 bucks. So if I told you that your job was to call people and have them curse at you and hang up on you, and every time it happened, you made $10, would that change the way that you looked at that negative rejection? Absolutely, you would.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
So having that mindset, and there's a book actually called Mindset that I like by Carol Dweck that talks about developing a growth mindset by looking for rejection and seeking it out as a challenge rather than as a failure. And I think if you can value the know, you can do that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
You know, the second thing that I see, and I see this a lot in my son, which is the world will give back to you what you give out to the world. So body language is so crucial, so important in what you do and how you carry yourself. If there is one thing that I would say that... we correct or try to help my son with as often as possible, it's his posture.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
It's always sit up straight, shoulders back, always that, always that. I hate when he hunches, because if you walk around all hunched over, dude, the world is gonna give you back the energy that you're putting out. And I tell people this all the time. If you wanna change, how the world perceives you. Do this one exercise for a week. Do this one thing, which is walk around.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Imagine there's an imaginary string tied to the middle of your chest, pulling upward, not forward, but upward. So you have your chest out, your shoulders back, and carry yourself like that for a week, and see how much different the world actually perceives you. Now don't believe me, there's a book called Cuddy's Presence,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And it's by a girl named Amy Cuddy who had a terrible car crash, a terrible wreck, a terrible early in her 20s. And she was convinced because of that that she was never, you know, it impaired her to a certain amount. She was convinced herself that she was never going to finish college. She was never going to amount to anything. So she just began doing one thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
which was developed this concept of what she called power posing, which is everywhere she was when she would prop herself up in a certain way, she would make herself look as powerful as possible. And the way that the world reacted to her, because of that, the energy that she was putting out, not only finishing college, but becoming a best-selling author and becoming a TED speaker.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And I've got some absolute savages on the phone. I mean, they are just, these guys are really, really talented at communicating very quickly why the clients that choose to work with us and our team are will have the best probable aspect or the best outcome they could have in purchasing or buying investment properties or their own property for that matter, or selling a property.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And it was all about how she presented herself to the world. So if you're having a problem with confidence, A very simple thing you can do is change your physiology to change your psychology. It's very simple to do. You know, when I think about, my favorite thing I think about is the lobsters, man.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
If you've ever heard the lobster story, the lobster story is, there's actually a hierarchy within lobsters that some of them that carry themselves meeker, if they carry themselves meek, they actually die and get sicker quicker. They've done studies on this, probably funded by the government, so Elon's gonna kill any future lobster studies, I'm sure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
But they've done studies that the ones that carry themselves meeker, they actually die faster because, because they look meek, they're fearful that they'll constantly be attacked. And that stress on their internal systems of the fear of being attacked because they carry themselves in a meager stance, the stronger ones do start to pick on them and they die earlier.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
So there's evolutionary truth in how you carry yourself. The world absolutely will reply to it. Now, I love that people talk about a good way to establish confidence. And you hear this all the time. As I say, fake it till you make it. Fake it till you make it. Just fake it. Just act like you have everything. Just act like this. Listen, I am not a fake it till you make it guy. That's not who I am.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
I am a... replicate, not imitate guy. And what I mean by that is, I think if you want to get somewhere in life, if you want to get anything, studying those that have already gotten there before you, studying those that have reached that place or gotten there, I think that just makes sense. I think emulating what they do Makes a lot of sense.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
But you don't want to fake it because people can smell non-authenticity on you. I think authenticity is, I don't know if it's still the buzzword for like five years. Everything had to be authentic. It was like that was the buzzword. But I think it's true. People can smell when you're being inauthentic, if you're being fake.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
However, if you are carrying yourself the way that you like, you see somebody where you want to be and you carry yourself that certain way. If you are doing certain things that certain way, then there's nothing wrong with that. For example, there's some changes that I've decided to make in what I do for the upcoming year based on some goals that I have.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And I've looked at some things that I do and I ask myself, okay, like here are these people that are where I wanna go within a certain thing that I wanna do, right? I have the book coming out in the not too distant future. I plan on touring the book. I plan on stages. I plan on all of those things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
So my thing is, okay, I need to get back into emulating, not imitating, but emulating the world-class speakers that I know. And I know a bunch of them. And I ask myself, where are they? Where do they go? What rooms are they in? How are they being perceived by everyone around them? And I've got to set myself up to be perceived the same way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
If I am, if I am, it's like, I guess it's a good way to say it is you can't get on the stage if you're sitting in the audience. And if everybody sees you sit in the audience, they ain't gonna see you on stage. And that's kind of some tough decision-making that I've had to make this year or for the coming up here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Things that I genuinely like to do, but I don't think they serve my greater purpose as far as where I'm trying to get. And they're damn sure not things that the people that I'm emulating do as well. So you got to make that decision. And then going further with that, talking about where I'm trying to go, you know, imposter syndrome is a real thing that creeps in and damages confidence.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
It really does. I mean, you look at, you know, Tom Hanks has been on record many times as saying that he constantly thinks people are going to figure out that he's not much of an actor. They're constantly going to figure that out. And I think anybody, if they're being honest, that has any level of confidence has this crisis of confidence.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
There's days when I wake up and I'm like, okay, so we got this book deal and the book is done. Who's going to be like, who's going to read this thing, right? Like, who's going to buy this thing? Like, I hope it sells. And then you hear like the beta feedback and you're like, man, that's really good. And I guess that's it. So like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Looking for ways to get yourself out of imposter syndrome is really focusing on the things that establish your competency rather than focusing on things that potentially take it down. Now, what I mean by that, like what I just said, if you look at this, when I have a crisis of confidence for my book that's about to come out,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
They're very good at articulating that to our clients. And yesterday I was sitting in my office and I was listening to a call, as I tend to, because they're right there, so I can kind of hear what's going on. And the call that I heard, quite frankly, was just dreadful. And what it was lacking, and this is somebody that had been with me for like a year, and what it was lacking 100% was confidence.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
I look at, you know, my, my literary people that I'm working with ran it through a beta group. So like they had 50 people read it and then these are people that just love to read books and then criticize them. The beta feedback was amazing. According to the people I'm working with, I didn't, That's not sugarcoating it. So whenever I'm having a crisis of confidence, I look back at that moment.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
I go, well, okay, hang on a second. These are people who are literally being paid to pull this apart. And I got a good, I got a good report card on it from them. So that's what I choose to hang my hat on. So if you're having feeling like, man, I don't belong here. I'm not good enough to be here. I'm not there. Focus on the things that got you in the room and validate you being there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Don't focus on any shortcomings that you may have. Everybody has shortcomings. Everybody's always trying to get better. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you do. But just focus on what got you there in the first place. And the last thing I'm going to finish with is just confidence is very much about what you see in the mirror. It's about believing in the direction you're going.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
It's about being happy with who you are day in and day out. It's about believing in what you are. You know, my son who works for me is a little challenged because some of his friends have a little bit higher paying jobs than he does. And he's a kid. So don't think I'm slave driving. I'm trying to teach him a lesson by not giving. He's earning everything he gets.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And, you know, yesterday I told him, and I think he was really surprised by this. I told him, I said, man, You have the ability because you're a really smart kid. You're a good looking kid and you're really dedicated to what you do. If you're not happy here with what you're making, you can change this and do whatever you want to do. The world is not happening to you. You're happening to the world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And I think at its core, that belief that you are happening to the world is where confidence is born. So hopefully, each and every one of you can figure out a way to find that belief. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Cultivating Success Through Self-Assurance
And the reason it was lacking confidence is this is a person, probably has been struggling a little bit lately, kind of got in the wrong groove, and we're trying to refocus him and get him moving again. But it got me thinking how important confidence is to success, not just in business, but in life and everything that you do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. What's up, everybody? Time for another episode of The Weekly Drop, my little solo pod I hit you with once a week.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
I'm gonna have him on the podcast next week to go through his story in detail, but very humble beginnings. And taught himself the stock market and got to be really, really good at trading options. And now he has built this into a following of millions of people, coaches tens or hundreds of thousands of people on how to do this. And the guy is just, number one, he kills it in the market.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Number two... He makes, I mean, infinite amounts of money selling his coaching. Every month, the number of orders he gets is staggering of people that join his coaching program online. It's staggering the amount of money he's making doing this. And the reason I say this is not necessarily to celebrate his success.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Although, dude, you know, anybody that achieves that level of success, I'm rooting for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
But more to the point, it's how this guy carries himself in those meetings, how he carries himself in this group because he is a guy that understands the stock market intimately and he joined our group because he kind of got sick of paying this massive tax bill that he had and he wanted to learn how to invest in real estate and utilize the tax code to lower his tax bill. And you would never know,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And today, man, I want to talk about something that is a struggle sometimes for me, and I made some realizations over the weekend. And that thing I struggle with is ego. It really is. And I saw a couple of things that hit me this weekend and I wanted to talk about it. And ego to me is perfectly fine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
how much money this dude is bringing in every month because he carries himself. And I was looking for the word this morning for how he carries himself through those meetings. And the only word I can come up with is grace. He carries himself in those rooms as I'm so lucky to be here. I'm so grateful to be here learning from all of you guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
He comes in as a student every day, does not care what anybody thinks about him, does not care about his accolades, does not care about recognition for anything. He is there as a student first to learn. He doesn't care how you view him. He's there as a student and handles himself with such a way of grace that it's a lesson. And I realized to myself, man, I go to these meetings like this for years.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And first and foremost with me, probably it's important that I come off important. And that's just dumb to be honest with you. Cause it's like, I look back probably at the energy and time that I spent looking important in these rooms when I could have been sponging information from some of the smartest guys in the business that do things different than what I do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
But instead I was more concerned about being seen as an equal elevated member of the room, whatever it was, which is just shocking to me that I should have just checked that. I mean, I made an investment for the education for what I would learn here. And instead I treated it as how can I be the biggest dog in a room full of big dogs? And that was just dumb.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Second example, I'm going to make of this this weekend that happened.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
was some friends of mine in a band that was huge in the 90s and a number one hit was good better than ezra great friends of mine they're how i met my wife we've been friends for more years than i can count came to vegas and they played a show and you know this these are guys that have been doing it right there's no break in this there hasn't been like this isn't a reunion tour this is what they do and make records and continue to push forward
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
It's what they do. And they just released a new record maybe six months ago. And they're playing this show to about, I don't know, there's probably 1,400 people in the room in Henderson, which is where I live, actually, here in Vegas. And they went to the show. And...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
During the show, they played all the hits, all the stuff, the hits they had that were big hits on radio play back in the day, a couple of the new stuff, a couple of smatterings in the new stuff. And then they played some really cool covers, but like three or four of them that they played that were covers. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, at first I'm like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
you know, that's a lot of bands going on tour and it's like, oh, we're going to play something new. And they just kind of play all their new stuff and they just kind of expect you to do that. And that kind of comes off a little, because you look around the room and a lot of those people, you know, we're just going to a show because it was a show that was there, right? Hey, we're here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
It's in Henderson. We're going to this show. And you can tell there's probably a lot of people that maybe had heard one or two songs and it was like, oh yeah, I would go to that. And they were being exposed to this band for the first time. And you see a lot of bands kind of just shoved that new material down people's throats. But what they chose to do by playing these covers,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And these were songs that were great, and they're other songs from the 90s. And everybody in that room was singing aloud and having a great time. And I realized, thinking about this talk today, thinking about Trap, I realized they put their ego aside because they realized their main role was to entertain that crowd, was to make them happy. That crowd wasn't there to feed their ego.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
There's nothing wrong with having an ego, but if it is prohibiting growth in you and holding you back, then that is a problem. I'm going to tell two stories from the weekend. that made me kind of realize that I gotta check myself, if you will, before I wreck myself or stop wrecking myself, if you will.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
They were there to give those people the best possible time and they got it. I mean that people had a great time. It was a great show. And I just think in life, man, as you go through, you got to start asking yourself when you deal with other people or you look at different situations, how am I coming to the table with this? Am I coming to serve you or am I expecting you to serve me?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And there's probably, in my life, too many experiences or too many times when I stepped into the ego trap and got myself stuck doing things that I shouldn't be doing because I expected others to be there to celebrate me. I see it. You know, the worst place we see it right now is there's this fiasco going on with our local board, right? Our local realtor board.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
where allegedly there's some people that are in power that did some stuff they shouldn't have done, and it's just stupid, right? And I look at that, and I go, if these people were really looking to serve others with all of this stuff going down, they would just get out of the way. but they're not. They're there to serve themselves.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
From the big stupid events they have, just the cow stuff, it's just gotten so gross. And there's stuff in, I think, all of our lives where we can look at it and say, wait a second, I gotta slow this down. I gotta pump the brakes a little bit on my ego and ask myself, am I here to serve or is this here to serve me?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
If you look at the book, one of my favorite authors, obviously, I always talked about is Ryan Holiday. Ryan's great. Um, you know, obstacle is the way it's probably one of the first books I tell people to read when they ask me what they should read. That's one of my first go-tos, but he wrote a book called ego is the enemy, which I really liked too.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
It was like a whole series in an ego, the enemy, you know, he talks and tells a story like about Steve jobs. One of the, one of the brightest minds of our time actually got kicked out of his own company. because of his ego, because he thought everybody there was there to serve Steve instead of Apple being there to serve the world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And when he changed his thinking on that, that's when he became a great leader and Apple became a great company. Because if you really go through this life seeing how you can be of service to others. There's a great saying that says, if you want to get everything you want, help others get what they want. And you just can't do that unless you're approaching all of this with a service mentality.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
You know, with me, you know, we used to have a, you know, I used to do the podcast back in the day with Chris Connell and Colt. Miss those days. Go back and listen to those episodes. Some are pretty funny. But, you know, Connell would always have, there was like a bingo card of a couple things that he would always talk about.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
So the first one is over the weekend, I went to one of my favorite places to go, which is the Boardroom Mastermind Group. It is a elite level group of very high level, high net worth individuals that focus primarily on real estate investing, but it's just a lot of really good people that are really smart.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And one of the things that he would bring up religiously was called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It was almost like a bingo card event. And it's funny, as I was doing research for this day, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect kept coming up because it's really based in ego and how it stunts your personal growth. And what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, it says like,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
The less you know about something, the better you think you are at it. Like for example, we've all seen people that go out and like play golf the first day and they're like, oh dude, this is gonna be easy. It's gonna be super simple. Then you ask them after the first time they take a golf lesson, how do you think you are at golf? And they're like, oh, I'm okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
But yet, the more you learn about it, the more you learn how terrible you really are. It's like, yeah, somebody's been playing it for three years, like, oh, the worst golfer in the world. Probably not, because they just have now understood how hard it is.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
It also is why the loudest voices are normally the most uninformed, because the people that know the least about a subject are normally the most vocal about it, versus the people that know the most have learned enough to question the knowledge that they have. So if you just automatically, you know, be very mindful of that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
If you really feel like, you know, everything about something and you don't need to learn anymore, you don't no longer need to be a student of the game. Think about my man, the wall street trapper and walk with grace in those rooms and walk with eyes open and ears open and mouth shut.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Cause you might be surprised that the limited knowledge you do have might be shaken to its foundation with a little more as you go along. But I think just there's so many examples of her ego. I mean, just recently, you look at, what was it, Thanos, that deal with Elizabeth Holmes, that crazy lady. It's funny. She tried to emulate Steve Jobs by what she wore, not blinking.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
For those of you who don't know who she is, she started a company called Thanos, which apparently had this revolutionary... blood testing deal where from one drop they could do like a full analysis and it was a full thing and it was all bullshit. None of it ever worked. And you're talking about they raised so much money for this company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
It was like a billion dollar market cap company and it was all bullshit. And she's now in jail. And what really screwed it up was because she had this image. If you watch, I think there's a book about it. There is, it's called Bad Blood. There's a book, I remember. I don't know who wrote it, but it's called Bad Blood.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And there's, they quote, the reason for Thanos happening was she had crafted this image for herself of absolute perfection and didn't want anybody To see the cracks in that, like didn't want anybody to see that there might be a problem here. So she she continued this facade of just absolute bullshit just to protect the facade that she had built, because that was all based in ego.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
So next time you find yourself in a situation where maybe you want to flex a little more, say something stupid or lie or misrepresent what you're doing, ask yourself, am I doing this to protect this self-image of myself that maybe everybody else doesn't see and doesn't care about anyway? Because it's like junior high school, man. What do you tell your kids?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
And a guy that I just met for the first time, that just came to the group for the first time in our meeting in Boston back in Q3, and I got to know him a little bit then. Not a lot. We were in the same room. But this dude's name is Leon, better known as the Wall Street Trapper, or Trap, as we call him. And you need to look this dude up, first of all. So this is a dude that has an amazing story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Don't be worried about what people think because they're all thinking about themselves. That's not just junior high school, dude. That's everybody. That's the whole world about roles. So, man, all I can say is, like my buddy Kevin Griffin that played that show last week, he has a great book out. Look it up. Look up for it. And I wish I had the name of it off the top of my head, but I don't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
I think it's called The Greatest Song is the name of the book. It's about collaboration. But he's got a whole chapter that is essentially your ego is not your amigo. I'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Ego Check
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. Back again for another weekly episode of The Weekly Drop, man. My little solo pod coming at you to help you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
Because in that book, it's really just the entire book is emphasizing that life is inherently unfair. And the sooner that you kind of come to grips with that and realize it, the better off you're going to be. Because once you're free of expecting everything to be fair, you're no longer going to be constantly disappointed when it's not.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
and instead using that energy to focus on things you can control, instead of lamenting on in your car, crying about the injustices of the world, that is what leads to real empowerment. Now, again, if this is you, if you're somebody that sat in your car and cried into a TikTok video over the election this week, it's not your fault. You are genetically predisposed to this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
The evolution of fairness is a real thing. There's these like, even monkeys, right? There's a study that was done, they call them Kapuchkin monkeys. Sorry, that's kind of a tongue twister after I just got off stage for two hours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
But Kapuchkin monkeys, and they did a study where they put two of them out there and had them do a simple task and then they would give each one of them a little slice of cucumber. Well, after they got used to getting the cucumber, then what they started doing was giving each one of them a grape.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And a lot going on this week. This week... of people not happy, man. A lot of people not happy. A lot of people are happy. A lot of people are unhappy. And if you go on your social media and you head down the feed, I seem to see a lot of the same kind of message, which is it's not fair. Life is not fair. How could this have happened? Life's not fair. I'm a victim to everything in my circumstances.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
Now, it didn't take but one or two grapes before the other one lost its monkey mind and started freaking out and screaming because it was like, hey, in its little monkey way, that ain't fair. I'm doing the same thing. So through evolution, this has been programmed into you. And the book Behave by Robert Sapolsky is talking about the sense of fairness through evolution developed
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
in small tribes as a way to be equitable with resources. For example, we're a small tribe in New Guinea. There's only so much grain. I get some grain, you get some grain. We all get enough grain to survive and it becomes this equitable sharing. And that's fine in a small tribe island type environment. But in modern society, it just doesn't work that way.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And expecting things to always be fair and equitable is just not normal. You're just setting yourself up for complete and total success. Now, a good way to overcome this, if this is something that you may struggle with, is reframing those things, reframing that injustice. You know, I just did a podcast that just, it's gonna get launched up next Tuesday with Barbara Majewski.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
She is constantly on the Today Show. She's been on Fox and Friends. She's a television personality. And in that interview, we talked about her purpose and her big why, which was her brother, was born with a neurological issue that is going to require him to have care for the rest of his life. And she did not look at that situation.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
A lot of people look at that, you know, as well as me, you know, she's the oldest, she's going to, you know, she takes this responsibility, but she uses that not as what has the world done to me, but she says, that's my motivation to go serve. You know, I can protect not just my brother, but all of the other people that have this, that are like my brother in the world.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
You know, my buddy John Driscoll Hopkins of the Zac Brown Band came down with ALS, which is terrible. And a lot of people would have just gone into a shell and given up, but that's not who my dude is. He's still on tour with the band. He started Hop on a Cure, which is a fund looking for a cure for ALS, trying to not just help himself, but help everybody struggling with that disease.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
He looked at it and said, I'm going to take this and take this unjust situation and transform it as my opportunity to grow and help others. And in A Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, they talk about finding purpose in suffering and reframing it into strength. And sometimes some of the things that...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
Are your biggest adversary, are the things that are bothering you the most, are the things that you perceived as these injustice in the world can become that fuel to drive you to something greater? You know, you've got to take, it's got to become a personal responsibility to see unfair situations as a chance for personal development rather than as obstacles.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And, you know, one of the simplest things I ever heard to start you on a path of overcoming this stuff, one of the easiest things I ever heard was my buddy Kent Clothier said this, talking about choosing responsibility over looking for injustice and fairness, which says shifting from complaining and unfairness to taking responsibility for your own life. And the easiest way to do that is this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
Here's a real simple technique that you can use to start this out. which is you can simply stop saying, I can't. Stop saying I can't. Eliminate that from your vocabulary and change I can't to I choose not to, because that becomes empowering. You know, when people are like, oh, I just can't lose weight. No, no, no, you choose not to lose weight. Oh, I can't get all my work done.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
No, no, no, you choose not to get it done. And when you start reframing it in that, where the onus and responsibility of your personal success falls solely on your shoulders, Well, that becomes empowering. That's something you can do. And if you want a book on that, dude, Extreme Ownership by Jocko Wilnick is all about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
It's not fair. Well, that's what I want to talk about this week is how to escape from that victim mentality of fairness. And I wanna let you know, first of all, if you're listening and you're a person that says it's not fair, don't be offended because it is programmed into you to feel that way. I'm gonna explain why in a minute. But I wanna kinda talk about the idea of fair.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
It's probably the Bible about personal responsibility and taking extreme ownership of your own shit. You know, you've got to take it. You got to be responsible for your own actions. You got to stop pointing the finger and start pulling the thumb. You know, if you look at the core values of a bunch of my companies, I talked about it today with the group I was speaking to earlier.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And the core value, one of the most important ones to me is we look internally for solutions to our problems, which means stuff's going to happen in life and business and everywhere else. But rather than looking first for the reason externally as to why it happened to you, look for what you could have done, if anything, to avoid it. Did I get in a wreck? Yes. Was I speeding? No.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
I mean, you got to look for things that put the onus back on you because that's empowering. Because if you're walking around all day, you know, waiting for something bad to happen to you or being upset because something happened to you, there's no controls there. Like what a miserable way to walk through the planet.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And you're looking, if you're blaming others, that's, you know, just looking for life's unfairness, that just weakens your position in life. It sets you up to be weak and be a victim. And I know I talk about it on these weekly drops. I talk about a lot of books. And the last one I'm going to talk about for this one topic is probably my favorite book, not for this topic.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
It is my favorite book, period. It is the one that I say to people all the time when they ask me, what one book do I have to read? This is the book I always say, this book. And the book is The Obstacles Away by Ryan Holiday. It's kind of a modern take on classic stoicism, which makes stoicism, you know, if you've ever read like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a little bit of a tough read, but
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
But Ryan's adaptation of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and these other great philosophers and how they thought and the text that they wrote into a modern palatable tome, if you will, was one of the most powerful books I've ever written. And in this you have to understand, it talks extensively on seeing opportunities and challenges As just that, it's an opportunity to grow.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
It's an opportunity to get better. And Hermosi said something a couple weeks ago in a post, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, but I still can't get it out of my head because it was one of the coolest things I've ever heard anybody say, which is this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
He said, anytime I have a problem in my life, anytime I have an issue in my life, anytime I have anything come up that is a major concern, I look at it like this. My life is a story, and I am the hero of that story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And I want that problem, it's like the dragon in that story, and I want it to be the biggest dragon possible because I'm the hero of my story, and the bigger the problem, the bigger the dragon, the bigger the challenge, the better the story. He looks at every problem as a story he will one day tell.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And I think that is such a great philosophy, and it goes right along with what Ryan preaches in The Obstacle is the Way. When you see an obstacle, don't shy away from it. Don't blame others. Don't do that. Dive into it. Use it for fire. Use it for fuel. Don't use it for tears and clicks.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
You know, once you move beyond the victimhood of looking for things to be fair and equitable and everything is supposed to be a certain way and take control for your actions in every situation, it will grant you a freedom that is greater than anything else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
So if you're somebody that was upset about the election, if you're somebody that's excited about the election because you think they're coming to save you, they're not. There'll be some good policy, I guess. We're hoping for the success of the administration. But at the end of the day, to be honest with you, I didn't care who won because I know I'm going to do for me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And if everybody had that philosophy, there'd be a lot less people crying in cars on TikTok. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
And in my household, raising my two small kids, not small kids anymore, now 17 and about to be 15, from the time they were little, Every time something wasn't fair in an argument over a video game or what movie we were gonna watch or a bag of popcorn, my response was always the same, which is this. There's no such thing as fair. Fair is where you buy cotton candy and ride rides.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Embracing Life's Unfairness
Fair doesn't exist because I wanted to program my kids to not see the world as something that was happening to them, but rather as something that they were happening to. And the first book, obviously, if you're going to talk about this subject, that you've got to go to is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
From the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be, escaping the drift, this is The Weekly Drop with Jon Gafford. No matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on, make sure you like, subscribe, and comment. And now, The Drop. What's up, everybody? Time for your weekly drop from... My podcast, it takes you from where you are to where you want to be.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
One of my good friends, Dallas McCray, always used to say, man, you ain't got to worry about how people talk about you. It doesn't matter if you're talking good or talking bad. It's when they stop talking about you, you got a problem. And I looked at that. As soon as I saw the Jaguar ad, I thought about that. When's the last time you thought or talked about Jaguar?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And the answer is probably you didn't. And if you look at some major companies through the years and over the history of these big companies, sometimes people got to a point where they're like, we need a little bit of buzz. We need some buzz. We got to do something kind of off the wall.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So today what I'm going to talk about is why I think Jaguar did that and how important it is in some ways that you can create buzz for whatever your company is and whatever your company is doing and how to do that now. So the very first thing I thought about when I saw the Jaguar ad was new Coke. And for those of you that are younger and youngins, if you will, you won't probably remember this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
But back in the early 80s, when we had horse-drawn carriages and whatnot, no, I'm just kidding. But back in the early 80s, Pepsi started doing these taste tests everywhere, these blind taste tests against Coke. And they were heavily advertising these taste tests because people kept picking, in a blind taste test, they would pick Pepsi, which had a higher sugar content in it than Coke did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And I got to tell you, man, I'm a little under the weather today. I'm feeling a little rough, feeling like I don't want to do this. But you know what? Like anything great in life, if you don't want to do it, that's when you have to do it. And last week was Thanksgiving, so we didn't do an episode. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to come down to the studio. I'm going to tough it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So Coke comes out and says, for the first time in 100 years or whatever it was, we're going to reformulate our product and we're launching new Coke. And then they put out this new, completely different tasting formulation of what they had. They discontinued the original stuff. They got rid of it. And everybody started talking about Coke.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
I mean, people were like, this is not as good, blah, blah, blah. And it was like upheaval over new Coke. But everybody was talking about Coke. And this was before the internet, before all that stuff. So this was literally just like mouth-to-mouth, hand-to-hand. The TV would talk about it, but whatever. It was just such a huge buzz over this product. And then what happened was this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So now you got this huge company that's created all this buzz, maybe not for the right reasons, but people are buying the product to try it and they're mainly to see if they can just bitch about it. But then you have this giant outcry for like, we miss the old Coke, we miss the old Coke. And then Coca-Cola comes out and says, you know what, people? We hear you, we listen to you, we understand you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
We're going to launch classic Coke. And this was pretty close behind. It wasn't that far. And then they released classic Coke. And I can remember as a kid, right? I had some friends down the street, the Adamson's and there was always like Coke at their house. Right. And I can remember like it was their mom, maybe that like the day that classic Coke came out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Cause they, they kind of, I don't remember if they said it was going to be like a limited edition deal or not, but But the day it came out, she went out and bought like 12 cases of like classic Coke, because people thought they were going to have to like hoard it. And it was so funny. But that little exercise, you know, eventually New Coke became a footnote.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
They got rid of it and then they pushed forward. But it turned the tables on that Pepsi war. It got nobody talking about Pepsi anymore. Everybody was just talking about Coke. And over the long run, it changed their brand because that's how the value of buzz can help whatever it is you're doing. If you look at Apple, Like think about Apple. Apple launches all of their products on one day.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Like they have the big Apple announcement. Now I get it, these days it's not as exciting with Steve Jobs gone because let's face it, it now weighs 0.10th of a gram less and has a little bit faster processor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Hasn't really been anything great from Apple in a hot second, but there are still people that like wait for that countdown and wait for that show because they start to promote it as this big event and then they just drop it all like it's a big drop. And it creates a tremendous amount of buzz. And there's a book called Contagious, How to Build Word of Mouth in the Digital Age.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And in that it talks about one of the most important things to create buzz is having some exclusivity. And again, if you are a person or a service or a product and you're for everyone, then you're for no one. And you'll hear big companies think that way a lot. If you try to be for everyone, then you're gonna be for no one.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
I'm going to be there for you guys today. And I want to talk about something. You know, as fast as the news cycle moves, I need you guys to go way back in time for me. Way back in time to last week. Because things come in and out of the news so fast. I know that. But this was pretty big news last week. And I really thought a lot about it. And I wanted to see what you guys thought.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And so by having a exclusivity part to whatever it is you do, like for example, when I talk about real estate, me personally selling real estate anymore, I specifically tell people when I talk about real estate, if I'm gonna work with somebody buying or selling a home, I only work with high net worth clients. That's what I say anymore. That's where I'm at in my career. I only do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And then I really do only do that because it creates some exclusivity to work with me. You know, if you look at Tesla, who Elon Musk has just become a master at creating buzz around things, it doesn't always have to be good. Like just like the new Coke thing, right? If you think about what Tesla got the most buzz for in the last several years,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
It was when he took that hammer, walked up to the cyber truck and broke the window. That wasn't supposed to be breakable. But who do you think was pushing that out harder than anybody else? Tesla was, because it was everywhere and everybody was talking about it. And nobody remembers that window breaking, but they were talking about Tesla. So lean into your imperfections.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Lean into those things that make you remarkable. Because there's a book called The Purple Cow by Seth Godin where it talks about businesses excel when they stand on being unique or remarkable. And remarkable doesn't always have to be remarkably good. It can just be remarkably interesting, remarkably funny, remarkably top of mind.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
You know, my good friend Steve Sims always created a lot of buzz around him and his brand by doing one simple stupid thing. And that was he would go into back when they had the SkyMall magazines on the airplanes and he would go into the SkyMall magazine and he would find that if you remember what those were, they had just it was a collection of goofy stuff. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And he would go into those magazines and we'd find like the weird like Bigfoot statue that you put in your yard that nobody's ordering. He would rip that statue out. He would write, I saw this and I thought of you. Put it in an envelope and send it to one of his clients. And he said the value of that was my clients would get it and be like, number one, why am I getting this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Number two, they would be at a dinner party and they would share it because it was remarkably interesting. Hey, this guy, Steve Sims, sent me this thing and said, hey, it's a Bigfoot statue. Why would he have thought of me when he saw this? And now the whole table is talking about Steve Sims.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And if you look at what Elon Musk has done, not just with breaking a window along those things, but he did something. And this is where now building a buzz becomes a little bit easier.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Because for the last several years, everybody that I know in business that has a big business, we've been a little terrified of getting canceled, of saying the wrong thing, of doing the wrong thing, of being perceived to be the wrong thing. and getting canceled. And it was a real fear with business owners that I know.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
I know that for years I've taught, don't talk politics because half of the people you do business with aren't going to agree with you. It's just one of those things where you're so scared of doing this. But again, it goes back to that thing of if people don't know what you're for, then you're for no one. You can't be for everybody. No product is for everybody. You've got to be for something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So if you didn't see it, everybody did because everybody was talking about it. But Jaguar came out with a new branding package last week that was really bizarre. It was like off the wall, like crazy gender bending, you know, actors and models. And it had nothing to do with a car and just a really artsy, super over the top type ad that came out that they did. And they got blasted.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And I think Elon Musk, if you talk about one of the two, what launched that dude into the stratosphere, in my opinion, in the recent times of being everyone's hero, is when he sat on the stage after he bought Twitter. And that reporter asked him at that press conference, what do you have to say about all the advertisers pulling out or threatening to pull out because of you buying this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And he looked right at the camera and he said, what do I think? I think go fuck yourself. I think he goes, you're going to blackmail me with money? Like something I literally have more of than anybody on the planet? That's how you're going to blackmail me? Go fuck yourself. And right there, that dude became an absolute hero to so many people that I know, me included.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
I was like, whoa, he does not care. He literally doesn't care. And that moment of becoming for something and becoming this is who I am, take it or leave it, got him a tremendous amount of buzz. Just a huge amount of buzz. And you don't necessarily have to be, and I think that's a good lesson, that you don't have to be, create buzz around what you're necessarily good at or what you do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
I mean, you look at Red Bull. You know, yeah, they got their stupid little cartoon commercials that are out there, but how does Red Bull create buzz? How do they create buzz around their product?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Well, it seems like every time I'm going through the internet and I'm seeing some absolutely insane thing happening, like a dude jumping off a hot air balloon that's going to land in a biplane and then, you know, drop in on a half pipe and then serve Malibu all in one move. It's all got Red Bull logos all over it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
They are sponsoring things that are impossible to do because they're attaching their brand to these crazy feats because they want you to think that every crazy athlete in the world is drinking Red Bull because wouldn't you like to be a crazy athlete too, even if you don't have the cojones to jump off the side of a hot air balloon? They're attaching themselves to these things to create buzz.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So if you're just the average person or you're a small business owner, whatever you are, I would say the first thing you got to do is start being you. I think the days of having to worry about getting canceled are kind of behind us right now, thank God. And so don't be afraid to have an opinion. Don't be afraid to share that opinion.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Don't be, you can't have fear that half of your people are gonna leave because you have an opinion. Because I would rather have half of my audience really gravitate to who I am and really connect with me and lose half of my audience that doesn't, then have 100% of my audience lukewarm and have no real feeling about me. Because it just doesn't make any sense.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
So with that being said, man, I hope you guys have a great week. We got some unbelievable guests coming through the studio coming up in the next little bit. It's crazy. Chris Voss will be here next week. Super excited about that. We just had Sean Mikey, who is incredible. His episode will drop on Tuesday. This coming up Tuesday, just incredible guests continue to come to the podcast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And a couple of things. I'm starting to do a newsletter. If you don't have time to listen to us all the time, I'm going to start doing a newsletter where I recap the best moments of the week, where I recap everything that's happened on the show, where I recap notes from stuff I'm reading, events that I'm going to, things that I think are cool. So if you want to hit the newsletter, do me a favor.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Jump on, click the links in the bio of wherever you're watching this or you're listening to this or go to thejohngafford.com. And yeah, sign up for the mailer list. I'd love to put you on that newsletter. It's going to be, I'm excited about it. It's cool. So anyway, have a great rest of the week. We'll see you on Tuesday. What's up, everybody?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Unlocking the Power of Controversy
And every talking head from Charlie Kirk to Fox News, everybody was talking about this. Everybody was talking about it. And they were saying how stupid they were, how the election was proof that the woke culture was done and people don't want this anymore and why would you do this and this and that. And I saw it instantly for something completely different. And this is what I saw it for.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop welcome back to the program everybody happy thursday and welcome to the weekly drop from the podcast that gets you like i said man from uh where you are to where you want to be and you know where i want to be right now today anywhere but here
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
You know, when I think about keeping my word, a couple of stories from my life come to mind and things that I've done to make it important. And the first one is gonna be a story of when I owned my own insurance company with my sister in Florida. This was a business that we spun up in the year 2000. It was really successful. It did really well.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
We were selling Medicare supplements to old people in Florida, which as you can imagine is good business. And we had kind of come across this really good system for getting free medicine for old people. It was kind of a handshake agreement with the US government, with these drug companies, that if they met certain income requirements, that they would give them their medicine for free.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And we went out and essentially would say, okay, You're paying $175 for your Medicare supplement, but your drugs cost you $600. If you buy our Medicare supplement, which because you're a little older is going to be more expensive, now it's $200, we'll get all of your medicine for free. And that's what we did. And literally it was handing out free drugs is what we did.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
That was the whole business model, and it worked exceptionally well. Well, as we grew, we started scaling to other markets. You know, we added some people and started adding people to the company. And we grew into Tampa, Florida, from North Florida. And my salesman down there, now, obviously, to make this work, we've got to buy leads off of mailers and just all this stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And the leads come in, we've got the salespeople, salespeople set the appointments, close the deals, and that's how it worked. Well, My number one guy, as far as sales goes, was in Tampa, and he was doing very, very well. And all of a sudden, I noticed he was blowing off leads and going to play golf as soon as he started making good money, not giving the business the attention that it needed.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And as the owner of the business, I didn't really have any choice, even though this guy was the best guy. I had to fire him. And the problem with that scenario is the guy was me because I owned the company and I was, we were, I was, I was the COO, the CMO, the head sales guy and everybody else. So how do you fire yourself? You can't.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
So I decided at that moment, and this was a growth moment for me was I had to get some middle management in my life and. How I achieved getting middle management was I just decided that my phone, which is every one of you has this tool in your pocket, my phone was gonna become my middle management. And if it went into my phone, if it went into that device, it happened.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
It did not matter what it was. If I put that I had an appointment, nothing else mattered. It did not matter if I got free tickets to Super Bowl, I was going to that appointment. If it said I was going to the gym, I was going to the gym. If it said I was doing this, I was doing that. So my calendar became religion to me.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
It was everything that I said I would do went into that phone and then got done. And the reason that this is so important in that aspect is because when you talk about being honest and keeping your word, keeping your word to yourself is so incredibly important.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
i gotta tell you i'm coming off the end of yet again a wicked wicked cold i just i'm just sick sick sick sick it's crazy how ill i have been this entire winter it just i'll get over one thing and then and then some other credit it's not even like i got like little kids anymore like when the kids were small they would constantly bring stuff home from uh from everywhere and it's not like that anymore it's just it's just me literally being sick and
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
We've talked about it many times on this podcast, but like the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz talks about being impeccable with your word in that book. If you haven't read that book, again, I could not recommend it more, but being impeccable with your word as a key principle.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Because when you honor commitments to yourself, you build trust with others because your actions are more important than what you say you're going to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
You look at guys like John D. Rockefeller, who the only reason he survived the Great Depression, believe it or not, is when everything went to absolute hell in a handbasket with his business because he always did what he said he would do in business.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
He was able to pull lines of credit and survive those financial hardships when everybody else couldn't because he understood that trust was his primary currency. You know, another story for me, a couple years ago, many, many moons ago, like 2017, I got brought in to start a property flipping hedge fund with a guy that I knew. And we went out and raised, he said, we gotta raise X amount of capital.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And it was a pretty decent chunk. And I went to my friends and family and raised $750,000 for our end of the seed money into this fund. wound up being a much larger raise, but I raised 750,000 from friends and family into this house flipping fund. Now, needless to say, look, I win more than I lose, but this thing was a loser and it lost. And it left me with a partner that abandoned me,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Hit the, literally hit the bricks and fled the state. Left me sitting on several lawsuits of which hopefully my lawsuit against him will come to fruition very, very soon. But hit the bricks, left me with lawsuits, left me with issues, left me with all kinds of things. And I made, I made a commitment in that moment. I sat with my wife.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And you're discussing this investment, and we were very clear to everybody that invested, friends and family, that look, this could have upside, but it's an investment like anything else. It could go to zero. And we both agreed that it was incredibly important because I plan not to flee the state and go to Texas.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
I plan to stay right here and continue doing business, that it was very, very important that we make everybody whole. And over the course of the next, call it seven months. Some people got paid faster than others, but over the course of the next seven months, I made every single one of those investors whole. And I say that as a matter of pride.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And I say that as a business lesson, because nobody out there can ever say that they invested money with me that I guaranteed that I did not make right. I would rather see somebody that tells me that story and shows me that proof rather than somebody that shows me a 20% return. Because, yeah, everybody hits the lottery once in a while. Projects go good. Things happen. Markets are good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
But what happens when the market's bad? What happens when things go to hell in a handbasket? What happens? That's what I want to know. And that is what the currency is. that trust is built on. It's worth so much. And if that's not enough, you gotta remember that your word defines your character. You know, reputation is what other people say about you when you're not in the room.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And one of the worst things that you can ever hear about anybody is, that dude's all talk. Or, oh yeah, they talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, they don't do anything. And sure, there's times in business or there's times in your life when you're gonna get to a place where, man, maybe you do have to let somebody down. Maybe you can't perform at a level you wanted to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And what I've found, I'll give you a great example. Pace Morby, who I love Pace, I love Jamil, I love those guys, this whole team. They came to me and they wanted to spin up a national title company. I said, okay, cool, I gotta do some research, let's get started on this, and I started working on it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And I realized very quickly that based on where we were within the scale of our company, there was no way that I could pull this off for them at a high level. Because at that point, that was the first time we looked at some of the states that they wanted to be in, and we just knew that the lift was gonna be too great for us at the size of our company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
So rather than just let it fizzle and kind of go on the vine, I was very honest. I just said, hey, man, I can't perform at the level I think this is going to need to be done to make this work. They ended up doing it with somebody else. I'm not mad about it. I couldn't perform. Now, I could have squandered around. I could have spent a year of telling them it's coming. We're working on it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
I thought to myself, if I'm going to go down there today and I'm going to do this podcast, and literally this is the only reason I came down here today, was to do this podcast. And normally I'm ahead. I'm ahead on the interviews, but I'm never ahead on the weekly drops because I like to keep them poignant with whatever's going on at the time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Things are happening, whatever else. But as soon as I knew that we could not pull it off, I got out. And my currency with those guys, my relationship currency is still good. My credit is still good with those guys because, yes, did we fail? Sure. Did I not do what I thought we could? Yes, but I was honest about it, and I allowed them to pivot as soon as we could, which is what you have to do.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
So many people just let the situations draw out and just drag out, and that's what causes those problems. Now, that's a very big promise, right? Hey, let's start a national company together with some really heavy hitters. That's a pretty big promise, but even the small promises matter, right? The small things matter. And my kids, when they were little, I would always tell them this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Even when they would tell these little white lies. And when I was a kid, dude, that was, I don't know if it was a defense mechanism or what it was for me as a kid, but I was a kid that, man, I told a lot of, no, I was a liar as a kid. I told some just fabricated wild stories because I thought that was the way that I would keep up with the Joneses.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
That's how I would keep things going was to be dishonest about stupid shit. I mean, things that were just silly that you would say. And I gotta tell you, it's such a dangerous slope when you start telling little fibs, because it becomes a habit like anything else. And if you can be dishonest about little things, then you'll be dishonest about big things, and it becomes less and less of a deal.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
We've all known people that are dishonest with people and tell just a bunch of nonsense, and you know who they are. And you gotta figure a couple things. Number one, it just makes your life so much harder so much more difficult because you gotta keep track of too much stuff. What was it?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
I don't know who said it, but they said if you tell the truth all the time, you don't have to keep track of anything, which makes life so much easier. Because when you tell the truth consistently, it's gonna build self-respect for you because you're staying true and aligned with yourself.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
I mean, people who consistently honor their commitments, they develop a stronger confidence because they have discipline. And discipline builds character, which builds confidence. Now, the next thing I would say is if you don't see like a lot of opportunity rolling down the street right into your lap, maybe it's because people don't think of you as reliable.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
And with this one today, I thought, what a better thing to talk about than the importance of your word being your bond. and the importance of how and why you should always honor your commitments to others, to yourself, and everybody else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
You know, when people think of me, I want them to think that A, if you need something from me, if it's hell or high water, you know, they see those quizzes all the time on on Facebook where it was like, if you had to call somebody at three o'clock in the morning to do whatever, who would you call? I love the thought of being that person for somebody.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
I love that I'm so reliable that they just know I would show up. And if I said I would do something, I would absolutely do that. That is one of the keys, again, how to win friends and influence people. Talks about consistency and trustworthiness are fundamentals to influence and leadership, which they are. If you think people are ever going to follow you and they can't count on you, you're nuts.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
If you have any aspiration to build a team, a business, a company, you've got to be somebody that does what they say they're going to do. So as we wrap up today, this Thursday, so I can get back to bed, just remember, I'm here right now because I made a commitment to myself every Thursday to be here with you guys.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Hopefully, you guys will take a little bit of motivation from the rough shape that I'm in today and start keeping some promises to yourself. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Impact of Honesty and Consistency
Because today, literally, I am honoring my commitment, not just to me, but the commitment that I've made to all of you guys that choose to spend this 15 minutes with me every Thursday, that you expect these things to come out. And I want to make sure that I do them for you, and they're here.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop ah welcome back everybody i'm john gafford and welcome to your weekly drop and i gotta tell you man i have failed i mean absolutely crash and burn miserably failed
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
And when failure comes, dude, for me, it can be gut wrenching because I have sometimes ideas that I fall in love with. And I'm the first one to say I fall madly in love with my own ideas. And when they don't come to fruition or they fail, it's almost like for me. an artist that paints a painting and then people think it sucks, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
It's almost how it feels because I take it so personally because so much of what I attempt to do, it is very personal to me, as I'm sure it is to you. And if you don't properly deal with those losses as they come up, then it's going to be a real problem. And it's funny, coming out next week on Tuesday, listen to this. I had Mikey C-Rock, who's a good friend, who I had him on the podcast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
His episode comes out next Tuesday. And just talking about, he wrote a book called Rocket Fuel, How to Turn Failure into Success. And it was the best analogy I'd ever heard for something he adopted at a very early age. He said it's either... It's either the trunk or the tank when something happens. You either put it in the trunk or the tank.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
And what he meant by that was if you put something in the trunk, if you think about that metaphor, it's like heavy, the back of the car, the vehicle sags down because it's towing all of this stuff. It's carrying all of this stuff. But the tank, man, that's what makes the thing go. So he says whenever adversity jumps up and bites him or he fails, he looks down and goes, am I going to use this?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Where's this going? It's two choices. There's no more than two choices. That's it. It's going to the trunk. It's going to the tank. And I wanted to kind of show you and tell you how I turn things from instead of putting them in the trunk and I put them in the tank. The first thing is this. I'm going to tell a story.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
My daughter had a situation where something that she loves and she works very, very hard at is not necessarily going her way. And right now, and you know, my first reaction to that as a father is, well, make yourself undeniable. Like if you're undeniable, then you can't get bumped out of the spot that you're trying to earn.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
That's my first, like earn it, everything or nothing given thought process. But then you start thinking sometimes some of this stuff is a little bit outside your control. And my wife wanted me to talk to her right away about it because my wife is very much super high EQ, very, you know, she's an empath, very empathetic, wanted to try to help baby bear right away.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
And my daughter is very much like me. She's very much like me. And I said, nope, you know what? I'm gonna let it sting her for like two days. Because me, when I first take that loss or something bad happens, I gotta let it sting me for a couple of days. I gotta sit in it. And what I mean by that is I've gotta let it hurt, right? I don't wanna hear a solution.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
And as the saying goes, if you don't fail, you probably aren't accomplishing very much either. And in life, the ball will get rolling, right? Sometimes you can just do no wrong. Confidence is strong. One success leads to the next. But if you're somebody like me that has a lot of balls in the air in business, in relationships, in ideas and concepts and things you wanna do,
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
I don't wanna hear, I'm not ready to decide whether I'm gonna put it in the trunk or the tank. It's just gonna sting me for a minute and I gotta deal with that. So let it sting. Then after a couple days, I say, okay, I need to do my failure blog. I need to hit the failure blog and I need to go through this. And I start dissecting whatever happened as though it was a school project.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
I'm looking for what happened. And so what I wanna write out, I write out on top of my blog, and I have a little personal blog, journal, whatever you may call it, that I keep track of this stuff, and I write out exactly what it was, because five, 10 years from now, I may not even remember what these ideas were. I write out exactly what the concept was.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
If there was a financial loss that was involved in that deal, I write out what that financial loss was. If it was an emotional loss, I write out how it made me feel. Whatever that loss was in the moment, I write out. The next thing I write down is, why do I think it failed? Why do I think this did not work? And I write out every reason why I think it may have gone south.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Now some of that is internal, some of that is external. Like for example, In a business that I had that failed, that did not get the traction I wanted, I just didn't hire enough people to make it work. I depended on myself to make all these outbound sales calls to gain interest in this product, and I don't have time for a bunch of outbound sales calls.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
It's just not something that I have time in the day to do with enough consistency to make this work. So I wrote that down. I wrote, you know, couldn't reach the proper market.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
So before I went forward with this idea, I should have made sure I had a marketing channel to actually get to all of these people that I wanted to find because it was a very small sect of people and there was really nowhere for me to find to get to them. You know, the next thing I wrote on there was, you know, maybe the price point was bad.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Maybe, you know, I should have gauged interest before I went all in on some expenses. And then below that, I write, what could I have done better? What am I going to learn that I won't repeat? Like, what will I not do again that I won't repeat? With this particular example that I'm talking about, I wrote things like, A, do not depend on yourself to be the sales force. You don't have time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
You won't do it. I just wrote, you won't do it. You don't have time. You will not do this. You will not be your own sales force. You can't do anything else ever again where you are dependent to be the sales force. You don't have time. Don't tell yourself you'll do it because you won't. Two, it was like, don't spend money blindly, assuming this is going to happen, because
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
You haven't gauged market interest yet. You don't know that you can reach the people you need to reach. That is probably, just to tell you in failure, that's probably my biggest issue is I have such blind belief in my ability and skill sets that I will drive headfirst into something. I'm like, yeah, book the room, sign the $30,000 contract to book the room. We're going to fill it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
It's like, wait a second, maybe you need to pump the brakes. And the problem is I probably wait too long in between times I go to my failure journal. Because just because I write it out and just because I write out the lessons that I need to learn doesn't necessarily mean that I'm gonna remember them when it's time to remember them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
In my office, so many people have trophies, you know, they have like great accomplishments of their life. If you look around my office, I have wonderful things of failure as trying to keep it in my face as reminders. I know that sounds like a terrible thing, but it's lessons that I've learned. I have $100,000 bottle of vitamins on my desk.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
If you ever come to my office, I have $100,000 bottle of vitamins. Did I pay a hundred grand for a bottle of vitamins? No, but we put up, paid a hundred thousand dollars for all the other vitamins that we bought with that one for a failed multi-level marketing company. It didn't go anywhere. Lessons learned from that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
I have a script from a television show in my office that I was asked to go read for right after The Apprentice, which was written by a guy named David Flabat, who did like Willie Grace and all these big sitcoms. And they saw me on The Apprentice and they wanted me to come read. And when I read the script, they wanted me to read for the lead of this thing, flew me to New York to do it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
you're gonna miss way more than you connect with. And I win a lot, but man, I fail a lot. And sometimes those failures come really close together and start to compile on them a little bit. And so when that happens for me, A couple of things that I know. Number one, I've probably drifted too far away from my process of how I deal with failure.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
And they wanted me to read for the lead. And I read in the lead that the character was slightly overweight, kind of chubby, by no means man candy. And I was like, whoa. And then the description of another character was loud, obnoxious, think Vince Vaughn from Swingers. So I went to this casting appointment and told these people, you know, hey, I walk in and I go, I think there's been a mistake.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
I think you want me to read for this other thing. And the guy just looks around with the camera and goes, dude, you can read for whatever you want. And then later on, my friends that are actually in that business are like, no, no, no, the descriptions don't mean anything. You should have just said, but the fact that I went and changed what was happening, obviously I didn't get a call back.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Thank God that show never got made because that would sting any worse. But that script is a permanent reminder of never go into a business meeting assuming that I know what the other people want to do. Just don't do it. So turning your failures, like again, you can't put them In the trunk, you gotta put them in the tank. And the way to do that is for me, utilizing that journal, write it out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Write out what went wrong. And this is with everything that happens to you. And for some people that might not wanna write, that's okay. You need a mentor. You need somebody that, a confidant that you can talk this out with and say, listen, I don't want you to tell me what you think happened. I don't want you to give me advice. I just want you to listen to me, purge this out.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
But the key to surviving huge amounts of failure is 1000% finding the lessons within it's the, it's the basis of stoicism. It's what Ryan holiday writes about. And In his great book, The Obstacles Away, which if you haven't read that, that is the number one book I always recommend.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
I talk about books a lot on this because I read a lot, but that is the number one book I always recommend everybody go get is The Obstacles Away. That book probably changed my life personally more than anything else. It is a goal one day to have Ryan on the podcast. I'm going to get there. We'll have him on. But you got to do something with it. Wallowing in it is not going to happen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
It's not going to make any better. And the last thing I'm going to talk about When you fail, don't hang your hat on outside forces as why you failed because that makes you a victim and it makes you out of control. When the reason for the failure or the major things that happened that caused it are you and within you, you are in control because now you have the power to change it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Like they say at Die Hard, man, I talk about it all the time, the henchmen at Die Hard, no one is coming to save you. It's to save yourself. We'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Harnessing the Power of Adversity
So today in this podcast, I want to explain to you exactly what my process is for dealing with these things. But I also go back and revisit some books that I love. Obviously, Ryan Holiday's The Obstacle is the Way. My good friend Ari Rastegar, his book, The Gift of Failure. Pick it up on Amazon. Great book. But all of these little things to remind me of how to deal with these things.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
So many agents get caught on the commission hamster wheel, right? Where it's like they make a bunch of money and they don't do any work and then, yay, I'm rich, I'm rich. No, I'm broke, I'm broke, I'm broke, I'm broke. It's the rollercoaster up and down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
For me, I ran numbers like crazy all day yesterday looking at the expenses I have in things, looking at return on time, how much time I spend on things, and whether or not those things serve me or continue to serve me. And this goes from I mean, you know, angles in my business. It goes from overall businesses that we spun up, auxiliaries that we spun up around the company. It's this podcast.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And if you can just work consistently in the business and put forth the right effort and the right amount of effort compared to what the market is doing in your KPIs balance, well, now you have a steady stream of income. And then you can turn those commissions instead of the end goal into the fuel that really fires the rocket ship.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
It's relationships with groups I go to. It's all types of different things. And if you are somebody that just kind of says yes to everything, which I like to say yes, I'm easily excitable. Man, that sounds a good idea. Let's do that. I definitely feel like I'm smarter than everybody else, unfortunately.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
So when I hear somebody being highly successful at something, I'm like, if that dude can do it, I know I can do it. I know I can. And like I said, we're going to get a little more into my personal journey on it. But welcome to the program, ladies and gentlemen. This is one of the guys that works at our company, and he is one of my aces. This is Jason Griggs. Jason.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Round two, buddy. You've been on here before. And again, I grabbed you with this. Um, I'm going to, I'm going to get to your story a little bit before I get to mine, but when we met, right, we met and you were essentially, I sent out an email, um, Actually, no. I got on Facebook because I walked in my son's room one night and he was watching lacrosse, like college lacrosse.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And I'm like, what are you watching? And he goes, I'm watching lacrosse. And I go, and he just randomly found it on a channel. And he goes, I think I want to play this. And I said, okay, cool. I've never played lacrosse. I'm from Florida, dude. We just...
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
play football baseball you know basketball like america we don't play these furniture sport yeah whatever it is so they do now obviously but back then i never played lacrosse so you know i get on i get on the interwebs and hey who do i know that could tell me anything about lacrosse And Jason hit me right up. He was a realtor at another company.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And he hit me right up and said, yeah, man, I can help you, dude. I actually coach the middle school team here. And he used to be the high school coach. And I can help you with that. And literally helped teach my kid lacrosse and got him into it and helped us. And I'll be forever grateful for that. You know, medically DQ'd Hayden. His career got cut a little short with the bad ankles. That's okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
That's all right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
um he had fun he did have fun he had a great time and when when we met you were you were doing you were running your lacrosse business as a business and it's your passion dude you've been doing this forever like you play lacrosse forever yep live eat breathe die lacrosse and still do because i see your sons who are like little still running around with lacrosse sticks right still but you know you were doing this chasing this passion doing this thing you loved and real estate was kind of something you did a little bit of yeah
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop welcome back to the program everybody this is the weekly drop this is normally my little solo pod that i do on thursdays
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And you made a very difficult decision.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
To let go of the lacrosse stuff, to let go of it. And we were just laughing before we got on here because if we'd had a reality show with how some of these parents treated him, it was amazing. I saw some of the worst behavior I've ever seen in my life out of adults at some of those meetings. And I don't miss them. I don't miss them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
I mean, very rarely do I sit in a room and just kind of move speechless. There were times that I was just absolutely speechless in those rooms, but, but you took a lot of abuse from those folks and you let go of something you loved and you got headfirst into real estate and have just had, I mean, I'm talking about, nuclear results. So I want to talk about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
What was that like giving up something you loved?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
I don't have to deal with their parents.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
So let's talk. I want to talk about when you made that decision. I'm not going to talk about income because that's just annoying. Trust me. I see his checks. I see what he's doing. But I'll put it in framework of this. When you made that decision, how many rentals did you own at that moment?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Closing your 39th next week. So in a very short amount of time, you did that. And you took that passion for coaching. And what I love about your team in particular, your group, and this is not an infomercial for Jason's group, it just shows how he took his passion to something that makes more money.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
when you took that passion for what you're doing and put it towards real estate your agents on your team like how to sell real estate because you're basically using the same systems and process i use which is great but you're taking it for your people and putting your own spin on it which is teaching them how to actually invest in real estate yeah and that's the most important thing
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Well, so many agents get caught on the commission hamster wheel, right? Where- It's like they make a bunch of money and they don't do any work. And then, yeah, I'm rich. I'm rich. No, I'm broke. I'm broke. I'm broke. I'm broke. It's the roller coaster up and down.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And if you can just work consistently in the business and put forth the right effort in the same the right amount of effort compared to what the market is doing in your KPIs balance. Well, now you have a steady stream of income and then you can turn those commissions instead of the end goal into the fuel that really fires the rocket ship.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And this week, man, I'm doing it with somebody. I got a guest on the weekly drop. So I'm not doing a full escaping the drift. We're not going to go for 40 minutes. This is still going to be like 15 minutes. But there's something that I want to talk about that this dude is kind of the walking, talking example of this. And I wanted to bring him in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Got it. I love it. So, I mean, again, you look at all those things. And with my process of stuff, a lot of it is in the numbers as well. Because I think... You know, you look at things and unfortunately with me, like the decisions that I make, a lot of it is very intertwined. Like I do this because it needs to lead to this. And I do this because it goes with this and I do this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And so it's these connected interwebs. And so, you know, for example, this podcast, this podcast is really designed and it's a lot of work to do this, man. It's not easy. Yeah. It's a lot of work, it's monetized, but it doesn't make me a ton of money, but the effort we put into it. But this is totally designed and totally put out there as an avenue to promote my book, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
So we're having the final bids come back on the book, which are coming back next week, actually, yeah, they'll be back by the 21st, all the people that want to publish it. And if none of those bids are to my liking, I'll probably just go the self-publishing route because why would I pay a vig? I'll just go the self-publishing route unless any of them are what I want.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And then I don't know that I need this. Right. So it's like all of this stuff kind of goes together. And I love doing it because I love to give back. But if it's based on driving sales through a publisher, then if I don't need the publisher, then I don't need this. And I think sometimes as much as you love doing things, you have to ask yourself, is that serving you still?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And if you're somebody that finds yourself burning the candle at both ends, you've got all kinds of things that you do, all kinds of stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
I think that's part of that, is this serving me? Is this particular thing serving me? And you look at, like right now, I've got some things in front of me and some things that are out there where it's like, you know, what you focus on grows always. And when your focus is too scattered, nothing grows right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And there were some things I looked at last night that I've been maybe a little lazy at looking at numbers on that. I was like, Whoa, that ain't good. All right. Whoa. Yeah. Okay. We got to get this in line fast and we got, you know, and steer the ship and it's stuff that for years would have just been fine. Like I just assumed it was fine.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
All of a sudden you're like, Whoa, I gotta, I gotta give that some attention. And yeah, you know, dialing back on the amount of things you're doing and going less wide and more deep sometimes. And this comes from like, I'm the king of vertical integration. I get that. But, but really going deep on certain things you're doing, focusing on and asking yourself, how does this serve me?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
There's an exercise that I do once a year, and I just went through this, and I didn't really sleep last night, not because I was still doing the exercise, just because when I get done doing this, it's such an introspect at your life, and it's such a way that you're forced to go deep
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Not just financially, but like you said, with your family, it needs to be how much, like for example, all of the mastermind groups that I'm in takes me out of town four days at a click all the time, gone all the time. Like, am I getting a return? Like, I love all the guys there. I love everything that happens there. I love the information I get.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
But am I really getting enough out of it to justify not just the financial investment, but the time away from my now ticking down to one more summer on Hayden and two more summers with Roma?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
I remember you saying that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Yeah, but here's the thing. But here's what people don't realize also. If you're scared to move out of one situation, because there's a lot of people in real estate too that work a job and they're like, well, that's where I get my contacts and my clients. That's my network. Well, dude, the only way it dies is if you let it die. Correct.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Just because you're not there doesn't mean you can't keep in the loop with people. It doesn't mean you can't have a checklist to interact with them mathematically through social media, a checklist to call in, a checklist to send them a handwritten note, a checklist to remind them you still exist. Checklist to drop in on people. That's on you.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Is that fight still going to be in L.A.?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And you have time to do that. Yeah, time.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
It's hard. I'm telling you, dude. This week, listen. If you are, again, I'm going to sum this up because, you know, I think we just reached a point where we've made our point, which is, hey, don't be scared to say no to stuff. I mean, for me, like, I think of it this way. One of my New Year's resolutions, if you will, was if it ain't hell yeah, it's got to be hell no.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Like, if you think of like, think of like the yes on a meter, right? Where like you have like the green, like a meter in a car that you would see, like on a dashboard of a car, right? And over here you have the green where you have the yes. Right. And then over here you have the red, which is no. And like the very bottom is like, hell no. And the very far right is like, hell yes.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And right in the middle is like, I mean, I don't know, maybe. Yeah. Okay.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Right. How much shit do you say yes to? It's in that middle. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Why not? Like, dude, if you just, if you just look at things like it's gotta be all the way red line and hell yes for me to say yes. How much better would your life be? Because we get inundated with all this crap that we just kind of agree to that doesn't really do it for us.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
on looking at the things that you choose to do and whether or not they continue to serve you in the best possible way. And sometimes that requires some very tough choices and some choices that are still out there.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
And then it doesn't spark any type of energy that we put into it. And I know there's way too much of that stuff in my life. I know there is. And I guarantee there's too much of it in yours.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Yeah, but it's stupid. Sometimes it's just stupid. It's too much. When you look at some of the numbers from last night, you start asking, why? Why am I this busy on some of this stuff? I could just clip this off and who cares, right? I mean, there's nobody listening to us anyway. If I stopped doing the podcast tomorrow, nobody would care. I'm just kidding. You better care.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
If I ever stopped doing this podcast, there better be public outcry. That's what I want. I want public outcry. Well, anyway, dude, Jason, thanks for joining us. Of course, man. You're the walking epitome of that story. And I hope he inspired you to look at the things in your life and maybe cut out some stuff.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
Have the balls, if you will, the wherewithal to cut out some stuff that isn't serving you. See you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: Aligning Career Goals with Personal Values Ft. Jason Griggs
But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
from the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be escaping the drift this is the weekly drop with john gafford no matter what platform you're watching or listening to us on make sure you like subscribe and comment and now the drop welcome back everybody to another episode of the weekly drop man my little private podcast where to just meet here in the studio talking to you about things that i find interesting or things that i think will help you and this week man i gotta be honest with you
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And that line to me has become, you know, when people come to town, if I'm on my stories, Instagram, and I see them in Vegas and they didn't call me, that's okay. That's an acquaintance. Because friends kind of call each other when they go to town. Like, I couldn't imagine going to certain places in the United States where I have friends that live there and not calling them.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Like, I just can't even get my head around that. And, you know, it's a little troubling because sometimes when you move people from that friend category to that acquaintance category, it's kind of like, damn, it kind of sucks, man. It's a little brutal. And the older you get as your circle gets smaller, right?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
and the harder it gets to meet people or become really good friends with people, you know, you start to feel, I don't care who you are, you feel a little lonely. And I think when you're looking for friends, and I think you're looking for that friend group, when you're little, dude, it's easy. You like the monkey bars? I like the monkey bars, let's be friends. Did we just become best friends?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Yep, we sure did. But as you get older, You value people for different things. And I think people look for different value out of folks. And when I say older, I mean, even like you look in high school, right? You know, the popular kids take an interest in you. You want to hang out with the popular kids because they raise your social status.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
As you get a little older, maybe you start networking on a business side. So you look for people that are in the same business as you or can help you with your business. But the older and older you get, the less and less and less that kind of works. And it gets difficult because you get your own life. You get kids. If you're successful in business, you get somewhat separated from everybody else.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And time goes on. People start to think, too, if you're someone like me that has a relatively large public persona here in town anyway, people just assume that I'm always busy or there's something going on. So you don't get invited to a lot of stuff. And it's weird.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And when you do get invited to things and you can't go for whatever reason, it's just like, man, I can't go, but please invite me again. So I'm not going to give you stories today of great success of what I've done to do this. I'm going to give you some books that I found this week and some tips that they give you on how hopefully I can get better.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Because one of the things that stuck out to me from Travis's podcast was if you want more friends, be a better friend. And you start questioning, okay, cool, am I doing everything I can to be a better friend to others to be more attractive and get in their inner circle?
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
It's more about me than it is about you. And what I mean by that is I wanted to do a podcast about something that's been troubling me, man, kind of lately and kind of how I am. And so I figured me being a problem solver and what I do is I do research and try to figure out how to get better at when things aren't going the way that I want it to go.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So the first thing I'm going to talk about is getting beyond small talk with people, which can be really hard, especially when you're dealing with people that are grown with families and careers and jobs, and especially when you're the new person breaking into that circle. new click.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Like for example, I just joined a new country club not too long ago and I've met a bunch of great people there, but I don't know that I have a bunch of people up there that I would call friends yet. I have a lot of acquaintances because I haven't quite gotten over that hump yet with a lot of those people beyond relatively small talk. And in the book, Platonic
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
how the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends by Marissa Franco, which I found this week. Marissa explains that building a deeper connection often starts with vulnerability and genuine curiosity, helping us to create bonds based on mutual understanding instead of convenience.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Now for me, dude, I don't know if you, if this is you too, but for me, hard thing about this is like, when do you ask a really personal question? Like when, You don't want to be like a creep like you're prying if you're not like on that level.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So for me, it's probably more superficial just out of fear of overstepping my bounds with somebody because, you know, it's like, bro, is that an inner circle question or is it not? But according to this person, you have to kind of just get over that and cross that threshold. And hopefully people don't look at you like you're a crazy person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Hopefully they look at you like, you know, yeah, man, they answer you with genuine concern. Now, one of the things I took away from this this week was I don't do enough of when people have things going on in their life, and I know they have things going on, I have not been good enough about just reaching out for no reason to say, hey, just checking in to see how it's going.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I've made a concerted effort this week to do that with several people that I am acquaintances, and some people I would consider my friends, just because I know they have some stuff going on, reaching out to make sure they're okay. I think... I think you got to get out of your own way with your own busy life and really do that. Get to the deeper issues.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I've got some folks that have some major life stuff going on and just checking on them just to see how they're doing without any agenda for getting anything back for it at all. The second thing.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Again, kind of goes with the same thing of initiating that deeper type of conversation and transforming somebody from an acquaintance to a friend is by sharing something personal, not asking something personal, but sharing something.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So Laura Tremaine's book, Share Your Stuff, I'll Go First, encourages breaking through barriers by sharing personal stories and asking intentional questions like, what's something like, what's something... Has something like that ever changed you? These deeper questions will create a deeper foundation for friendships based on trust and emotional investment.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Again, maybe getting out of my own way, sharing those personal deep stories. I guess this is a good first start. I'm sending this out to 100,000 people that get my podcast, and I'm sending this out saying, I don't have enough friends. So I guess that's step one, I guess.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
But yeah, I guess it's getting over that hump and getting out of your own way and losing your ego to a point where it's okay to share things about yourself and getting that done. Next point, invest time and attention. Discuss the power and consistency of checking in regularly.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And the topic of what's been kind of bugging me lately is I've realized as I've gotten older, I have a shit ton of acquaintances and very few friends. And I know there's little memes everywhere that says it's better to have two good friends than 500 acquaintances. But I just, I'm not somebody that really believes that. And as you get older, people change, things happen.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
I kind of hit this a minute ago, but again, in the book Together, the healing and power of human connection in a sometimes lonely world, advocate scheduled time with friends to combat loneliness and build connection, especially in today's busy world. So, Checking in with folks, like I said before, this is more of, I don't schedule this. Like I don't think about it until I think about it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I think that's most people like, like we don't, you don't think about drinking a glass of water in most cases, unless you're thirsty. You don't think about food unless you're hungry. You don't think about, I don't have enough friends unless you're like, I don't really have anybody to go to the hockey game with tonight. Like shit.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Like I've called my three people that normally go and now I'm kind of strapped. You know what I'm saying? You don't think about it till then. And I think this is a great, I think this is a good metaphor for anything in life. Thinking about things before it's a problem is a great recipe and a great solution. for success.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So I think systematically putting in my calendar, and I think this is something I need to do, and I'm probably going to do right when we get done with this, is just put in my calendar little reminders throughout the week to check in and reach out to three or four people and just see how they're doing. Just check in. Just to check in.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
But by scheduling it, hopefully those acquaintances that I have will manifest into deeper friendships going forward. Hopefully that'll work. I thought this was really, really interesting. In the book Find Your People by Jenny Allen, she was talking about how conflict can be good.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Now, I'm not saying I'm going to go out and pick a fight with people, but she says conflict is seen as a growth point, helping friends move beyond superficial connections. She discusses how handling conflict with openness and compassion can strengthen bonds rather than break them. And I thought about this, dude, and I was like, does this make any sense? Don't pick fights with people.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
But I think so many times, As an adult, when you have conflict with somebody you're acquaintance with or friends with or whatever it is, sometimes it's easier just to be like, man, this is too much fucking trouble. I'm just going to move on. I'm just going to get past it. And I'll tell you, there was a moment not too long ago. This is maybe like a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I won't name the name, but it was something that's a very, very good friend of mine. I got in a dispute with them, we'll just say, over something where I wasn't being completely forthright with some financial ramifications. of a situation that were forcing me to act a certain way or make a certain decision a certain way. And that decision also affected them financially.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And they didn't understand why I was making the decision and it caused a huge problem. And it was my fault because I think had I just been completely honest with the situation, then there wouldn't have been a big blow up. But it was bad, dude. It was a bad, bad fight.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I ended up coming down off my little high horse and really saying, hey man, in a very vulnerable way, explaining the dire straits of that particular situation and what had happened. And I think, and immediately this person, because they're a wonderful person, acquiesced and understood what was going on. I was like, dude, you should have fucking told me that in the first place.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And everything was kind of okay after that. But I genuinely feel that that is probably the biggest argument I've had with somebody I would consider a friend. And I can't even remember another instance where there was a situation where somebody I would consider a close friend I was in that big of a tiff with. And I got to tell you, I think we were better friends after it. There's something to this.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So I guess the message here, and I guess, and I told a story not a couple of weeks ago on a podcast where a kid that works here and his buddy, you know, go back and listen to that one where I was talking about communication, whereas his buddy, they had a big fight. And I think they're closer now after the end of that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
So I guess the moral of that story is if you have a problem with somebody you're close to, don't just walk away from it. Like understand that on the other side of that problem, there's probably going to be a better relationship. There probably is. So something to do that again. And then the last thing is making this a priority.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
People come into your life, they go out of your life. But the older you get, the harder it really becomes to make good friends. And what started me thinking down this line was my good friend Travis Chappell. Check out his podcast, which is Travis Makes Friends. Just did his little solo drop on this deal, and I listened to it, and I thought, man, that was pretty profound.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Talk about prioritizing friendships in your life by setting aside time for social activities and meaningful conversations, especially when life gets busy in the art of showing up by Rachel, Rachel Wilkerson Miller, which is another book I found. The importance of intentional friendship building is emphasized.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Miller highlights the need to actively make time for friends, which deepens relationships by reinforcing them because it means that they matter to us. Now, so much time, we want things to happen organically, and it's so funny. You know, I think if you're a married person, and I think we all have this, I have a very dear friend of mine, and he's the single guy in our group.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
He is the long-term bachelor, if you will. And He's probably the most loved guy among all of the married guys. And the reason probably part of that is, is because he can just go with the flow, right? Like when any of us get like that, Oh my God, I have five seconds to do this. You call him. He's like, I'm down. Let's go. Right.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
But when you have other responsibility in there and God bless him for that. But when you have other responsibilities in life, you're, You got to understand everybody else has other responsibilities too. So you have to plan some of this stuff out. I'm not a good planner. I've been very bad about that.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
I want to, you know, I'm still trying to live like I'm 32 years old trying to figure out what bar I'm going to in South Tampa. You know, it's like Friday night, 530. What are we doing? And I was like, oh, dude, I got kids. I got this. I got that. I got this. I got that. I got, you know, I've had plans for three weeks with this other person.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
And I think to myself, like, how do these people have all these plans? Yeah, because they're responsible adults and they made these plans weeks ago. That's what they did. I'm so busy trying to fit in my social life around kids at work. It just doesn't exist. I got to do a better job. You know, just same thing like with your marriage.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
If you want a good marriage, you have to schedule time with your spouse. You should schedule a date night. You need to do that for your friends too. I saw something the other day. It was talking about how men need like four adventures a year. with their guys, whether that's a golf trip or playing Indiana Jones in Egypt.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
You need four trips like that a year to keep yourself maintained, to keep yourself like that edge to yourself, to be a good father, husband, all that stuff. I've neglected that, completely and totally neglected that. So I'll do a follow-up. I'm going to give this all a whirl. I'm going to get dedicated to this for the next six months.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
I'm going to see where I'm at at six months from now, and I'll do a follow-up. But if you're somebody that is much like me, a million acquaintances, very few friends, and that bothers you, maybe give this a whirl. I'll see you next week. What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.
Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Escaping the Drift - The Weekly Drop: The Art of Building Genuine Friendships
Because one of the things about living in Vegas, right, and living here in this town is because there's so much going on here from conventions to events and this and that, you really kind of get, it's a great litmus test for who's really your friend and who is really just an acquaintance.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
I mean, that's what we, we, we, and it's funny because all these realtors saying we were stealing your business and we're, we should be getting licensed, blah, blah, blah, all this argument. Right. And we serve as typically different clients. And that's what realtors really kind of don't understand. They're learning it. They're learning. They're learning. Right.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
That is the type of client we service. Like mom died. I'm heartbroken. I want nothing to do with this. This is emotional terrorism for me. Cause I think about my mom, get, give me my buck 40 and get me the fuck out of the scenario. Right. That's what, that's my kind of seller. Right. And so I think I'm very excited that you and so many others are kind of pouring into this.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yep.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
It is actually why I'm getting licensed is because I have a platform for coaching and like, why am I not coaching realtors on how to be better investors? and do it the right way, do it legal. But why wouldn't I have that audience to go help them actually just make more money, do more good, create more wealth for themselves and service more clientele?
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Because most agents don't want the dumpster fire rehab property to list, right? They're going to say, hey, can you fix this up? And the seller's going to say, I don't have any money to do that. Agents don't love that.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
And that's, I get that also is where people should head, right? Go create a business. I think when you're just starting, go make a couple of paychecks, right? Whether you're an agent, you're a wholesaler. Yeah. And people ask me, and I think you would agree. I would tell you getting your license can only help you, not necessarily hurt you.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
You have to play by the rules, but listen, at the end of the day, if you're doing shady shit, you shouldn't be doing that.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
It's going to come back to bite you anyway. Don't do that. Play by the rules because that's what good people do. So you think the trajectory of this year's five and I would tend to agree. And I do believe it'll open up inventory, which is great because now people will say, okay, I can justify leaving my 3% loan.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
It's close enough. It's probably not going to get lower. I would make the argument it gets lower in year three with Trump is my gut feeling.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
I don't study this shit. I'm not an economist, but I just feel like Trump's biggest win would be to lower the Fed rate to zero in year three.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
This is going to be super simple. Well, guys, I'll put Greenland on hold if you get this thing.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Right. No, it's great. I mean, master negotiator.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Um, all right. So what is your next move? What do you see for John Gafford? You and I, you know, personally, I kind of know, but you've done a lot in the real estate space. You've built a lot in the real estate space. Where do you want to see? And I'm going to use four years because I'm going to say, well, Trump's there and I don't think he'll go for round two.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
But what do you see your business real estate trajectory for the next four years?
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Oh, I like it.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
That's right.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Bro, this was long overdue. Top-ranked podcast. Escaping the drift. About to drop a book. I mean, guys, if you need anything in Vegas, he's not going to give you his phone number. He'll give me the phone number. But this guy is so connected in Vegas. He's an absolute man.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
And we have a good night plan for you. We have a great night plan.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Dude, I'm excited, bro. Tonight's going to be a good night. But again, everyone, make sure to go follow the John Gafford. He's an incredible businessman, entrepreneur. He was on Donald Trump's show, The Apprentice. I didn't even mention that yet. So he actually does know Senor Presidente. Oh, Presidente, yes. And dude, you're an incredible human. Again, everyone needs to go listen to his podcast.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Absolutely. And then they start thinking about, oh, John Gafford has this at like, and then their friend, their colleague says something, you're top of mind because of this.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Go follow you and just be a general good human. Reach out to the guy. Thank you for showing up, bro. Of course, man. Anytime. Yeah, dude. All right, y'all. If that was good and you liked it and you think someone needs to hear from John or myself, share this with two of your friends. I'd greatly appreciate it. See you on the next episode.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
And it brands you, it creates credibility, it creates influence, it creates authority. I mean, I literally, if you are out there listening to this and you want to aspire to get a podcast, you and I are going to say, go do it.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah. Well, dude, I want to go into that, but let's get to real estate real quick because you are the man. I mean, you have created something basically because you wanted to. You never set out in life knowing your backstory, right? And you have an incredible podcast, by the way, making sure everyone goes and checks out John Escaping the Drift. You need to go check out that podcast.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Check him out on Instagram. He's an unbelievable human. Everyone's going to start to follow you and love you. But
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
That is not correct. That is not correct. Go ahead. So you're a brokerage here. You have the second highest business volume right here in Vegas. Yes. And that's in the entire city of Las Vegas.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Well, so let's talk about that part, right? There's people who are aspiring real estate investors here, aspiring agents, maybe they're licensed, they've never done anything. There's a lot of ways to monetize real estate, right? And this is why you become vertically integrated.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
What is up, Science of Flipping family? I am super fired up because I have a very close friend of mine, and he is the man in Las Vegas. Not only is he a real estate investor and a master real estate investor, he owns a brokerage, hard money title. He is vertically integrated. If anyone should be on this podcast, it's about damn time. We got John Gafford here.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah. You're here and you're saying something that I try to help preach. So I'm a victim of this, right? Any of us visionaries victim, like we are shiny objects. Oh, we can go take on the world. Let's go to all these States. That's us. That's you. That's me. So I have to work. That is something I literally have to work on all the time.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
They didn't want them.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
So what advice would you give the aspiring agent or investor, right? You are both what I love about what the, you know, yourself, myself, like we, we are diversified. I call it being dynamic. You don't just do this one thing. And in my space, wholesaling is the thing that everyone leans into because you don't need money and credit. but you should be doing it all.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
You are on the other side of that. You not only are an investor, we just talked about, you know, the wholesaling space for you and the listings and hard money. You create the entire vertical integration on almost all of it. But what are you going to give the, either the agent or investor listening to this? Like, how do they remain focused? Where do they need to put their focus?
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Isn't that crazy? We do. And we've become incredibly close over the last year. And that is the best part of these podcasts. I'm sure you could probably say is like the relationships that get built because of podcasting. Oh, totally. Unreal. Totally.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
So I was just asked on a friend, Austin's podcast, what do I see being the next trend? What do I see around the corner? So I'm going to take that same question, give it to you. What do you see being the next trend?
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
That's right.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
No doubt.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
But it's the, so, Amen to what you're preaching because it's about time realtors really catch up to what the real wealth and income comes from.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
I will make more money on a burr, mind you, not a flip, a burr than the realtor made representing me on the buy.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
And then I have the asset and I'm keeping the asset for the wealth side. And so I just I'm excited that you and the Brandons and Brett myself, like I'm leaning in. I'm going to get my realtor license.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Because I just believe... Well, you're getting a real estate license.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
A real estate license, yes.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yep.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
And it opens up so many doors, right? People – so I told you previously, like – People are asking me all the time now because of the level of success. Should I do it? And my answer is hell yeah.
The Science of Flipping
Why Smart Realtors Focus on Wealth, Not Just Commissions | John Gafford
Yeah.