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And he said, we'll pay you $5,000 for 40 minutes. I said, I speak. I speak.
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. 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 he's
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 and Selling from stage teaching other people how to get on stages and really just the guys 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
And he's here to share his secrets with you today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the studio. This is James Malinchak. James. John, my brother. How you doing? How are you, man? Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming in. Right down the street from me. This is an easy drive. Yeah, it is. And you know, I was laughing with my assistant. 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. Yes.
Yeah, most people don't think about it. They go on TV thinking they're going to be the next Denzel. Right? 15 minutes of fame. Yeah, well, you know, when we were on, this is back in for you kids listening. This is, believe it or not, back before the Facebook thing.
Back before this, I mean, like MySpace was a thing. I remember we were, they wanted us to get on the Friendster 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. And to have no outlet to capture that traffic like you can through social media today, 100%.
What a waste. Yeah. So most people go on TV trying to be famous. I looked at it as 15 minutes of opportunity. Yeah. There's two sides of it. First, we're going to serve and help these amazing people on the show recognize unsung heroes. That's smart enough to realize there's a second side to the coin in business, right? That's why my logo is a coin. Second side is that business. So I went on with a whole plan on how to drive leads and
- Things I would say, and I had 30 different opt-in pages coming up, all running SEO keywords around the show. So yeah, we had like 300,000 people, I think it was. - I think, you know, it's funny, 'cause 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.
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?
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 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." And my first interview that morning was, was it MSNBC maybe, Power Launch or something? It was one of those, whatever. And I get on there, and you don't realize how fast those interviews are. And it's like, dude,
All they wanted 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 him, and I was making a joke about it, and then it was funny, and we're talking about the preparedness, and then it was over. And I was like, holy shit, I just wasted this whole audience. So yeah, being able to capture attention and really understanding how to harness it
into, you know, funnels that create money. That's your expertise. Yeah. Well think about, you know, people go on trying to get famous, right? Yeah. I would say you can't deposit fame into a bank account. You can leverage it. Clicks don't pay the bills, baby. That's right. That's right. Clicks and likes, right? Don't pay the bills. But you know, you had 300,000 people. So what's the big deal? Well, if everybody spends 50 bucks with you, you just made 15 million bucks for going on a show. What have they spent a hundred dollars with you in a year? You made $30 million. Yeah.
for going on a show because you strategically thought I had a whole marketing plan centered around the show. So I would say things in the show, you know, oh, that's amazing. That's one of the things that gets emailed into my website all the time. Right. I would just drop those little seeds. Right. You know, when I'm coaching somebody one-on-one, right. Well, I just sold coaching, but I didn't sell coaching. I just seeded it. Yeah. Right. You know, when I'm speaking on a stage for a big corporate convention,
Like I had all these little seeds that I was dropping the whole time. I did the same thing in the media. I was on the red carpet of the Grammys and I had a card printed up.
right and i had it in my pocket like hundreds of them so when you would uh you know take a picture and try to like hey what's your website or how do i find i would just hand you a card and it had all my website with all my pictures easy domain you could easily find me if you were in the media that's how i got so much press nobody misspelled my name some some of you made it easy i made it easy i printed up just a simple card i kept in my jacket pocket when i was doing the red carpets and things like that so i could hand it to all the media people
Let's go back, man. So how did you get started? What's your backstory? I was born in a van down by the river. I love that. I grew up in a tiny steel mill town outside of Pittsburgh called Manessen. About 6,000 people. You blink, you miss it. Dad was a steel worker. Mom was a lunch mother serving lunches to us kids at school. We didn't have anything growing up. But my first big dream was to play college basketball. I thought that's how I could get out of a small town. So long story short,
accepted a basketball scholarship to the University of Cincinnati. My coach got fired, transferred, went and played in Hawaii. First game, blew my knee out on a rubber basketball court. My sneaker stuck, ripped it. Moved to Los Angeles, started my career as a stockbroker. That was my backup plan. Started with Merrill Lynch and got recruited, went over to Dean Witter, then ended at Payne Weber in the Beverly Hills branch.
And then I did some, we built my partner and I built our business pretty, pretty fast in our young twenties. So I started getting a call from a couple of people to speak and I'm like, I don't, I don't speak. I'm a broker. Yeah. So, well just come in, like motivate my salespeople. Right. I don't speak, man. I'm watching the market.
And he said, we'll pay you $5,000 for 40 minutes. I said, I speak. Yeah. I speak. I say whatever you want me to say. And that's how I got into speaking. I was like, what? What is this? And then one of my best friends is Joe Theismann. He used to quarterback the Redskins. Until his knee got broken in 50 pieces by Lawrence Taylor, I think. Yeah, yeah. Still one of my favorite stories. You know the story. If he's one of your best friends, you know the story. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I always say, Joe, did it hurt when you broke your leg? He said, I didn't break my leg. Lawrence Taylor broke my leg. No, no. I had no intention of breaking my leg.
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. I never go half speed, Joe. Yeah, never go half speed. I'm going to break that leg again. But no, Joe, you know, he had to reinvent himself after that. At that time, he was getting a million bucks a year as a quarterback, which he was the third highest paid player, if you can imagine this, in national football. A million bucks a year. A million bucks a year. Gets hurt, takes a $965,000 pay cut. Can no longer play. What's he do?
So he just remembered that, hey, we had to make appearances when we played football, right? And I used to speak at all these dinners. Let me speak and start charging. He's charging like 500 bucks here, you know, a couple hundred bucks there. And then he found out about the speaking industry and he went on to make
50-something million dollars speaking. Well, Joe started to explain the industry to me. I was like, what? They pay you to talk? Like, really? I thought it was just this one guy. And man, you don't have to hit me in the head with a two-by-four twice. I got it. And I just became a hound dog. I said, I'm going to figure this out. And I just became, John, really good at
finding who the people are who have the money and the budgets. I wasn't famous. I didn't win a Super Bowl. I didn't follow the airplane and live kind of thing. I just knew who had the budgets when they were coming to do, what their fees were, what topics they're looking for. And specifically, I started in the college and university market, and then I branched off into the corporate market. I got started by accident. I didn't even know it existed. But it based off your skill set and success as a stockbroker.
No, it literally had nothing to do with that. Really? No, it was just they were looking for inspiration and motivation and...
Well, I was pretty good at firing people up. Like, especially I talked to a lot of kids groups as an athlete. Yeah. And I just learned through Joe and became a fast study of like, okay, so how do you speak to a sales team? How do you get the sales team to increase their revenue? Like with what you say in inspiration, motivation, that sort of thing. Cause that's what Joe does. So your skill actually was simply speaking. Yeah. You just developed that skill. I came up with great stories. I came up with, you would sit there and go,
damn he's right i need to get off my ass and go do shit right all right i'm holding myself back let's go do this yeah that was my whole purpose i can get people like excited about what they're doing to try to perform and then i got better and better and better right and then it was like oh my gosh i mean let me take people from 97 percenters status quo and let's make everybody a three percenter and then a one percenter like that became my focus like yeah how do you like kick people in the rear and get them in gear all right well somebody's listening to this right now they're thinking to themselves
i could do that sure i could do that so so let's let's let's let's let's go start with me let's say i can do that right so what are the keys number one but way so what are the steps of this where do you start
Yeah. The first thing is you got to pick a mark. Everybody says you start with a message. Nothing could be further from the truth, right? Start with a message. You don't even know if people care about it. You start with a market. Amen. So if you say, man, I want to get paid for like all these corporate, actually, that's the reason I moved to Vegas 20 some years ago. I got tired of flying around. I said, I'm going to target all these Vegas conventions so I don't have to fly around.
Right. Almost like my own residency. Yeah. No kidding. I saw Wayne Newton, right? He bedded down and it was at the Tropicana. He was like the first guy. 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. I remember seeing him on, I think it was Larry King or something, 25 years ago. And he just signed this 10 year deal, right?
And they asked him, well, why would you do this? He said, man, I love entertaining. I hated to travel. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm on the road 300 days a year, flying all over 20,000 conventions of Vegas. I'm moving to Vegas and I'm going to target all these. And it becomes probably more appealing because you save them on the travel cost. Bingo. And I give them a discount too.
So, but first thing you got to figure out who you want to talk to, right? So if you want to get paid to speak for corporations, they have different needs than colleges and universities for students or for educators. Or if you want to get paid for youth groups, that's different topics. Here's the number one mistake everybody makes. They don't start with a market. They don't find, let's say you pick corporations, right? You need to find out what the event coordinators are paying money for.
not what you want to talk about. Yeah. Right. You've got to map. And then you take your message and you match to what they're already used to booking and paying money for. So I'll give you a simple example. You probably heard of chicken soup for the soul of the book. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So Jeff, Mark, Jeff Hansen, Mark, Victor Hansen, Jack Campbell. Yeah. Jack's been my client for years. So when the whole movie, the secret and that law of attraction craze came out, Jack wanted to speak for corporations. He's like 40,000 bucks.
And I said, Jack, no one's going to book you. You can't bring that esoteric type topic into corporate America. Yeah. Board of directors, shareholders, different ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs. I said, but if we take your stuff and we repackage it as the success principles, which is his book now, how to go from where you are from to where you want to be, which is what you said earlier. So there's a market for it. Yeah.
I knew that's why you people were listening to the market for this. It's proven. I told him, I said, you can't market that esoteric woo woo stuff to corporations. But if we repackage it, now you get booked.
Because that's what they want. They want success, achievement, right? Get off your butt, overcome challenges. They don't want wooey, wooey law of attraction stuff. Yeah. So you got to start number one with what the market is that you want to go after. So how do you, how do you, now I agree with you completely. And I talked about this before on this show, but,
You know, I love how people could, you know, collect trophies in their office, like all their awards and stuff. I have like a wall of failure in my office. Like I have a hundred thousand dollar bottle of vitamins in my office. Cause 25 years ago, me and my sister started a nutritional supplement company without asking if anybody wanted to buy it.
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. 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? Yeah, it's so simple. All you got to do is go to a major speakers bureau website like Washington Speakers Bureau, which is the number one speakers bureau in the world. And you look at the speakers they have and the topics they have. And you know those topics work because they wouldn't allow those on their website to be promoted to their clients. If they didn't work. If they didn't work.
So, I mean, I could tell you right now, like in a corporate market, anything that helps with sales, customer service, team building, teamwork, motivation, inspiration. Good friend of mine, you may know him, Rudy from the movie Rudy. Rudy lives here. Rudy's been speaking for 30 years. And what's he talking about? Inspiration. Don't quit. Don't, you know, don't give up. Yep. You know, so, um,
Uh, peak performance is huge. Anything that like lights a fire under people. So it's not hard. I mean, I just get, you don't have to do any research. I just told you right then and there. Yeah. So you literally, you literally just go see what, what the, what the big boys are doing or big girls, if you will, who are getting paid, we're getting paid. Yeah. We're getting paid and then you see where you can plug into that and you model. So, okay. So let's, okay. Let's give me the framework of a good talk.
Oh, it's very simple. I'll give you my outline. This is all I do for talks. Five parts. Introduction, which I'll get to in a second. I'll give you the framework first. Introduction, a little bit about your story in that introduction. And the story is only three things. Before, turning point, success, or mess, turning point, success. Then you have three points to the talk. I'm going to share with you three things, point one, point two, point three.
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It's literally the whole framework for it. - And how much of that, 'cause 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? - So there's two, you gotta divide it, like put a line down the middle. So when you're being paid a fee, you should not be selling. You're paid to talk.
Right. Then there are other events like I speak at a lot of real estate events. Yeah. Or they don't want me to, they don't want to pay me a fee. But you'll have to sell. They want me to offer something. Yeah. So I have a whole course on that. So I basically, I teach for, let's say it's a 90 minute talk. I'll teach for 70, 75 minutes. And then I'll give them an offer to go deeper with me. Like in a web class or something like that. Yeah, so 80-20 is about what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 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 thing was never walk out and say, hi, my name is John Gafford. But just assume that, you know, just you need to grab their attention in 10 seconds and you walk out and you just start talking. You just hit the ground running. Yeah. Let's welcome James. Hey, right.
Hey, let's get started with a couple of questions. And I have, uh, uh, let's get started with a couple of questions and I need some quick enthusiastic responses to each question. Here we go. Question one. How many of you ready to be more successful in the future than you've been in your past? Raise your hand. Say I am. I go right into it. That's it. That's it. Yeah. I have an intro video that kind of introduces me with all the fancy stuff, but I go right into it. Yeah. I think by the way, I start from the back of the room. So I shock everybody. Oh, you come walking. Oh yeah. Yeah. I, uh,
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. Perfect. Love it. 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. If you say that to a room full of people, they all stop and go, well, who's this dude? What are we talking about? I hate those folks that walk on stage and go...
Hey, tap, tap, tap. 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 and this is how you should listen to me. I took a walk down the street today, saw the trees like what? Yeah. Oh, it's beautiful here. I called the Mike Tyson knockout punch. Come out and throw the knockout punch. Just hit the helmet. 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 want to 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. I'm going to send you everything I talk about today. So you don't have to take notes in your phone. You don't got to 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, when I say that blew up on me once in front of about 8,000 people,
They pulled that slide out of my thing. And so I was like, oh shit. You didn't know until you were July 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, you need to go to the AV guy and say, Hey, let me just check, double check my slides. Cause I had two versions of this and just make sure what you're working with. Yeah, no, that's smart. Cause I pull them. Yeah, no, no, I love, I love that technique because I,
you know, look, they're going to forget about you as soon as you finish in 45 minutes anyway. Yeah. So, but if you get them on a list, then you got them forever. John, I still have people to this day buying from me who saw me on secret millionaire 2011. Yeah. And they're still buying. I still buy them because they're on my list. I went on that show realizing that TV is just a media. Yeah.
Yeah. It's no different than run Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Sunday newspaper inserts. It's a way to, if you do it the right way, it's a way to acquire quality leads and the right leads. If you plant the right seeds. So tech, I mean, technology has advanced so much since 2011. When did you start doing this career? I mean, doing funnels in this stuff, because you were actually building HTML websites with landing pages at this point. You know, it's crazy. Cause there was no click funnels back in oh five.
Okay. So that's deep. I used to have an internet company where I would build all this stuff for them. Funnels, thank you page, upsell page, downsell page, sales pages. This is way before Russell's a longtime friend. I knew Russell when he was broke. Yeah. Like when I did my secret millionaire party at Russell Brunson, who did ClickFunnels, I had my secret millionaire party. I had a whole event wrapped around it when I debuted. We broadcast from my house here down the street.
And we were watched in over 100 countries. I had 1,600 affiliates promoting us. And Russell was so broke. He called me and said, hey, man, can I stay in your spare bedroom? Because I don't have $100 for the hotel down the street.
So that's how far Russell and I go back. We go 20 years back. Russell doing pretty good now. Yeah, 265 million last year, 150,000 subscribers. I was just with him at his event. Yeah, ClickFunnels. 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.
I went because it was his last one. So I was in Boise in March, I think it was, at his office. He bought Dan Kennedy's magnetic marketing company, and they were launching a new book, and he had me come out as one of the 20 speakers. Yeah, if you don't know, 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? One of them, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Dan is one of the best copywriters ever.
Ever. I'd say Frank Kern's probably better, in my opinion. Oh, no way. Frank learned from Dan. I still think Frank's just such a lunatic in the best possible way, which is why I think he's probably better. I helped teach Frank how to sell from the stage. Really? He could not sell a lick.
from the state. If you go on my website, bigmoneyspeaker.com and look at the celebrity endorsements, watch the video from Frank. He says it. 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. Yeah. Um, Russell actually I'm honored and you can watch it. I don't say this. It's on video. So James is one of the all time greatest sales people from stage I've ever seen.
What's the secret? So walk me through the secret of selling from stage. It's like, what's the secret of being successful? Okay. I can tell you in one line, but I can give you a couple ideas. Perfect. All right. So the first thing, like when I look at somebody's presentation, I've rewritten a lot of presentations, even for webinars. First thing is they're actually over-teaching. They're trying to cram a three-day seminar into a 60-minute
talk yeah right and the minute you overwhelm people people our brains too much our brains go work they equate it to work yeah to be studying neuroscience and brain-based learning the minute somebody equates something that you're offering to work they ain't buying it right so i go through everybody everybody slides words everything they say every everything has to convey three things
Everything. What's that? Number one, the audience, and you can't tell the audience this. The audience has to just get this from how you communicate. Number one, the audience has to say, I can do this.
You know what John's sharing or what Russell's sharing about, I can do this. Number two, they have to say, I can do this right now. Oh, this ain't going to take years. I can get this implemented right away. And number three, I can do this right here. Meaning wherever I am in my life, I'm single, I'm married. I live on a farm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I live in a high rise in New York city. Meaning I don't have to make tremendous change in my life in order to make this stuff work. I go through somebody's presentation. That's always violated throughout the entire presentation. It's too hard. It's work.
And they just don't, they can't see it. Yeah. I had a guy one time and I'm not going to say the name. We were speaking at the hotel Roosevelt. He's a legend in the speaking. I love him to death. I'm not going to say his name, but he's a legend. We're both speaking there and we're both going to offer a program on speaking. Okay. Okay. So technically a competitor. First of all, I'll give you a little, a little James trick.
Whenever there's somebody speaking on the same topic as me and they're going to offer something similar to me, I always go second. Oh, sure. Because you're the one they remember. Well, no, I watch them. And then I know how to adjust my talk because I don't ever want an audience member saying, well, it's both on speaking. Let's go with the legend and hang out with the legend. I want them to go, it's both speaking, but oh, they're two different things. I need both of them.
Right? I don't want to, which one do I want? Oh, I need both. And that only happens if I'm able to adjust my talk based on what the person said was on the, on the program with the same topic. So here's what the person said. 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. Yeah. Yeah. I want them to understand they need both. So if they're talking about how to,
shine from the stage and craft stories and a message. I'm going to talk about the business side of speaking. And once you learn all that, let me show you how you really get paid. See, now you need both. Whereas if I talked about the message and the story, it's like, it's the same one. Which one should we take? Let's take the more famous legendary person's training, right? But this person said this, literally said this, I don't believe you deserve the right to get paid to speak. Listen to the languaging.
deserve the right to get paid to speak until you have done at least 1,000 talks for free. I said, oh, I got them. This is easy. This is easy because here's what goes through your mind. 1,000 talks. If I do 100 a year, that's 10 years. That's a lot of work. I can't do this. I can't do this right now. It's going to take me 10 years. That's work. Right? It's work. I can't do this right here in my life. I got kids. I run a business. I got to make big. I'm not buying that. So I started switching everything around and showing speed.
I would have videos play. People say, hey, man, I'm here with James's training. First two hours on day one of four days, he taught one strategy. I went out in the hallway. I've never done a talk before in my life. I made a call to the event coordinator, and they just bought 5,000 of my books based on what he said. I don't even know what I'm doing, and I just sold 5,000 books. I just sold speed.
80% of the audience bought my stuff, which ticked me off. 100 should have bought it. And nobody bought his. Not because he's not great. Because it was work. It was work. The audience didn't say, I can do this. I can do this now. I can do this here. So that's the underlying foundation throughout a whole talk. So when I'm crafting a presentation where I'm going to make an offer, I'm going to sell something.
Every talk, every word, every slide, every image, if it doesn't convey that, I got to adjust it to make sure it conveys it or I got to take it out. So you stop and say, does this look like work? Oh yeah. I go through. If you knew how many hours I spend on writing somebody's presentation or my own. Yeah. Because think about it. You could go up there and literally have a seven figure day in 90 minutes.
If you do it the right way, you're gonna have a six figure day in 90 minutes. If you do it the right way, why wouldn't you spend time on it? So that was one of the hidden secrets of speaking. And by the way, when I started, I didn't know any of that. I just thought speaking was fee paid speaking. Yeah. And the actually Mark Victor Hanson called me 2005 and said, Hey man, I hear you're this college speaking guy. Like, you know how to get booked for colleges and universities. I said, yeah, kind of doing that. The time I was two time national college speaker of the year.
He said, I got this event I'm doing teaching speaking. I want you to come and teach speaking on the college circuit. I said, sure, here's my fee. And he's like, well, no, we don't pay fees. I'm like, what are you talking about? He said, well, everybody speaks and then they make an offer at the end. I said, how many people are you going to have? He said, 500. And so in my mind, I was going, cause my training was 2,500 bucks. I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe 500 people are going to be 2,500 bucks. But remember, I'd never done this before. So I didn't, I was so naive. And so I went there and
And I made the offer and nobody bought because I didn't know what I was doing. I thought if I just talked. Yeah.
Hey, if you want to learn how to do what I just did, give me 2,500 bucks and let's move forward. But I watched a couple of Dan Kennedy was speaking there and I watched this long line of people. There's a guy named John Childress who was big in real estate back then, trained all the real estate speakers. And there was this long line for him. And I was, I couldn't understand because I had a long line too, but they were hugging me. Yeah. No one bought. No one's pulling a pen out.
So I went and I invested in everybody's training. I said, there's something not right here. I don't get, I got a standing ovation, but I got nobody investing in my training. I had people say, man, I took 14 pages of notes. I learned so much best talk at these events I've ever heard. Great. You come into my training. Now I'm going to go to Dan Kennedy. So I didn't understand what I was doing. I went to John Childress's training for the first time, 30 minutes into it. I quickly realized probably the most important lesson I ever had about speaking. I speak, but I don't know how to speak.
Okay. I was talking, but I didn't know how you structure a presentation that people buy from you at the end. I didn't know what you, what you share, what you don't share. So I'll give you a little tip on it. Wait, so you got obsessed with watching other people's stuff, which is the best way to learn. I love to this day, man.
Dude, one of my good friends. I watched several of your episodes of this podcast before I come on it. Okay, well, good. Which one did you watch? Oh, I love the one about the car. Pick the guy lowest on the totem pole. Yeah, like how you go buy a car. Yeah. Hey, man. I just watched that literally. That is solid advice if you want to go buy a car. I was like, I should have done that one. I bought my car last year. Oh, yeah. That's solid advice if you want to go buy a car. You can see that. All those tips in that one episode was amazing. Yeah, that was a good do. But one of my buddies, Nick Daniel, they have a company called
vShred, 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 and I would try to...
He said it was like a mad scientist. I had them all like 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. And he goes, eventually no teaching of that stuff. 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, you know, 50 bucks left. Let's make one more VSL and see what happens. And it blew up. I did the same thing with infomercials.
Yeah. Cause I couldn't, nobody would enroll my stuff. So I was like, well, wait a minute, but these infomercials running on TV, like people buy, they're not running unless they work. So I started recording, unless it was dropping a lot of, I remember like all the old people like Wade cook and Dave Del Dotto, even back in real estate and Charlton sheets. And I'll tell you something funny. You can look up and you look it up on the internet. It's funny. So some buddies of mine, uh,
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 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 uh my buddies man we got to use you for something i want to use you for something
I'm gonna find something I'm gonna find something use you for I'm like, all right, dude So they call me up they go we got it. We got it. You're gonna be the tax sale guy. Oh and I'm like, huh? I go I don't know shit about doing tax. Oh, he goes I know but we got the guy who's knows everything about doing tax sales and You're gonna be the guy you're gonna sell his thing. It's gonna be you let's do it. I'm like, all right, dude I'll be the tax sale guy. I don't care. Let's go say fly me down to Tampa and
And I get there. And when I, 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. So we still want you to be in the infomercial and, and, and try to extrapolate some of, you know, 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. Well, no. And we used their formula. And they're still on the air. No, God, this one. Because airtime, so. No, this one. So I used to study all the ones. I would record them that were like running for three, four, five, 10 years. Yeah. And I'd transcribe them and I'd go through it with a red pen and a green pen.
And I'd circle with a green pen all of the sales triggers and hooks and, oh, I see what they're saying here. Like, you know, all the seeding they're doing. And then a red pen I would circle where I thought they could improve, maybe they missed. And that's how I started crafting my sales presentations. Yeah. Because you were talking about, like, immensely studying.
I used to record infomercials and study them like crazy transcription. And I'd read them hours and hours and hours. Dude, kind of like your V shred. Well, let me, 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, I'm, 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. Cause for example, when I need to copyright something now, like I'm,
I straight, sorry Frank, you're gonna break your heart. I straight tell AI, you're a copywriter, in the voice of Frank Kern and the style of Frank Kern, write me this hook, write me something for this. And I get pretty close, 'cause 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. 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? I can't worry about what I can't control.
Right. Good answer. That's a great, that's a great answer. That's a great answer. And I could worry is nothing more than the misuse of your mind, choosing to focus on what you don't want to have happen versus choosing what you do want to have happen. I can't control that. So why would I worry about it? It's like people always are like, Hey, aren't you worried about somebody ripping off one of your courses? I'm like,
they're going to rip it off. Yeah. Like everybody gets ripped off. Like, what am I going to like scrutinize and sit there and go after every person that, you know, did something like that? I mean, I'd rather just work on bigger and better things. I think that brings up a real interesting point. Abundance. 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. I'm 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. 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. And your personality. 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, right? Like you just said, people can rip my program off all day. They can't rip me off. Right.
thousand percent well now they kind of can't with ai right now but in general you know your frequency and how you connect with people isn't you can't duplicate that yeah because it's you and that's your uniqueness and here's something else like when people get freaked out and say oh there's so many speakers out there i said you do know how easy to make how easy it is to make a million bucks just 100 talks at 10 grand or 67 talks at 15.
Like we can't find 67 people in the whole world. If we package you the right way, that'll book you for a talk. Shoot. I was doing 150 some locations when I was cranking it. And here's what I mean by location. I went to Valencia community college in Orlando. They have six campuses. So I could go there and get six checks, one location, six checks, six payments for six talks. Right. I was cranking 150 locations paid. Yeah. A lot of people talk about, Oh, I did a hundred talks. I'm like, how many did you get paid for?
Well, no, I did all these TEDx talks and all these freebies and all that. Did you sell? No.
So basically why would you do that? So here's my point. If you price the right way, you package the right way and you market the right way to what event coordinators want. Let's take speaking. Make their life easier. Make their life easier and what they're used to cutting checks for and what they want the outcome to be for their audience. You don't need a lot of them. What if you're 25 grand? Yeah. And you do a hundred talks, you get two and a half million dollars, which is basically most net, mostly net after taxes. Yeah. Like,
You don't have a lot of expense. Yeah. Same with coaching. Yeah. Right. You don't need a lot of people. Right. So I don't worry about saturation and, and I always look at it this way too. I'm going to be, I always said this in every business I had, I'm going to be here for the longterm. So I'm going to win just by everybody else dropping off. Yeah. Like I'm in this for the longterm. I've been doing this for 25 years, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. I've had coaching clients for my, for 18 years is my longest 17, 10, 12. If I'm pretty, here's, here's my little thing about coaching.
You pay me $25,000. My thing is how fast can I make you the $25,000 back? Because if I do that, why would you ever leave me? If I could teach you how to do that every year and even 10 exit, 100 exit, why would you ever go anywhere else? Hey, I can't do that for you. I got to ask this because you've been doing this so long. I know. I started when I was five, by the way. Started at five, right? With Instagram and all of that stuff, dude, there are so many just –
Fake fake gurus out there, which I'm one of my favorite accounts. You mean those Lamborghinis aren't really there? 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. And,
And it's a guy that I know. And we were just chatting over a couple of drinks. And he made the comment to me. He goes, yeah, dude, because we're talking about this influencer, that influencer, this and that. And he goes, buddy, he goes, I see their, 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. Can't, can't show me a bank account with 10 grand in it. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. 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.
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? Yeah. So here's all I could share is what I do for myself. Cause I'm a big believer in investing in coaching. I still do it. I never would stop. But, uh,
I had some, I'll give you a personal example where I had three life insurance agents come and want to sell me policies, right? Every one of them, I tell them to open up your portfolio and show me what you got. Yeah. First two, you know, lips are quivering, right? Didn't want to do it.
Third one was the only one that did it and showed me his policies, why they're set up, right? Here's for our kids. Here's our key man policy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. I said, okay, cool. Picked him. You're the guy. Did seven figures with the guy. Yeah. All because he showed me. So I want people to, you know, that line been there, done that total nonsense, been there, done that, still doing it. So one of the, I retired like in 2017 from doing my speaker events and trainings. I'd done a thousand of them. I started, my first one was in 1999.
And I just, it was kind of just time, right? Everything has an evolution. And I start seeing all this stuff popping up over the years. And I was like, this is just nuts. I don't, these people are, who are teaching speaker stuff, such misinformation. So I said, I'm coming back. I'm going to come back in and just teach people the right stuff. And that's going to be my legacy on how I really help people. Right. And so I tell people all the time, if you're thinking about that speaker trainer, you should have him or her open up their calendar and show you how many talks they booked.
If they tell you they could sell on a webinar, tell them to open up their bank account and show you. So my whole thing is proof. If I'm going to take relationship and marriage advice, I want them to be married for 30, 40 years. Not divorce five times. It's the same way in real estate, right? It's the same way we do. It's like I know and just –
I know a call is going to go miserably when it starts out, when somebody tells me how long they've been selling real estate. It's like, bro, if you're, 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. Like most, 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. I care about results. Yeah.
I believe only results matter and you need to show me that you're doing it. Not that you did it 20 years ago. Yeah. Because markets change, business changes, life changes, right? I listed my house, I don't know, about seven, eight years ago. I thought I was going to sell it because I was getting a place in Florida. I had two agents come by and see me. First thing they do, they walk in and they hand me their packet. I said, hey, nice to meet you. Thanks for coming. Here's the door. It took like 30 seconds. Mm-hmm.
Third agent walks in and I said, I mean, you got a packet or something you want to give me? He goes, well, before we get to all that, could I just sit down with you and ask you what's important for you with this house? Yeah. Let's see if we can even help you. Let me see if we can even help you. Yeah. I didn't care if the first two agents were in business 20 years and took fancy picture. I don't care about any of that. Like I care that you care about what I know and that then you show me proof that you can actually do this stuff. Yeah. So I don't know if that helps, but that's how I pick people.
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. You're a financial consultant and you're in debt? Yeah. That's called a clue. I don't want to work with you. I love it. So it's so funny when we agents want to join the company here, right? When 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 gonna be a gazillion let me like all this random stuff they're showing them right i just go i start the presentation with new agent every single time not doing just gonna 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? Yeah, that's me. That's number one. See this office? Yeah, that's me. That's number one right there. So
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. I can't make this fake. It's not it. I see certain sales trainers on Instagram and all that, and I'm like, I know them. They can't even sell their own sales training. And they're out there telling you they're gurus.
right or oh here's the worst john this one drives me nuts i'm teaching you my millionaire training and i had to set that guy up three years ago on a 24-month payment plan to pay off a five thousand dollar debt for that's the dude that's the dude that can't put 10 grand it's it's in that and that guy is everywhere yeah yeah but look i but i rented this really nice car yeah and i can rent this house maybe sort of i don't know dude it's just so like the speaker trainer stuff i'm
Like I always tell people, I said, come with me to a talk. Watch how I sell from the stage. I'll open up my PowerPoint. I'll tell you everything I'm doing. Work the back table. Hang with me after, you know, we'll go to dinner or lunch, depending on when I speak. And I'll break down the presentation. Matter of fact, I want you to keep a notebook and write down the stuff behind the stuff you think you saw because then I'm going to quiz you on it. Right. Or if I'm doing a fee paid talk, come with me. Watch how I rebook that talk on the spot after.
Come with me and watch me talk. Ask those other speaker trainers if you could go watch them. They won't let you because they don't book any talks. They're selling courses. Yeah.
those who can can and those who can't teach there you go i'm a big believer been there done that and still doing it today i love it well let's talk about these books man because because you've written a bunch of them i got your your this is the newest one i'm assuming millionaire success oh that was a few years ago i did that when i came off the tv show to play the the kind of piggyback and attach to the secret millionaire tv show yeah yeah there you go so my contract with abc where they own secret millionaire i was going to call the book secret millionaire secrets i
And they owned the name. So I said, well, hey, could I use Millionaire Success Secrets? Is this to the kid? Yeah, because Hayden was cool. I got yours over there. You realize that Hayden is my 16-year-old son. Yeah, he was texting me. He's the one who set this all up. Dude, I'm telling you, man. Dude, dude.
I love that. I love that. He is, yeah, my son is, we just did the West Coast tour of schools. Oh, nice. 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. What?
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Bring that diligence with the grades. Didn't get that from me. Didn't get that from me at all. Didn't have it. Yeah, I almost got on the back of the new roll, C student, or C plus, 2.3 at AVG is what I was going to get. Yeah, I was a C student in high school, and that was C your way through school.
See you at school. I love it. I love it. My parents had a bumper sticker. You know, those bumper stickers. My child was honor student of the month at XYZ school. My child, I beat up your honor student. No, my child helped your child become honor student. Yeah, exactly. My child gave your child something to cheer for during sporting events. We'll just say that. No, you know what? I got to pay you some homage, man. I didn't even know who you were. And your video, no, it was a post you did about seven, eight months ago.
commenting on Trump. And it was something about, you know, appreciate people who helped you and open doors, that sort of thing. And I commented on it because I was like, yeah, people sometimes forget
which tree the apple fell from yeah certain things that were beneficial yeah right and then that and that's when i started following you because i was like this dude's real i like i started watching some of your stuff and i was like yeah i like this guy a lot well i like that and then that's when you reached out out of the blue like two months later or something yeah i think because i maybe because i started liking your stuff because i was watching it yeah i dude i you know social media is such a funny thing man and that's you know honestly people ask why i 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. Literally five minutes from here. Yeah. I live 90 seconds across. 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. Well, I mean, let's just play this out. Yeah. And I'm being sincere right now that.
If I ever listed my house in the future, I'd call you and think about this seven months ago. Yeah. And even would not have called you because I didn't see, yeah, I didn't know you were online. I see you online. Here we are now. I'm down here. I see what it is, right? I see who you are. And I'm like, well, why wouldn't I list with John?
Yeah. And my book comes out in the fall of this year. So if you don't think I'm already plotting the strategy with you of like, bro, we're going to have some whiteboard sessions. Yeah. I already see that coming down the pipe, my man. If it's helpful, I'll give you a testimonial for it unless it's already. We can use my secret millionaire. We literally just signed the deal with Diversion. I just signed it.
Um, I went with them over Ben Bella, great guys of both places. God bless everybody. Went with the guys at a diversion. Uh, 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, you know, it's evergreen, but there's stuff in there where I'm like, ah, I'm going to probably do something different in that situation. Now there's going to be some tweaking. Oh man. I'll just give you one tip right now. Yeah, man.
So the majority of the companies incorporate, I don't know if you're going to plan on maybe trying to speak. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's what I've done before. Well, majority of companies and organizations have one of three budgets. They have a learning materials budget for their people. They have a continuing education budget or a T and D training and development budget. They're pretty much all the same, right? Different than a speaker for our convention budget.
These budgets over here are for training materials, continuing education, et cetera. So the line is, Hey, you know, you're interested in having me come and speak. I appreciate it. You know, I have this book and it qualifies as continuing education, learning materials and training and development. So therefore, why don't we pull funds from one of those budgets? By the way, they're all the same. You just don't know how each company labels. The levers are there. And basically,
That way we can get all 8,000 people a copy of the book and I'll give you a discount. So now the message lives on after the event. Bam, you just sold 8,000 books. If you make $10 a book, you made 80 grand on top of your speaker fee. You're doing well. Just because you know the budgets.
So that's the stuff I teach my clients. 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. Oh, it's smart because I'll put you in stores. You might be in airport stores, et cetera. That was my deal. Yeah.
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? No, I love law of attraction. 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?
All you got to do is go to chatGBT 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. Oh, wow. This is bestseller. Love it. Sitting in Hudson News, and I look at it every day. Love it. Every day I look at that. Love it. So part of my deal was it'll be in Hudson News. Oh, I love it. Yeah. That's part of it. Yeah.
of it. Because I want to walk through the airport and see my book. Yeah, see if you self-publish, you're not going to get that space. You're not going to get it. That's smart that you did that. I want to be in the airport and hold my book. And hopefully you negotiate a good buyback where you get a low fee for buying them back so you can resell them. Yeah, 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 a $29.95. So
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. When does it come out? They say fall 25, which is why I did that. So fourth quarter this year. Did you write it yet? No, it's been done. Oh, God. Are you kidding me? Oh, my God. Zero chance it would come out. No, people think it's kind of like many, many, a couple of years ago, I
I was involved in a deal and we bought a jet, right? Because we were going to do this jet charter business. We bought a Dassault Falcon 50 and people are like, man, that must be cool to own a jet. It's like,
You don't go buy it and then you get to take it up. Like there's a lot that has to happen before it goes. And when I got in the book thing, I started working with some, some editors that were helping me in New York, Kevin Anderson associates that have been great. And you know, they're like, okay, here's the process. Like this is going to take a while. You're going to, you're going to write, we're going to edit, you're going to write, we're going to edit. It could take a minute. It took almost two years to get it done.
And part of that's on me, 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. And I'm like, what? Buying seasons for bookstores. 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. Like I'll drop it off by the time. I don't care. No, it takes a long time to get it done. I was shocked at how long that process is. Yeah. When I was on secret millionaire, I had a three book publishing deal.
signed and I ended up actually canceling it because of how long it was going to take. Cause I wanted it to come out coincide with the show. I don't need it to come out a year later. Yeah. It doesn't help. They don't, you know, they didn't understand marketing. Right. Yeah. Like it, no, it needs to attach to the show. Yeah. Right. Not a year later. And so I just, I say, I don't, I don't want to do this deal.
Well, that's, you know, you talked about Trump. That's why I speed to lead 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. 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. Somehow you could pull a testimonial from him.
Possible. Possible. I still have people very close to him, which is good. So that's a possibility. So I'll give you one. So I love and adore Lisa Gibbons. She has been to my event. We've done co-facilitating seminars for my students on media training, et cetera. And I kid you not, this had to be – so he got elected in 2016. This had to be 2014. We're doing a training together, teaching media stuff to my students.
And I said, oh, Lisa, I got an idea for you. I said, Trump said some nice things about you when you won Celebrity Apprentice.
Well, that's public knowledge. I said, check with your lawyer. But I believe you can take that and use that as a testimonial. And here's what I said. I kid you not. I said, because you never know. He might become president of the United States one time. No, I have that. So you might have the same thing. I have that. If he said some great things about you on television, public knowledge. No, no, no. I have it printed. He said, because when TV Guide... All right.
See, kids, back in the day, there used to be this thing called TV Guide. It 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. 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. No kidding. And he just said about me, really, really smart.
Donald Trump. I would run it through your lawyer, but I believe you could actually use that because that's public domain. That's public knowledge. Yeah, it is. There you go, buddy. Look at that dude, man. And I got to tell you, think about any other shows you've been on. You were on the today show or like you were on Oprah and they said something. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
That is wild stuff. I'll tell you a little. But I have that in print quote about me from him. Let me give you a little ninja thing I used to do. So when I was building my speaking career and there would be some celebrity MC, I would write up my intro and I would hand it to him like 10 minutes before because, you know, they're super busy. They're running a whole event. I'd say, hey, John, here's a change. The smartest human I know. Yeah.
I didn't say that one, but now they said it from the stage and read it. So boom, testimonial. Oh my gosh. That is magic. Unfortunately, most of the stuff that people say about me, not so good. I can't use it. Think about this though. And I tell people this all the time. Look, forget whether you like Trump, don't like Trump. There aren't many people that have a testimonial from a president of the United States on their book. That's a good point.
Man, yeah, that is going to be a call right away to make sure we can do that. Yeah. 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. Well, yeah.
Hey, look, SW, SW, SW, SW. Some will, some won't. So what? Someone's waiting. So if you ask him and he don't get it, that's all right. But you also have that TV guide thing. I got the TV guide. You got a backup. Very, very smart in print right there. I got it. Matter of fact, I was shocked when I walked in your front door, there wasn't a photo of you and Trump hanging in the lobby.
Or with that quote. 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. 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 get fired? And I'm always like, because I'm too tall. And they're like, what are you talking about? Okay, so here's the story. So
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. And it was a really weird couple of days 'cause you're not allowed to speak because they want the first time you to meet each other to be on camera.
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. Right. So they're shooting the pictures for the marketing pictures in the suite. And the first time we ever saw Donald Trump for somebody ever saw him and 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. 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. Walks out of the photograph.
And then literally, like, we're not there or we're mannequins. He goes, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, you got to move this guy next to me. He's taller than me. And I'm like, fuck. 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. Click, 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, 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. 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 to me.
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. 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 him 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. I mean, I just think that celebrity association, like somebody walks in here is thinking of another real estate group and it's like, oh, well.
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.
now because we sell a lot of homes over 2 million bucks. Right. 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. Right. Just be like, that's this person who's very famous because they're buying a house. It's not, it's not out of the ordinary here. Right. 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. Yeah. You know, I tend to, I tend to try to keep my politics as neutral as I can because, uh,
you know i don't understand you know what's your philosophy on that and say let's talk about that we're going to finish with this little topic because i think it's a good a good place to stop but let's what is your i always think man if you go heavy into your politics you are eliminating 50 of the people that are different yeah and then some people like but some people conversely say well if you go all in on something politics then half the people are going to love you and definitely want to work with you so mine is uh and it's always been this way i don't talk about politics
religion or relationships. Like,
Yeah. It's, it's Thanksgiving dinner table. You keep it there. Yeah. And, and nor do I want to know anyone else's. No, no, no, no. I'm good. That's all I need to know. I mean, I have a, a lot of folks I've done business with over the years who we didn't see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, but we still liked each other and did business. Sure. You know, now it had that person been imposing that stuff on me or me on them. We probably wouldn't have done business and liked each other and still been, you know, colleagues all these years. Yeah. I got to tell you, I tend to, uh,
I tend to mute people on social media that are loud on both ends of the spectrum. Sure, a thousand percent. Yeah. 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. And if you're rude and inconsiderate and don't really know the whole story of stuff. Just going to mute you. Well, everybody's an expert on social media. You know that. Of course. And everything's true.
Everything is true. Everything's true on the internet. 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? It's very simple. www.bigmoneyspeaker.com. Not little money speaker. Bigmoneyspeaker.com. Or like we connected, DMing through Instagram. What's your Instagram? What is your handle? Just James Malinchak. James Malinchak. So check it out. Dude, James, thanks for coming in, buddy. You and I.
eventually we will sell your house and we're definitely do some stuff with speaking. It's a pleasure to meet you, man. Thanks for having me. This has been great. It's a hundred percent. Do listen up. You have a new fan. I'm a fan of yours. Thank you. I appreciate that guys. Listen up. 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. 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. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.