Avoid This $1 Trillion Mistake in Business | Dan Pena DSH #536

And people are afraid.

And we have a whole new generation like yourself that have made money in other ways, alternative methods of investment, which I may or may not agree with, but you've made it.

So that's all that's important.

And that you've learned how to make money in spite of the f ⁇ ed up economy.

And I take my hat off to you.

I'm not so sure my generation would have been that innovative.

In fact, I'm positive my generation wasn't that innovative.

I don't have to think about it.

Yeah.

Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm.

It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team.

Truly means a lot.

Thank you guys for supporting.

And here's the episode.

All right, guys, we got the trillion-dollar man here today, Dan Pena, coming in from his castle in Scotland.

Thanks for flying in, man.

You're welcome.

By the way, when he went 3-2-1, it reminded me, I used to be in the movie business.

And some of the movies that we made would probably be considered pornographic in today's market.

And the

so forevermore, I see flashbacks of naked people running around, except there's nobody naked in here.

But anyway, yes, thank you.

I appreciate you giving me the time.

You wear a lot of hats.

You've been in a lot of industries.

Yes, sir.

How do you choose which industries you enter these days?

If cash flow, if free cash flow does not cover debt service by at least 1.5 to two times, I'm not interested no matter what the industry.

Okay.

So you're willing to do anything as long as the numbers are good?

As long as it's illegal, moral, and ethical.

Okay.

And you were mentioning you got a crematorium out here, you got

a cemetery, a funeral parlor.

Okay.

And are you mainly on the investor side these days, or are you active?

No, I'm an active chairman.

I'm a chairman of 23 companies

from

Germany to South America to the United States to Canada

to

China.

Wow.

Which countries do you see a lot of opportunity in right now?

Wherever cash flow covers debt.

It doesn't matter the country.

It doesn't matter the industry.

What does matter always is the management.

It's tough.

And subsequent to Corona,

management and employees, you know, you hear the,

we're short-staffed.

Everybody's short-staffed.

And now, or not now, but during Corona, everybody had a supply chain challenge.

And those are not things that you can just forget about.

But given that you have a good supply chain or adequate, given that you have enough employees to staff, then as long as cash flow is covered at least one and a half to two times, I'm interested.

Or more importantly, you, my mentees, are interested.

And then they either ask me to be their chairman or they don't ask me to be their chairman.

Yeah, because you're mentoring, what, thousands of people at this point?

Well, we have

several million.

Several million.

Yeah.

The $2.3 trillion that I've

directly or indirectly created are through guys like you.

99% of all the people that have utilized QLA, I've never met because all the QLA product is free.

We don't sell anything.

We haven't sold anything for 20 years.

And the reason somebody asked me a few days ago, well, why do you give all this shit away?

And he said, well, I don't mean the shit, but all this stuff away.

Because of customer service.

We got so tired of you.

Oh, the tape doesn't work or the disk doesn't work.

The CD.

And I just said, well, just give all the shit.

And then customer service went away.

So, I mean,

and it's been easy.

I mean, when you give everything away and now it's all digitized, it took us a while to get everything digital.

Yeah.

But, I mean, it's now no customer service.

But we still get guys that bought something in 1994.

Oh, by the way, it broke.

You know, and I don't know.

I thought CDs were forever.

Yeah.

But they're not.

They could break.

Well, yeah.

They can break.

And so

we still, maybe 1% of our efforts are replacing stuff that doesn't work anymore for whatever reason, even though we never had a lifetime guarantee.

There seems to be a lot of fear and uncertainty in the U.S.

right now with the economy, with the dollar.

Is that something you've been seeing?

Yes, and it's not just the U.S.

It's everywhere.

Everywhere.

We have 40 wars going on right now as you and I sit here speaking.

40 wars around the world.

The ones that they're more cognizant of are Ukraine, Israel, Gaza now.

But there's 38 other wars.

People are scared shitless.

And in mainland Europe, the last thing they want is another european war

and i i i talked to some fairly sophisticated people i was in the pentagon uh here last year uh amongst other places and um

if you think nato is going to defend ukraine what are you smoking give me some of that if it's not addicted i'll i'll get high with you yeah that's not going to happen this won't They don't want to see another mainland war.

I mean, we have a very successful mentee named Peter.

He's the largest independent healthcare provider in Hungary.

Wow.

Well, Ukraine's right next door.

I mean, he's created

hundreds of millions of euros.

And if the war spreads over to Hungary, either because of Putin or because of Ukraine, his fortune is what, cut in half, cut by 80%.

So the people over there are worried.

And they don't, it's not that they don't believe anything Putin says.

But they almost don't believe if he says he's going to be a good boy, you know he's not going to be a good boy.

So the people are afraid.

And the currencies reflect that.

And even though people are saying that the dollar isn't what it used to be, that's true.

But all the other currencies aren't what they used to be either.

Like I gave a speech at Oxford about five years ago.

And they said, well, how can we?

Everybody's got big deficits.

Okay.

At that time, the U.S.

deficit was not the current $33 trillion that it is today, but it was about $26 or $29 trillion.

And I said, all we have to do is devalue the dollar.

On Friday, a dollar is a dollar.

On Monday, a dollar is 40 cents.

You do away with all the debt.

What president wants his legacy to be

that he have

the largest economy in the world?

Nobody's going to do that.

So we're going to suffer with, in my judgment, certainly the rest of my life,

with these deficit problems.

And people are afraid.

And we have a whole new generation like yourself.

that have made money in other ways, alternative methods of investment, which I may or may not agree with, but you've made it.

So that's all that's important.

And that you've learned how to make money in spite of the fucked up economy.

And, you know, I take my hat off to you.

I'm not so sure my generation would have been that innovative.

In fact, I'm positive my generation wouldn't have been that innovative.

I don't have to think about it.

But, you know, the world's in trouble.

And I met with a very leading

political lawyer in London a few weeks ago.

He came to the castle for coffee because I'm running as an independent for office there.

And he says the world is on its way down

and we're winning the race.

Are you interested in coming on the digital social hour podcast as a guest?

Well click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life.

Click the application link below and here's the episode guys.

I mean you can't find someplace.

You can find little pockets, but you can't find a pocket, but only pockets of prosperity.

You know, after World War II and after Korean War, which is my generation, I mean, the world prospered.

Yeah.

Okay.

You don't see that anymore.

You don't see that anymore.

And

it's,

you've got two guys my age running for president of the United States.

Full disclosure, I know Mr.

Trump from another life.

I've never met President Biden, but we should have guys 35, 40 years old running for president, not 80.

Yeah, I liked Vivek.

I was upset when he dropped out.

Yeah.

There's talks of World War III.

Oh, yeah.

You know, they don't talk about the war to end all wars anymore because we've already passed that.

And I'm pretty sure, I'm not positive, but that if a war breaks out, and I hope it doesn't, it will be in Europe.

Somebody's going to make a mistake.

They're going to launch a missile.

They're going to do this and that.

But it's a tough time to be raising kids, trying to create a family, et cetera.

It's a tough time.

What do they have to look forward to?

Yeah, it is pretty dark.

You got kids?

Yep.

I have three children and two grandchildren.

Okay.

You hear this term tough love, right?

That's how I was raised.

What do you you think of that?

Well, my dad had been in tough love.

Well, when I went off to the military, I volunteered for the draft in 1966, which seems a lifetime ago because it was.

They had 400 people in the barracks and bunk beds three high.

And of the 400 that were trying to sleep, 150, 200 are crying at night because they're being beaten because

in the 60s you could still beat people in the military.

Wow.

And so,

and I yelled out, if you think this is hard, you should have been raised in my house.

This is a fucking country club of luxury compared to how I was raised.

And my dad was really tough, extremely tough.

And my kid brother,

who's 15 years my junior, who's retiring from the LA County Fire Department as deputy chief in a few days, I'm going to his retirement dinner.

I mean, but we have kids that have never, they feel entitled.

We have kids that have never been really held accountable.

We have kids that got away, not with literally murder, but you know,

kids don't do what their parents tell them to do.

Kids do what they see their parents do.

And in my particular case, my dad was an extremely disciplined guy, a disciplinarian.

He treated me very, very harshly.

But I'm absolutely 1,000%

positive that I wouldn't be the man I am today if it wasn't for that tough love.

But you can overdo tough love.

I'm probably,

I'm not a proponent of overdoing it, but in hindsight,

I have one special needs child and I have two kids that are out in the real world, a 37-year-old daughter and a 40-year-old son,

that

compared to the other people that they went to school with, et cetera, I was extremely harsh.

I won't say cruel, but I was harsh because I set very high standards and I held them accountable to the very high standards.

Most parents that want to be their friend, they're pleasers.

And my dad wasn't a pleaser, and I certainly am not a pleaser.

Our kids are closer to their mother than me.

Fortunately, somebody in the family, parents, has to be a nurturer.

Somebody in the family, okay?

Usually the mother.

Yeah, usually.

And in our case, absolutely was the mother.

But the corresponding dad is supposed to, you know, at least how I was raised, is supposed to hold the kids accountable, you know?

you know uh and not just you got to be home by 11 o'clock i don't even know if that means anything anymore but when i was a kid if i wasn't home by 11 o'clock, I paid the fucking price.

I mean, I paid the price.

But it's not an easy time to have kids.

You know, that's why a lot of kids, I don't know, a lot of kids, some kids are, you know, freezing their eggs or the sperm

to bring them to life when there's a better time.

But, you know, the

Professor Hawkings of Cambridge, who died a couple years ago, in 2004 said in a nationally publicized article, we are at the apex.

Homo sapien is a monkey with a slightly larger brain.

We're on nothing but an average planet

and we have seen our best days.

That's what he said in 2004.

I said in 2014 almost the exact same thing.

I'm 10 years behind Hawkins.

But

when you think about it, the first aircraft, airplanes with the Wright brothers was about 1997.

62 years later, we put a man on the moon.

All that was accomplished in 60 years.

One lifetime.

Okay.

What's the next lifetime?

About now,

69 to 2024.

Yeah.

Okay.

We haven't made the same progress in the last 60 years as we made the first 60 years.

And if you go back 60 years before the Wright brothers, we had the Industrial Revolution.

So we should be farther ahead than we are.

And we've always had war.

We've always, you know, the Romans had their times.

The Indians had their times.

The Persians had their times.

And the Homo sapien is, you know, in my judgment, has shot its wad.

I mean, and that's why, I don't know Elon Musk personally, but that's why Elon has a story about it.

It wants to be a second planet race.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's because we're through on this planet.

You think we've peaked as humans?

Correct.

What about AI?

Okay.

Well, AI has just come, it's been around a while.

But in the last three to five years, I mean, you put AI on your website,

I mean, it's instant cash flow because they're hoping it's going to be like dot-com.

But if you remember that dot-com ended in a bubble burst where 80 or 90 or 95% of all the money that was made in dot-com disappeared in dot-com.

I'm not sophisticated enough to know that's going to happen.

But I do know with all my heart, people that say that AI is going to create more jobs, they're lying.

You have to be really thick to think.

We were in a restaurant last night where in the bar, in in the outer bar, not at the bar, robots were serving drinks.

Wow.

Okay.

Robots were serving snacks.

Okay.

Now,

how can anybody say

that that guy, that little guy, cute as hell to look at, you know?

The only thing is you couldn't tip him.

I tried to tip.

It locks down.

You can't tip.

So maybe I don't know how that equates to the original question.

But I mean, we're going to have less jobs because of AI.

About five years ago,

the then most powerful computer in the world played chess against three grandmasters.

The three grand masters won the chess game, okay?

And the moderator, it wasn't Bill Gates, but it was somebody like Bill Gates.

It might have been Thiel from Silicon Valley.

And he asked the computer,

what have you learned from this experience with the Grand Masters?

And the computer thought about it, a millionth of a second, just, do not trust us.

Google fuck it.

Do not trust us.

On its own, of its own volition, the computer says to us, do not trust us.

Wow.

You listen to Elon, you listen to Bill Gates and some other luminaries, and

we should be afraid of computers.

So you're not getting a neurotrip in your brain?

No, no, no, no.

I'm not getting a neurotrip.

I can't speak for my children.

Do you have any regrets with the children the way you raised them?

Oh, well, no.

Well, I have three regrets in my life.

My one regret is I'm an experienced combat trained army officer.

We never saw combat.

The second is I told my mother the night before she died, mom, you're not fucking sick.

Don't be a bitch.

I'd like to have that one back.

She's dead the next morning.

Wow.

And the third, I didn't set my goals high enough.

Really?

Those are the only regrets I have.

But you've achieved so much success.

Yeah, but I left a lot on the table.

There were three or four-year periods where I'd rest on my laurels.

And it's hard

when you've got a lot of money, and arguably I do, it's hard to not make a lot of money.

I mean, the law of numbers, okay,

you really have to be advised by some real pinheads

and/or have a death wish.

And a lot of kids go through their family's fortunes,

like, you know, like shit to a goose.

But those are my regrets.

My regrets,

I probably wouldn't have sent my kids to the best schools.

You wouldn't, have?

I wouldn't have, because

they got arguably good educations, in some cases, great educations.

But how they, it's not what you learn in school, it's how you put it to use.

Right.

And most kids, and I call you all kids because I'm either old enough to be your father or grandfather.

Most kids don't utilize what, if you believe in a God, what

somebody gave you.

Now, some people, I'm going to my sixth-year high school reunion in a few days.

I was voted most likely not to succeed in my class.

Wow.

And I'm going to be giving a speech

as a keynote speech.

You know, now how do you tell people that are 78, 79,

their life's behind them?

Now, how am I going to inspire that audience?

Yeah.

When I was known as a class fuck up.

So you were not a good kid growing up.

Fuck.

I was terrible.

I've arrested five times, flunked out of university three times,

tried to set the high school that I'm going to give a keynote speech at on fire.

Wow.

I rebelled against any kind of authority.

The army saved me.

Entered a private, left an officer.

I needed somebody that held me accountable.

Today, one of my,

not nephew, niece, was the head of a human resource at one of the casinos here.

Nice.

One of the big ones, okay.

And she quit and went to work for one of the other big casinos.

But I said, well, why did you leave?

This girl kept complaining.

She wanted to see the head of human resources.

I need to see if they had human resources.

Only the head of human resources will understand why I'm unhappy here.

So finally, after weeks and months, she got to see my niece.

And she said, my car broke down.

Today I had to take a cab.

And you're wearing $3,000 shoes.

And so my niece said,

I don't understand how the car breaking down, how you having to take a cab and my $3,000 shoes have anything to do with, you know, have anything to do with human resources here.

But she quit that job.

And she's not in human resources now.

Now she's in some other senior management.

But it's not my fault her car broke down, as she told me over coffee a couple of days ago.

Victim mentality.

Thank you.

That's exactly.

A lot of people my age have it.

Yeah, well, I know they do.

And, you know, I've had the privilege of speaking at Oxford, the Naval Academy, Wharton, a bunch of great schools in the last six, seven years.

And a certain portion of the kids have the victim mentality.

Yeah.

And a certain portion of the kids have let's get shit done.

Right.

Okay.

And it's funny.

I wish I had done this over the last seven, eight years when I'm speaking at schools.

It's like the kids that have the let's get shit done mentality kind of sit together.

And the victims kind of sit together.

And it's

correct.

Like I say, poorness rubs off.

I'm from the body of East Los Angeles or nobody was rich.

I mean, the good jobs were teachers and cops.

My dad was a cop.

But, you know,

now

I'm told that staffing is a problem.

You can't get people to work.

Yeah, I heard prisons are struggling finding guards.

Yeah.

And part of that is that people have found a secondary and a tertiary method of earning a living on the net.

I mean, I won't won't say anybody can make money on the net, but almost anybody can make money on the net.

Whether you make a lot, a lot of money or you don't make a lot of money, it depends on your skill sets.

But the kids today, the kids are basically good.

They just need leadership.

And leadership is a rare commodity.

And it's not something that

you get rich on.

There is a deep underlying sickness in America, in my opinion, one man's opinion.

And again, I know the former President Trump.

Why are there so many people pissed off about politics?

So many.

I mean, Jesus.

I mean, tens of millions.

Might be hundreds of millions.

Yeah, maybe more.

Because, well, first of all, politicians don't have the best rep.

Okay.

Not the highest quality people go into politics.

People that become lawyers, normally they'll go to Wall Street or, you know, they're in the business environment.

When you go to law school, you don't necessarily,

your first choice when you get out of law school isn't to be an assistant to some congressman.

And so we have a poor talent pool.

But that's not just here.

And because I'm running as an independent for Westminster Parliament in the UK,

the talent pool is not great.

for politics across the board.

And I'm experiencing it now

myself.

I never thought that I'd have anything to do with politics.

but I've been at the top of my game for a long time now, and I want to do something else with my 80s.

And so far, I find it not exhilarating, that'd be an exaggeration, but I find it interesting how

my mother used to say, a man that cheats on his wife, his family, can justify it in a thousand ways.

Okay.

You can make up bullshit why you did it.

Okay.

She didn't do this.

The kids are this and that.

In politics, they can make up the most asinine

things.

The thing that my pet peeve is, they're setting up

a city or a town in Rwanda for the immigrants.

Well, my wife and I have run a charity in Rwanda.

We've been to Rwanda.

You can't walk from here to you without corruption.

Wow.

I'm positive the 200 and some odd million pounds that have been given by the British government to the Rwandan government,

if 5% of that that actually got to building houses, I'd be surprised.

That's it.

Jeez.

And it's, of course, we haven't got to climate change yet.

There's been 11 expeditions that have both gone to the North Pole and South Pole, 11.

Since 1903.

My wife and I are 11th, and all the other 10 are dead.

Whoa.

We've been to the North Pole.

We've been to the South Pole.

We've talked to the scientists.

And we're in a, the next ice age is going to be between five and 7,000 years from now.

No matter what we do.

Okay?

And all the water that we're worried about losing, which we're not really losing that much, is going to turn to ice.

And

most of the people that inhabit the planet Earth are going to be gone.

They're going to be frozen to death.

But we've been there, and

we're in the middle of a cycle.

I've said this on TV

azillion times.

We're in the South Pole, which not many people know, it's on a mountaintop.

And And so if you're not suffering from oxygen deprivation, and we're sitting there with a scientist,

young guys, PhDs from MIT, Caltech, Stanford, wearing flip-flops, Bermuda shorts and t-shirts and 40 below zero, and they're going through these ice cores.

And then he says, this ice core, 55,000 years ago, it was 1.8 degrees warmer Celsius than it is today.

I said, oh, stop, Professor.

Let's go back up to that ice core.

Now, how do you know that?

And then they got all kinds of scientific ways that they know it.

And so

it's going to be this cold or this warm.

Again, yeah, after the next ice age, five to seven thousand years, the next warming period is going to be 11 to 15,000 years.

It's going to be just this, you know,

just this warm or just this cold, depending on how you look at it.

And whenever I'm asked to be on a panel to talk about global warming or climate change, as soon as the other panel members know it's me,

they don't come to the panel.

Because the first question I ask them, young man, PhD, MIT, Ph.D., when was the last time you were at the North Pole or the South Pole?

Have you ever been?

No.

And you're pontificating?

I have been.

I met with the scientists.

When was the last time you were in the Pentagon to talk about climate change?

Never.

I was there last year.

How come I didn't ask you?

And then the panel's over.

Wow, so global warming was just all propaganda?

Oh, I believe.

And Al Gore,

God bless him, I wish I I had thought of the scam, actually.

But

it would have been twice as good as Bitcoin.

Twice as good as Bitcoin if I had taught.

But Al Gore came up with it.

And there's interesting pictures from 2008.

He's standing in the North Pole or the South Pole.

And the North Pole is a Russian deal.

The South Pole is an American deal.

But he's standing in the middle of the North Pole, you know, 60 below zero.

And he says by 2012 or 2014, there won't be any North Pole.

Then they show him again in the picture of 2022.

It's colder than it was.

My wife and and I renewed our vows, wedding vows at the North and South Pole.

We had more fun at the North Pole because the stories of Russian scientists and everybody drinking vodka, they are absolutely true.

Okay.

They contend it's how they keep warm.

I don't, you know, but how they keep from blurry vision or blurred

answers to questions.

But

so we've been to these places and nobody else has.

Whenever I listen to, not whenever.

I don't carry credit cards.

I don't carry cash.

Yeah.

And my wife gives me a $20 bill when I'm in America.

In case I get lost, I can get a cab.

$20?

$20.

That's no money.

Yeah.

But Sally and I have been together decades.

She started giving me $20 in the early 90s.

So, I mean, she hasn't up

my allowance.

But I do have, I think, $20.

I have a driver, but.

Why are you against credit cards?

I'm not against credit cards.

My wife just doesn't allow me to carry them.

Okay.

The queen, well, the queen, God rest her soul,

the king of

England doesn't carry cash or credit cards.

He has people

that carry cash and credit cards.

So I don't consider myself the king of anything other than my estate.

You do live in a castle, so?

I do.

And I'm not lonely.

And it's 55,000 square feet.

It's 156 acres.

It's rental manicure.

We have our own golf course.

And

our staff, our butlers and some of our housekeepers have worked at Buckingham Palace, have worked at some of these places.

And working for us is like a

country club vacation because all those big rich estates in royalty pay very little.

They allow you to use

on your resume that you serve tea to the queen, etc.

Oh, so they don't pay you.

They pay you.

No, no, we pay.

We pay a lot.

We pay probably 40 to 60 percent over the going wage.

and have.

We also give

virtually all our employees get a a 13th month.

We pay them for 12 months.

We pay them for 13 months.

We give them an extra month.

And because my wife and I worked for tips once.

I mean, we were poor.

She waited tables.

You know, I mean, I know what it is.

Nobody believes me, but I know what it is when you're hungry and your stomach sounds like a mixed master.

I mean, it's growling.

I know what that feeling is.

Fortunately, it hasn't been for a few decades.

and about 20 pounds ago.

But

so we have the luxury of having been poor.

And so we like the fact that we treat people as we would have wanted to be treated when

we were at the other end of the stick.

Did you meet your wife when you were broke?

Yeah.

Sally loaned me 30,000 pounds.

This came up in a conversation last night, in fact.

This is my third and longest-lasting fortune.

But I had two fortunes before and I lost them.

Because I was young and I thought I knew everything.

Yeah.

Two girlfriends before her?

What?

You're talking about girlfriends or friends?

No, no, no, no.

I was broke, but no.

She loaned me, well, I never paid her back.

She gave me 35,000 pounds, which is about $42,000

back in the 80s

when I was broke.

How did she get that?

Oh, she had saved, she's from a poor family.

She lived in a caravan, like a mobile home.

Wow.

Her caravan is about...

was about half as big as this room.

Okay.

Because the plane we flew in on from Miami a couple days ago, the plane was bigger than her home was.

Geez.

Humble beginnings for both of you.

Yeah.

I think that gives you guys an edge though, right?

Because you experienced it.

Yeah.

And right now we're in the process of giving our money away to foundations and trusts, et cetera,

both to the schools I went to, the grammar school I went to, Marilyn Monroe went to.

Wow.

19 years beforehand.

But

when she lived there in the barrio, it was white trash that lived there.

When When I lived there, it was Mexican trash that lived there.

What's your opinion on leaving your kids with all your money and business?

We're not.

You're not doing anything at all?

We call a million each, anything.

Only a million.

Yeah, but that's not very much of our estate.

And why did you decide to only do that?

Because they're not mature enough.

But they're 40 and 37.

Yep.

I said they're not mature enough.

Huh.

Wow.

Now, I plan on living another 20 years.

If they get mature in the next 20 years, you know,

trust can be changed.

So you got high standards for matureness.

Correct.

What would that look like?

You're the average of the five people that you hang around with.

Okay.

Okay, let's just say the people that you spent most of your life, five people.

Okay.

Okay.

Did any of them know anything about

creating high-performance people?

No.

Okay.

Did any of them know anything about, now we're separating high-performance people from net worth now.

Did any of them know anything about creating massive wealth?

No.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, I'm sure somebody in that five was a nourishing person, maybe your mom.

Yeah.

Okay.

Maybe one of those five might have been a religious person, depending on if religion is in or out.

Okay.

But so it's potluck how people turn out.

I happened to, the five people for me was my dad, who wasn't there that often, but he was a strict disciplinarian.

He was like a superhero.

My mom, who was very nourishing, very devout Catholic.

And when I was young, I wanted to be a priest.

I wanted to be a priest.

Wow.

A lot of people think that that's pretty funny.

Even I think it's pretty funny when I talk about it.

I had a grandmother who was my mother's mother, who was also, I won't say a religious fanatic, but nourishing.

And then

I had a kid brother.

the guy that's retiring from the LA County Fire Department.

And then I had one best friend who actually is a recently retired corporate executive from Vegas.

Okay.

Okay.

And

those are the five.

But nobody knew anything about high performance.

The only person that knew something about high performance was my dad.

My dad was an all-American athlete in high school, and I couldn't catch a ball.

But I rebelled.

I wanted to be able to do something that my father didn't do.

And that's make a lot of money.

When he first came to the castle in 1985, 86, we're standing standing in our drawing room.

And the ceiling is a Napoleonic chandelier, a real Napoleonic chandelier, a real crystal, blah, blah, blah.

And I put my arm around him and he looks up at the chandelier and says, son, just tell me it wasn't drugs.

The only thing he could relate to making this much money that I did at that time, 40 years ago, was drugs.

I said, no, Dad, it's kind of like drugs.

It's oil and gas.

And oil and gas can be addictive, just like drugs, I'm told.

Yeah.

But he came for three weeks.

He only stayed five days.

He was so uncomfortable.

Really?

It It was so out of his comfort zone.

He was playing golf with

my head of security then, who was a retired Royal Marine.

And

my mother came to die there.

And she never stepped into the castle.

She lived in a cottage on the estate.

And she used to go to talk to the maids and the butlers.

And is my son home?

Yes, ma'am.

No, no, he's too busy.

I don't want to talk to him right now.

And so I see her at dinner.

But they were way out of the comfort zone.

Wow.

It was just such a big change for them.

Well, it was a big change for me.

But again, the five people, as soon as I realized that the poorness rubs off,

richness rubs off.

Why do Olympic athletes train with other Olympic athletes?

To get better.

Correct.

And then I started on a venture.

To this day,

it's hard for me to find people that are more successful than I am.

But now I find kids.

You know,

I've had the privilege or either the, some people don't call it a privilege.

I've met five presidents.

I've met six Secretary of States.

I've met two kings.

I've met three queens.

I've met

the Secretary of

John Connolly, who got shot when Kennedy got shot, the magic bullet.

John Connolly was one of my sponsors

in Texas when I lived there.

So I've associated with high performance people.

And high performance people don't allow you to shirk responsibility.

High performance people

hold you accountable.

And so that's what I've done and I still do to this day.

And it's worked out well.

The program that we started 30 years ago has created

trillions now.

The largest deal in recorded history, the $500 billion NAM, the City of the Future in Saudi Arabia.

One of my mentees, Dr.

Klaus Keinfeld, he was the first CEO.

That was his idea.

So we've created

at least a million millionaires.

We've created a couple hundred billionaires.

We've created the program.

The program.

So directly or indirectly, I've helped these kids.

A lot of them dirt poor.

A couple of rich goody tushus, but most of the mostly dirt poor.

But you need to be around people.

Money's not everything.

It's the only thing that anybody really keeps track of.

But you need to have the devotion.

For 26 years, I didn't take a day off.

Wow.

And there's five or six people around the world.

The richest girl, a lady in China, didn't take a day off for 26 years.

One of the richest people in the UK, a lawyer, didn't take a day off for 26 years.

So there's about eight or nine of us.

A couple are dead now.

And

during Christmas, during childbirth, during

anniversaries, during Valentine's Day, during,

I always worked.

Today, I don't call it work.

I still work 50, 60 hours a week.

But I was asked by Forbes magazine a couple years ago, what do you, what one key thing, Mr.

Pena, can you attribute your success to?

I didn't even have to think, like I'm pausing now, the countless

100 and 120-hour work weeks

over at that time,

you know, 25 years.

I can't count them all.

But when I think about, remember,

we don't do what our parents tell us to do.

We do what we see our parents do.

When my dad retired from the LAPD after 28 years of service, he had 735 statutory days off he hadn't taken.

Wow.

28 divided by 735.

He never took a day off.

And he got a check at that time for about, I don't know, $59,000.

This was 1971, which was a lot of money.

They were paying him, but you can't do that now.

Now you can't accumulate that many days.

Now it's...

Because

if you don't use them in the year, you lose them.

So that was

my role model.

And so I never, and when I was on Wall Street, when trading went to 24-7, 365,

I never went home.

I mean, I slept at my desk.

I went to the YMCA across the street and took a shower because I could trade someplace somewhere 24-7, 365.

And the lazier guys didn't do that.

They found out they could work less

because they were able to, you know, there's a market open someplace.

But it's tough to maintain that fire in your belly.

Absolutely.

And it's unusual the fact that I'm as old as I am and I still have it.

Yeah, a lot of people lose that fire.

Do you think early on a big part was you wanted to make your dad proud of you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I couldn't do it in athletics, but I certainly could do it in

business.

I got a big award,

most successful alumni.

And I went to a little school that you got to explain about,

which is Cal State University Northridge now.

And so he's being interviewed on channel CBS.

Mr.

Penny, you must be really proud of your son getting this big award.

She says, yes, yes.

He looks right in the camera.

And he says, But my son is successful not because of me, but in spite of me.

Wow.

I didn't do anything for my son, Danny.

Damn.

And he didn't.

Then they talked to the dean of the School of Business, Shirley Teeter, who was about my age.

And she went on, got a PhD, and then she became dean of the School of Business.

And they asked Dr.

Teeter, same question.

She says, they added the question,

what have you seen change in the 25, 30 years that you've known Dan Pena?

The only thing that's changed with Danny Pena is his accomplishments.

She's looking right in the camera, caught up with his big fucking mouth.

They cut that off at the six o'clock news, the fucking part.

But I built up a lot of animosity because I shamed her into getting a PhD.

I shamed her because she's really a great teacher.

But I used to tease her, you know,

you can either have a love life or your PhD.

There was no room for in between.

She was from a poor farm someplace.

But I made it, you know, I probably should get the award and my graduate or my

reunion, 60-year reunion in a few days, as the one that accomplished the most with the least.

They don't have that award.

Yeah, you got most likely to fail.

Correct.

And my kids don't like that story.

Yeah.

My kids get embarrassed that at one time, you know, I was considered a failure.

Do you think you were rebelling because of your strict father's?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And at that time, the Catholic Church was very strict.

Now, I didn't see any of the abuse, and I know it went on, but I didn't see any of that.

The only thing I saw were nuns and priests beat kids, not sexually abuse them.

And I certainly got beaten.

But for every beating I got, I deserved 10 more.

Wow.

Because I became very cagey,

you know, slipping under the radar.

But my wife and I are very close to the Catholic Church.

We support

St.

Teresa now.

And I say jokingly, it's not so funny now, but I put my money on the bench before she became a saint, you know.

So we've supported orphanages in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, South America

here,

and the

lepers.

I mean,

we've supported a lot of people,

mostly Catholic, not all Catholic, but we've supported Muslims, we've supported, you know, I used to be partners with the Israel, Israeli National Oil Company,

I was partners with the Arabs, the Japanese government, the Russian government, the Mexican government, the UK government,

Yemen government, Sudan government.

So we've been around.

But when you're successful, it's easy to be joint venture partners with these people.

Right.

But you got to start someplace.

And most people give up before somebody gives them a break.

Absolutely.

Somebody's got to give you a break someplace.

Because nobody starts from the pinnacle of life unless, you know, Baron Trump is a good example of somebody starting at the pinnacle.

It's rare though.

Yeah, it's very rare.

Because money cycles every three generations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then the,

I'm, I'm hoping it's not a strategy, but I'm hoping that it works out for Baron.

But it's a tough,

tough horse to follow.

It's tough.

Anyone I've gone into business with that comes from money, it just never works out.

It's tough.

Yeah, absolutely.

The standards are not there.

Now, I know religion's played a big role in your life.

What about modern-day religion?

Do you think it's been compromised a little bit?

You mean the modern day Muslim, the modern-day Catholic, the modern day Jew?

You mean that?

Yeah.

I think that when the modern day, if that's the right terminology, I'm not sure it is, got started, their heart and their morals were in the right place.

But we've

transgressed.

You know, when poor Muslim women get half beat to death or beat to death, because they're not wearing their, what do you call it, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

And

there's nothing right about that.

That's all wrong.

When

Muslim little girls from schools get kidnapped and raped, et cetera,

you know,

nowhere in the Quran, and I've read the Quran, nowhere in the Quran does it say, you know, you use religion as a tool to go out and kill people and butcher people.

But nobody is not guilty a little bit.

I mean, all the religions are guilty to some extent

because they all have to exist on money.

And normally the zealots get most of the money.

The psychopaths like me

get most of the money.

Or 10%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

but we're on that path and

I don't see us switching.

I don't see that changing.

Yeah, it seems really divisive right now.

It seems like they're always fighting.

Yeah.

Nobody, well, I won't say nobody, but very few people have anything good to say about some of these things.

And

like everybody's waiting to see how Israel is going to react to all the missiles.

There's a bunch of people that say, why don't you just call it a win?

Unfortunately, only one person got hurt, and they fucked it up.

But Netanyahu, without a war, is out of a job.

I mean, there's a whole lot of people that would like to see him gone, and I don't know him at all, although I have been partners with the Israeli government.

But those Middle Eastern countries play hardball.

The U.S.

talks about playing hardball, but at the end of the day, we all have a little, I want to be liked.

And when you're a leader of the free world, as President Biden is, and I'm not a proponent of him, but I mean, he doesn't know

he's got very few alternatives that won't piss somebody off.

Right.

It's a tough spot.

Very few.

It's a tough spot.

How much importance do you place on the president?

Because they get all the blame, but do you think they're actually making moves?

Well, I don't think Biden's making too many.

You know, I know it's glamorized, and he talks to the wall, and nobody's there, or he falls downstairs.

I fell down two years ago, Christmas Eve, cut my head open.

I was running from the pavilion into the castle and it was raining.

I slipped.

And the, so I know your coordination at closing in on 80 isn't the same coordination as young people like yourself.

And so I have a little, you know, I cut him a little slack.

I'm more worried.

He gets into office again, and then Camilla is president.

I have more concerns about that.

I'm not saying anything bad about her, but

she hasn't accomplished much, if anything.

But what's really worrisome, getting back to your

question or two ago, we've got nobody 25 to 35 that's interested in politics, that's charismatic, you know, that can carry a conversation,

that's a real orator.

When I was raising money back in the day, I studied Hitler, I studied Winston Churchill, and I studied John Kennedy, their speeches.

The greatest orator that we've had in the last hundred years is Adolf Hitler.

Wow.

That's just it.

Unfortunately, he had nothing good to sell, but he was a hell of a speaker.

There's no question about that.

Can't deny that, yeah.

And

the world is in a different place.

Now,

if you're born in 2020, you're supposed to be able to live at least till 100, 2020.

Okay.

When I was born, the life expectancy was 55.

Wow.

Okay.

55.

And so now, the reason a great majority of my portfolio is in health care, healthcare has been growing for the last 40 years.

40 years ago, 3% a year.

Last year, 25% a year.

And by 2030, 28% a year.

Damn.

Because we all want to live longer.

We all

more or less have the money to live longer.

And notwithstanding pharmaceutical wanting to charge as much as they can,

the costs of health care proportionately per capita is going down.

Nobody wants to talk about that.

And so, you know, my grandchildren should live easily into their hundreds.

Now, we have good genes.

The men die in the early 90s, and the women die in the late 90s, early 100s.

That's really good genes.

Yeah, yeah.

And so

I'm sure, and this was no exercise, smoking and drinking.

So, and I know it's not as popular to drink now as it used to be, but I'm sure that, you know, unless I get hit by a train, my wife and I are going to space next year, unless it goes down, you know, crashes into the earth, I'm going to believe, live until at least I'm 100.

Nice.

Yeah, and so the so you'll be able, I'll be able to go to YouTube and hear myself say fuck shit.

And, you know, when I'm 100, make grown men cry.

I'm sorry.

Yeah,

well,

we had a guy, we hadn't had a guy shit his pants in about this true story, seven or eight years.

And then last year,

the gods were with us.

We had an ex-National Hockey League star, that you'd know his name,

shit his pants in the seminar, all the way from his back corner seat to the closest toilet.

Gobs are shit.

Okay.

He then took his underwear, apparently my maids, took his underwear off.

And

we don't run out of toilet paper at the castle.

Because the stall that he was in, he had to use his underwear as toilet paper.

So

the well, we've had a couple of seizures,

but he we hadn't had anybody shit themselves in a while.

I thought I was losing my touch, but I'm not losing my touch.

What are you saying to trigger that?

We have two bank accounts in life.

We have a financial bank account.

You made a few bucks.

God bless you.

And we have an emotional bank account.

I would guarantee all the money I have against all the money you have.

And I'm positive there's a big disparity that your emotional bank account isn't as strong as your financial bank account.

Isn't as strong.

Probably not.

Okay.

The fact that you use the word probably means I know I'm right.

But the fact is the really big guys, like Elon Namusk, as I affectionately call him,

he truly doesn't give a shit what anybody says about him.

He truly doesn't give a shit what people think about him.

Okay.

He says on a personal interview, not with Oprah, but somebody like that, he said, I would rather cut my stomach open with a can opener than talk about my personal life.

Okay.

He believes in sepiko, which is when you the Japanese assassinate themselves, kill themselves when they fuck something up.

Okay.

And the guys that I've been privileged to be around, Donald Trump is not dissimilar to that.

And the other super wealthy guys,

I had the privilege of working with Steve Jobs.

I arguably am one of the last guys to see Jobs, see him alive.

He was in India and Sally and I were at a private club.

He was there.

He danced on a dance floor about as big as this area.

He danced for five hours straight by himself.

Wow.

With his eyes closed and his head like this.

And then finally, when the band and everybody stopped playing, the general manager came up to me because he said, you said something.

I said, hi, Steve, because I knew him.

And he says, do you think you could tell Mr.

Jobs the place is closed?

And I said, why don't you tell him?

We don't know how we'll react.

I can guarantee I know how he'll react.

I would just let him stand there and dance if I were you.

And so we left.

And then I don't know

how much longer he was there but I saw Steve try to throw a programmer out a window I saw Steve throw a

you know the old-time computers the big yeah the box ones yeah yeah yeah yeah and a programmer

he couldn't control his temper right no he was violent

and that now you know if you say shit to somebody I mean they want to go see human resources right yeah people have gotten soft right you call them snowflakes correct and that's because they melt under pressure

they melt under pressure.

It's changed.

But I think it's remarkable that kids like yourself can generate followings with podcasts and arguably make money from them.

I would have bet against this.

I did bet against it.

I told you.

I thought podcasts were shit.

You bet against crypto, too.

Yeah, I bet against crypto.

Well, the story's not out in crypto yet.

But temporarily, right now, I'm wrong about crypto.

No question about that.

But the kids that have thought of ingenious ways of making money on the internet is quite remarkable.

Yeah, it's a different era, man.

Yeah.

I think it's easy from an older generation to kind of hate on the younger ones, right?

Well, not hate.

I mean, I'm jealous.

You know, the

I, you know, I've had some big, big opportunities to make some investments at ground level, and I said they'll never work.

Well, I mean, Bill Gates didn't think the internet would work.

I mean, he passed on it, and he's, whereas I'm not educated in that arena, he is.

So he should have known.

Okay.

People didn't think Amazon would make it.

No, and

I remember meeting

Beatros back in the day when his office was about half this big.

Now, you know, the first acquisition thing he spent money on?

What was it?

He had three employees.

One of the two employees, they were packing boxes.

They're on the ground with their knees were knee pads.

That was the first thing because

no matter how young you are, if you're on concrete for day after day, week after week packing boxes, your knees go out.

And so the first acquisition he made or expenditure were for, he bought three sets of knee pads.

Wow.

That is legendary.

Did you think he would make it?

I met him.

He's Cuban.

He's got fire in his belly.

I can't speak about now.

But 26 years ago, he was right at the beginning.

He has fire in his belly, and he's got something to prove.

I didn't know him well enough to know who he was proving it to.

But a lot of fortunes are made, you know, you're a fucking bum, you're never going to amount to anything.

Okay.

And

a self-fulfilling prophecy, you wind up being a bum and not amounting to anything.

Whereas the kids,

nobody ever called me a bum, but I was voted most likely to not succeed.

which I'm going to remind him at the reunion in four or five days.

You kept receipts of that one.

Oh, yeah.

But the hardest thing for me to do, how do you tell people 78, 79, 80

they still have time to make it?

I'm a great speaker and a better bullshitter, but I mean, most of the people in the audience are just going to say, you know,

that was for Danny.

That's not for us.

But I'm looking forward to it.

I'm going to tell the

Marilyn, if you're listening to this,

I had a crush on a girl since grammar school.

And

I don't think I've ever told her this.

And now we're out of high school 60 years.

I'm going to tell her that I had a crush on you since we were in the fourth grade.

She's going to regret not.

Yeah, well, probably, that's what Sally says.

Sally says, these,

and most of the girls that are left in our class are little short, chubby grandmothers now.

Right.

Okay.

A couple of them are in wheelchairs.

A couple of them have those, you know, those framed things that you walk up there.

But I remember them when they were 30, 40 pounds lighter.

I remember them when they had curly blonde hair.

I remember them when they used to wear tight sweaters.

I fondly remember that when they don't look anything like that anymore.

Time changes, man.

Time flies.

Anything you want to close off with?

No,

yes.

I appreciate the time.

And I don't wish you good luck.

I wish you all

the luck you deserve.

That's through hard work.

I don't know any other way than hard work.

If there's anything I can do as a follow-up, don't hesitate to tell my office.

But I'm spending most of my time now in the 23 companies I'm chairman of.

And I give a few seminars a year, not many,

and I'm busily getting prepared to run for election this coming November in the UK.

I fully expect to win in a landslide.

I fully expect to ride

a white charger into parliament until the masters of arms tear me down off my my horse.

You can say, fuck shit, a lot of bad words in Parliament because that was the language of the 13th, 14th century and it's never been changed.

Wow.

The only word you cannot use is liar.

So

I've already been chastised about calling people liars.

So

you're judicious with the truth.

That's what Churchill used to say.

You're judicious with the truth.

But I like helping kids and I like success.

And I like this medium that I don't understand fully and how the kids like yourself, you know, make it and you can make a living.

Some of the guys, I'm told, make a lot of money doing this.

And I was on

the guy that's going to fight Tyson, his brother's show.

Oh, Logan Paul.

Yeah, yeah.

And they try to explain, off camera, they try to explain to me in the two hours how when you have 10, 15 million,

how you hit the cash register.

Yeah.

And I said, that's a great scam.

And then his father, who was in the back behind me, said, that's what I told him.

It's not a scam.

It's just a new model.

Okay.

But when you can't find the right words to describe what it is, I always use scam.

But,

and of course, now Tyson's going to fight his brother.

Who you got winning up?

If Tyson doesn't win, I'll be highly surprised.

If it's a regular fight, not with 16-inch gloves and not choreographed.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I just don't believe

Mike is, you know, and his age, I consider him young, but I mean, compared to the kid who's 28 or 30 years his junior.

But the fact that that can happen, I think it's tremendous for entertainment.

I think it's tremendous as long as nobody gets hurt.

I think it's tremendous.

And I hope both Tyson and the kid walk away.

a fist full of money.

Yeah, they will.

But it's going to be,

Tyson is, you know, still a formidable.

I was at, when he won the World War Championship, I was in the second row, and behind me was

Danny DeVito and a bunch of actors, Robert De Niro, et cetera.

And when Tyson won that, he was hitting the guy with such velocity, the sweat, the bullets of sweat, I'm in the second row, were coming off the guy's head.

and hitting me like BB gun.

That's what it felt like.

Holy crap.

Okay, and I mean, and of course, he won.

And other than the trouble that he got in, and I've gotten my own sets of troubles over the years.

But I'm glad that he apparently has resurrected his life.

And

whatever you want for this deal that you're doing, I hope that I hope it's not a strategy that you work hard enough to make it come to fruition.

Absolutely.

Dan, it's been an honor.

Thanks so much for coming on.

Okay, it's my pleasure.

It's my pleasure.

That was fun, guys.

I hope you learned a lot.

Hopefully, Dan didn't make you cry.

But if you did, hopefully, you can gain some strength from it, right?

Otherwise, see you next time.

Okay, very good.

Thank you.