High Stakes and Comebacks: A Wall Street Saga with Ross Mandell
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And basically, I had a bong next to my bed, and I was hitting the bong every morning. Wake and bake. That's wake and bake. And the rest of the day was just, I don't know what happened really. I had a lot of girlfriends, and I had a lot of sex, and I did a lot of drugs, and it was freezing cold, and I said, this is terrible. ♪♪

And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of the podcast like the opening says, man, get you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, we're going to talk about

In the studio, ladies and gentlemen, I got somebody that's got a pretty wild story, man. This is a guy dubbed the bad boy of Wall Street at one point. And no, it's not that wolfy dude. It's another guy, better guy, that built phenomenal companies, took them public on the London Stock Exchange, had a little bit of a problem with the government, but is back bigger than ever, star of his own reality show, Facing Life.

And when you talk about facing life, this is a dude that's got some life lessons we're going to learn of today. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Ross Mandel. Ross. What's shaking, Big John? How are you, buddy? What's going on? You know, I just got to say, before I came here today, I'm staying at the Wynn Hotel in obviously Las Vegas. And Donnie, who booked me here today, made the introduction. He said, why don't you watch an episode of

of john's uh podcast and i was tired i've been very busy i've been filming i did three days filming yesterday in one day and uh i lay on the bed i put you on and i got jazzed up i got energized oh that's how you just say you fell right asleep that's right i got freaking energized knocked out like a valium i said to steve i said i got energized bro i said this guy's got real energy i loved it well thank you so much man i appreciate that and you know it's now that i'm here

you know i was listening to you you're interviewing this guy just dude i'm six five i'm 280. i play titan for notre dame oh john sir yeah john sir and you know so i'm thinking you know wow big dude i mean you know you must have been there now you're just as big

Well, I'm not as heavy. I'm as tall, but I'm not as heavy. You're much leaner. I mean, you probably look like you're in shape. Yeah, I try. I do what I can. Like I told you when you came in, like I'm not winning the battle anymore, but I don't feel like I'm losing any ground. I like that. All we could do is, you know, hold our position. That's it. You just dig in and hold the foxhole. That's what we're doing. He said to him, Father Time is undefeated still.

I'm still gonna make a run at him. I live my life by the motto of Ricky Bobby from Talladega Nights, and he says, with the advancements in modern science and technology, I don't see any reason I can't live to be 137, 157 years old. That's what I'm banking on as we go. He looks at, ladies and gentlemen, if you haven't seen this man in person, you owe it to yourself. Oh, I'm a ravishing Adonis. That's how it works. He's like a Ford supermodel.

I'm not just saying that. You know, I speak my mind. See, we're going to start hugging and then people are going to have to watch this online. It's going to get weird. It's bromance. Yes, we're bromancing right now. We are, Ross, for sure. So let's get to you, dude. So obviously, man, you don't just wake up one day and become the bad boy of Wall Street. That's true. So I want to talk about this, man, because obviously you don't reach those heights of early success, right?

without some sort of catalyst to move you forward. And I'm always a real big, I have a huge interest in kind of the nature versus nurture idea, right? So do you think that the way you were raised, your upbringing, your experience as a smaller human led to your desire to build something great? Or do you think it was just innately born within you? You know, it's a good question. I question that myself a lot. I will credit my mom who just recently passed away. She passed away in July.

And we had a pretty rocky relationship over the course of our lives. And one thing she did, I give her credit, she used to say to me, you could be anything. You could be anything in this world. And you could be the president. Like, who would want to be the president? But, you know, I had that in my upbringing. I never really thought about it until recently. My wife, Stephanie, was brought up in the Bronx. She was the youngest of four kids there.

She was the princess of the family. Stunning gorgeous her whole life. She was born beautiful and she's always been the prettiest and nicest or whatever. Everywhere she's gone. But her father was like, you better get married. You're going to work in a deli. Don't go to college. He was a real Bronx, Italian, like off the boat type of guy. Girls got married young and they took care of the house and they had babies. And that was that. Don't waste your time trying to be something. And you know,

She ended up, I went to prison for nine years and four months. I was in federal custody. And the day I left for prison, I left her and my two daughters, 14 and 11. And when I got out, they're both in their 20s, women. And my wife had to face life. And she ended up building a tremendous little business. She became the Florida Sea Turtle Lady.

lauradaceturtles.com okay little plug for the wife i like that correct she's in about 65 stores she's got a big online shop and uh she does this eco warrior kind of thing where they clean the beaches and they make sure the turtles are okay and and uh it's really like a marvelous wonderful thing and you know they say that uh necessity is the mother of invention that's the truth

You know, when we're faced with sort of life or death, you know, eat or go hungry, find a way to eat. And I was a good kid, very competitive, but not super competitive. I was an athlete, but I wasn't, you know, a six foot four Don is from North Florida like my friend Johnny over here. And my father dropped dead suddenly when I was 16 years old.

Oh, man. I went from being number six academically in my high school class to barely graduating. They only let me graduate because they knew my father died. I basically stopped going to school, started doing a lot of drugs, smoking weed, taking a lot of pills, Quaaludes, the Wolf of Wall Street. I'd say, yeah. Glamorized a little bit. It was every bit the truth and drinking and just drugging and using women,

And abusing cars and abusing myself. I just was very angry for some reason. Well, your father died. I think that's pretty. To a 16-year-old kid that probably idolized his father at that point. He was my best friend and he was a good man. To this day, he's probably the most honest man that I ever knew in my life. Yeah, I think being mad at the world is probably an appropriate response. I was made a god. I like to say, I tell my story, I was a god-fearing kid.

And when my father was taken away like that and my family was just fucked, I just said, you know what? Fuck God. There's no God. I get to be a God. And that's a big argument I get from people that I have friends who we get into these discussions and I was in prison. Well, you know, I was framed. I didn't do anything wrong. I'm in jail. How can they be a God? Or I had a baby and she's autistic and has to live in a home. She never did a thing wrong in her life. Why is she? Why is my wife? Why are we punished? So, you know, stuff, there's all kinds of questions.

So God died when my father died.

And 17 years later, when I got sober in rehab, I found God again through the program, the 12-step programs. Well, let's talk about this. So when did you get into the Wall Street game? Okay, so I go to college. So you were still drinking, drugging, partying like crazy. I don't remember college. I don't remember a day. So they let you graduate. You somehow got into college. I got into college. And just so you know, the way I graduated high school, I had to take a summer school. I wasn't allowed to graduate with my class.

So I couldn't go to graduation. I had to take a course and read a couple of books and write a big paper about World War II and the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm like an expert in that field. It's the only thing I really remember from...

from last year in high school. But I'm drinking. You know what's funny about that? Tell me. Is technically, technically speaking, I've never said this on this show, but I'm going to say it now. Technically speaking, I did not have enough credits to graduate from high school. I love it when you get honest. Yeah, yeah. No, because my senior year of high school, I played on our golf team. And the coach of our golf team was also the guidance counselor.

So my senior year of high school, if you took team sports, if you played a team sport with high school, you could go practice. So I took my schedule in my senior year, which team sports had no credits. My senior schedule was team sports, team sports, team sports, team sports, AP English, AP

lunch, AP calculus, team sports. That was my schedule, right? So I would just go play golf all day and then come take two classes, go to lunch, go play golf again, and then practice with a team. And I was just doing that constantly. And at the end of the year, my counselor calls me down. He says, hey, you don't have enough credits to graduate. And I was like, well, dude, that's your fault. You let me, you saw me do this. You let me do this. You helped me do this, whatever. And I don't know what he did.

But I got to graduate with 23 and a half credits from high school. Gaming the system all these years later. I'm happy the statute of limitations has probably passed. Yes. But you're safe. We're getting honest here, and I love it. Well, I'm keeping it. I keep it real because my father also did not graduate from high school. Wow. Later became a judge.

I mean, went to law school, did everything else. And well, he went, yeah, because back then you could just, you know, he never took the GED, but he just, with the credits, he just, he went right into college, right? They didn't require him to have a high school degree. And what was funny is years later when he was judge, um,

like his 50th class reunion or some shit, our small hometown. He wanted to go. So he's like, would you guys give me an honorary degree? And they're like, sure. Take the GED. They said, take the GED. Yes, they wanted to take a GED to get an high school diploma. He didn't do it.

It's good to be the judge, right? Yeah, it was so fun. He's like, I have two college degrees and I'm an attorney. I'm a judge. What's going on? Anyway, enough about that. That's very funny. Yeah, it is funny. Sorry. I'm entertaining myself right now and I should be being entertained by you, Ross. I'm sorry. No, no, I love it. This is fantastic. Let's get back to your story. So, you know, I go to SUNY at Albany because I had a full scholarship because my academics...

from grades 9, 10, and 11 was spectacular. I was like number 6 in the class at a 624. And my senior year was just basically I got a pass because I wrote that paper. So my transcript, I had already applied to like a bunch of schools, early application, and I was accepted. I went to University of Albany. And basically I had a bong next to my bed, and I was hitting the bong every morning. Wake and bake. That's wake and bake. And the rest of the day was just, I don't know what happened really. Yeah.

I had a lot of girlfriends and a lot of sex and I did a lot of drugs and it was freezing cold. And I said, this is terrible. What year is this? This is 1975. September 75, that semester. All right. And myself and a bunch of kids, like sort of a Long Island high school kids that was to hang out on Long Island, go to the city and all that.

We all decided to transfer to University of Maryland, College Park. Okay. Which I later, believe it or not, endowed, gave him half a million dollars. And that's a legacy I left there before I went to prison, 2004. Okay. You know. So you became a Terp. So I become a Terp. Lefty Dryzel was the coach and-

you know we had some really famous athletes there and uh randy white the big bro from the texas uh big ten dollars cowboys big ten now yeah yeah but that was it was it was pretty cool and uh the drugging and drinking continued and i was like a cool kid i like a camaro i had a wrestler's body i used to wrestle in high school and i played football and all that and uh i was lean

And I just didn't, I had this like, I didn't give a fuck attitude. And something about that makes you attractive to young people. When you're older, you're a bum. When you're a kid and you're not bad looking and you have this attitude, you're doing drugs, you're drinking, you become popular somehow. I don't know. And I ran with like a group of guys that were basically not really interested in school.

who were interested in throwing parties in the college. And I heard you share about that with the kid from Notre Dame. Oh, yeah. You know, and I was also one of those kids that, you know, we used to throw parties at the hot clubs. That's the way to do it. If you're getting $20 to get in, then we would sell them Quaaludes when they were in. Not the way to do it. That part's not the way to do it. Very enterprising. But, you know. Don't do that, kids. People say to me, so, you know, I was basically drinking and drugging all the time, and it's expensive. Yeah.

It's really an expensive hobby. And the older you get and the fancier, you know, you talked about bottle surfs and clubs. And I was one of those guys sitting with him, $10,000 on the floor at Marrakesh in the Hamptons. You know, this is, we're talking, we're talking 1980. And one of those guys, best table VIP. So I'm using, and every dime I'm earning, hustling, I'm spending,

And I hooked up with a group of men, went to graduate college. We all just went to sell something because that's what guys like us do. It didn't pass me that you're selling real estate because guys like us sell stuff. You sell. That's what we do. And I was pretty good at selling because I love people. I get it. I can hang pretty much with any crowd. But I need money. And so one day, one of my friends calls and says, listen, I want you to buy this stock. I get a tip from my broker.

Didn't even know what he was talking about. And we bought some stock for three and it went to eight. We sold it and made money. We said...

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I'm old as fuck now. That's how I look at it. So, you know, we would go to the studio 54. There'd be 10,000 people on 54th Street, and they let 100 people, you know, play in the game with the velvet ropes. Sure. And, you know, finally we'd get in, and we'd say, you know, how did you get in? How come you pulled up in a Lamborghini or a Rolls Royce, and you have this hot chick, and you had the best table? Like, if you don't mind me asking, who are you? How do you get this? He wasn't a movie star. He wasn't a face I recognized.

I work on Wall Street. I'm a trader. I'm a broker. You know, I do arbitrage. I do leverage buyouts. So you went to, wait, you went to the EF Hutton training program. I did. I did. So if you had to take, because that was probably back then, that was almost a gold standard. It was. They went Merrill Lynch. Yeah. My good friend over here went to Merrill Lynch.

the Merrill Lynch training program. But you look at, you look at training programs, you know, for sales and that was probably a gold standard. I mean, I think spectacular. I think even today there's a couple that I would say, you know, I advise people to do this. It was the advice I got years ago when I got out of the bar and restaurant business and got into sales. My buddy said, look, dude, at this point, the easiest, fastest way to get a PhD in sales is to go. So Kirby vacuum cleaners, door to door.

Correct. Or go sell highline cars. Aluminum siding. Either one of those things. Oh, yeah. Now I'd probably also say solar would probably be a good thing to get into, right? Because some of those solar companies have amazing training programs. But yeah, it was a great way. But back then, that EF Hutton gold standard training program, if you had to pick one thing that was the best thing that you learned out of that training program, what would it have been?

So they're trying to teach you a certain way to sell. You want to sound educated. You're talking about securities. You're calling people cold on the phone. You're asking for orders of $100,000, $250,000, and you have $1,500 to your name. And so I learned humility.

I learned humility. There were guys next to me that looked like you, 6'4", gorgeous. Doesn't matter on the phone, baby. Well, that's true. But, you know, many of you guys sounded great. You sounded slick. So I'll never forget, I started out in this training program, 130 people. And we all, they had a big boardroom, and they put us all on the phone. And when you got a guy on the phone, a lead, to pitch, you had to raise your hand. And everyone was at a desk, a numbered desk. I was number eight.

And I go like this, and the guy at the front of the dais was senior brokers, like 20 of them. They'd see I raised my hand, they would go to the break, and they would listen in. So the first time I made a cold call and the guy answered, my hands were shaking so bad I hung up. And I'm looking around, and all these people are raising their hands, and they're pitching, and so then I dialed, I dialed, and then I got a guy answers the phone.

And I hung up the second time. My hands are shaking. But meanwhile, everyone around me seems to be like on the phone and everybody's attacking and feeling good. I'm like, I mean, get your shit together, bro. Get my self-talk. I mean, come on, just do it. Right. I was scared as shit. And a lot of people say, well, it's Mandel. Scared, what? And I was. I confess it's the truth and it's something everybody should know.

Nobody just has the balls to get on the phone and be a star and all these different things. You got to go through it. Yeah, it's a callous. You got to go through it, bro. Play golf. I've never played. I went to play golf one year. I went to golf school.

And I go out there and I'm playing golf. I'm playing 18, 36, you know, 54. My hands are sore. I got blisters and calluses, right? There's no way around it, right? I mean, you buy golf gloves. But this is if you want to play. You play football, you're going to have those aches and pains and the soreness and all that good stuff. So, okay, so I go to this program and I'm doing my thing. And I understand there's no one way to be great at sales, right?

It's very stylistic, but there are certain basic tenets and techniques that everybody should know. You could buy books and you can listen to tapes and video. And, you know, the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordy Belfort teaches a straight line method, which is called the Lehman method. But the only way to be great at anything is repetition. Repetition, repetition, repetition. I see morons.

They just, they have no business picking up a phone, making a half a million, 750,000 a year, just because they don't quit. Stick-to-itiveness, it's a great quality. You don't get down, you eat rejection, and you just keep going. The only way to lose is to quit. - Well, what we teach our people here that is, for me, the ultimate cure for that ailment of terrified of the no, right?

is we value the no in everything we do. And every business that I have that involves outbound reach, you know, outbound calling, you know, converting warmly to this, whatever it is, anything that balls outbound, we value the no, which I say, okay, look, your closing probability on these is about three to 5%, whatever it is, which means that 3%, three people out of a hundred are going to say yes. So when they say yes, you make five grand. So now you take, you know, 3%,

So now you say 15 grand is what you're going to make per hundred calls. So everybody tells you to go fuck yourself. You're really making about 150 bucks. Kind of makes it go down a little smoother when you look at it that way. You see, I found you put blinders on and you don't calculate, you don't analyze, you don't think. No. You just do. So I'll tell you this story. I have Hutton. Yeah. And finally I raised my hand. I get a guy on the phone and I make my pitch.

And at the end of this week, they rate every one of the salespeople. Out of 133 people, I was like 80. I was like, you know, barely in the top 70% or whatever it was. That went many people better than me. And that was very humbling. And I thought I didn't think I was very good. But you know what? That doesn't matter. All that matters is that you keep going. And so what happened was...

At the end of the first year, we got a Series 7s, and then we went on business for real. It was February of 1984. I started. By the end of the year, I was number one in opening accounts. By a mile, by the way. By a mile. And what do you attribute that to? And then I was second in gross production, dollars generated commissions. The only one that was ahead of me was Marge Schatz's son.

Steven shot who had a $500 million trust fund and was just trading his own money to make commissions. Yeah. Right. He had one account himself and his mom, you know what I mean? So I, and so I was shocked by this because if you just heard, heard me in a room of a hundred people selling, you would think I'm okay, but you know, you walk by nothing. That's what made you great. Just psychology, just stick to it of this and, um, learning to manage fear.

Everybody's afraid. I never understood that. When I was a kid, and you know, the first day of school, I don't know if you had a school bus where you'd go up. You'd go in a corner and wait for a school bus to Long Island. I'd be like, Daddy, I'm scared. I'm so scared. And like when I had to go away to sleep away camp, I was like 10 years old or 8 years old. I was leaving. Parents drop you off and then you don't see it for two months. And I'd say, Daddy, I'm so scared. And my father would say, Son, you're not scared anymore.

You just have anxiety. Nervous. He taught me the word of anxiety. Of anxiety. Just don't worry. Everybody feels anxious. And that was like a volume to a young boy. Because I would go through life looking at you and say, look at this guy. He's so tall. He's handsome. He's got a great rap. He's not scared. But I'm scared. And once I learned, they figured that everybody's scared. So not just picking up the phone. The guy that's answering the phone is scared.

He's got fear. He's got anxiety. And so all of it just went away. It went away when I realized that I was sort of normal that way. And you just got to keep going. You have to learn every technique there is, but then adopt it and create your own style. And I quickly learned that I can't sound as slick as some of these sort of Harvard educated, Ivy League educated guys. A guy like you, father was a big attorney. You're well-spoken. You're very...

Well, manicured. We're going to start dating. You keep giving me these compliments. I've seen people seeing this head of hair. My wife's going to get jealous, Ross. He's got no hair out of place. I'm going to have to understand. I'm going to have to explain this episode to my wife. You keep it up. You know, your wife is that good looking. I should explain it to her. So what I'm saying really is that I adopted my own style. And people are just people. We're all the same.

We all feel the same kind of things. You know, a lot of people go through life and they say, oh, look at that guy. Look at that. This guy's a garbage man. This guy's a lawyer. This guy's a judge. This guy's a waiter. But we're all the same. You know, if you stop looking for the differences and you focus on the realities, the blessings, the common threads we all have, it allows you to move through the world in a much more

a much cleaner and more effective way. Well, that's, you know, the best thing I think I've ever heard about sales. I was watching, there's a show on HBO, which is almost unwatchable. It's called industry. The reason it's unwatchable, especially if you got kids, because it's essentially really great trading floor dialogue.

then drugs, then sex, then really great trading floor dialogue, then drugs and sex. And it just repeats every episode. Sounds good to me. Yeah, it's just like that. Can't watch it with kids walking around. But there's a trading floor in London at a company and the guy is explaining to the first year people on the teams. He says, listen, because you have to understand what our job is. Our job is to talk people

into making a decision that we know is right for them much faster than they want to make that decision. I like it. And I thought, man, that is such a good way to explain really what sales is on an intimate level. What's about identifying a need? Yeah. You like to make money? Sure. You sure? I wouldn't be here if I didn't. Okay. What if I could show you a way that you can make some money?

You'd be interested in chatting with me. You've talked about how attractive I am. I think you're going to turn me out, Ross. I think this could be a problem. So you understand. It's like it's about understanding we're all the same and we all have certain needs. And, you know, when you go to Wall Street, they teach you to tap into fear and greed. I have an opportunity for you.

Okay, so you can't take advantage of this opportunity. Don't worry. I'm sure there'll be another opportunity down the road. I just hate to see you miss out on the old takeaway sale. There's just so many methods and effective techniques that are taught by geniuses, experts. I mean, they have analyzed this freaking field, and there's so much information available. But again, until you do it over and over and over again, you don't have an edge.

You know, I used to make $300 a day for 20 years. I used to pitch a minimum of 10 people every day. I'm qualifying. I walk around through life and I qualify everybody. I want to know everything about everybody. I don't do it consciously anymore. It's just, you know, when I went to prison and I was in a few places, I know everybody. I knew what their worth was. I know what they were doing. I understand where they are in life. I understand details about their lives, so forth and so on.

And, you know, I have an advantage in the fact that I genuinely like people. It's not an act. Yeah, you can't, I don't think you can be great in a sales job if you don't like people. I don't think you can. Well, I have, I have some examples of guys that make millions and really hate people. Really? Yeah, but I think it's because they have low self-esteem and they hate themselves. I haven't really analyzed it that carefully, but I know that they really think that they're very superior and they don't like anybody and they don't care for people, but they're great sales guys because they're practiced at it.

They're practiced at it. But the best thing I can tell you with sales is most salesmen are nervous. So you talk at, you talk at the person and the idea in sales is to talk with somebody. Yeah. Doing something together. Yeah. Nobody wants to buy anything, but everybody wants to own something. It's like we always say, if you're talking more than the person you're talking to, you're doing it wrong. Well, you know, I don't think there are any absolutes. There are stylistic differences, you know?

So let's get back to EF Hutton. So when do you leave EF Hutton and start your own deal? Well, I go to EF Hutton and I leave in 1986 to go to Oppenheimer & Company. What was the offer that your boss put on the table at that kind of production to EF Hutton? What was the offer your boss put on the table as you're walking out the door? Well, I had, I'll give you an example. Right in 1987, I was lured away from a place called D.H. Blair. This is where I started making millions of dollars. I went there and I had a few thousand dollars in cash

I ended up having $30 million in my account on my 29th birthday. And I left and they, you know, I was routinely offered 300, 350,000 upfront, which in those days, you know, pretty good money, pretty decent money upfront, doing very little, just changing my desk. And, you know, well, I can just, I can just imagine, you know,

The powers that be at these companies when you're walking out the door just doing, throwing just ridiculous shit at you trying to get you to stay. They do. And they threaten too. I was threatened quite often for leaving. First they try the carrot, then they go with the stick. Yeah. That's a big play because these men are lesser than you and they don't know really how to sort of outsell you and their propositions are not working. So then they go with the stick. That's something that

you know, small people are very good at doing. And so a lot of the problems that I had on my record were from me saying, listen, I'm out of here, bro. I wish you good luck. And then they would just write me up on my form, U5 it's called, within the industry.

It's like industry talk. I would get you fived in a negative way because I left. But if I stayed, I was getting 300, half a million, the corner office, partnership. But because I decided to leave, they would write me up like I'm a bad guy and all these different things. Trying to damage that future deal. That's gross. And that happens a lot in this business. It's just really, it's cutthroat. That's gross. And everybody tries to steal everybody's clients.

You know, it's a very different kind of game than, let's say, real estate. Dude, no. It is not. I mean, we're a completely vertically integrated company here, right? So we own our own mortgage company. We own our own title and escrow company. We own everything. If there's a nickel spent around real estate, we own part of that company. I love it. That's doing that. And we have had because, you know, like, look, if you –

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the big giant national powers that be that have always had full reign of being able to walk in. I mean, this, just so you know, this real estate company that you're, you're in, this is the number two highest grossing company in for real estate in Nevada. Love it. Nevada's one of the best markets. Yeah. Yeah. We do, we will do $2 billion plus in sales this year. We'll do 4,000 plus transactions. We've got just under 600 agents that work here, which is great for the, for the number, like the number one company has like,

1,800 agents. The number three company has like 1,100 agents. So we have 600. We have six, just under 600. So we're doing extremely well what we do. So, you know, we're big. We're 6% of the market is this company. And when you shut the door in the bottom market. Yeah. And when you shut the door on the big national title companies, because you opened your own, they don't like that shit. They do not like that shit. And, and over the years we've had them come in and, and poach, uh,

some of our bigger, some of our bigger salespeople from the company. And, and yeah, with, with the, with the, the walking papers of they were going to try to come in and steal our business and that none of them have been successful doing it.

we've been able to kind of, you know, outflank that in our own way through good quality relationships. And we continue to have to do that. So that's a battle we always have to fight. That's not singular to that any one industry. If you're making money and there's a bigger company that's making more, you're going to have a problem. You know, there's a common thread that runs through all business. I get that. And then there are the differences, but the common threads remain the common threads.

So I was speaking on a different level, but when I went on my own and I built my own broker dealer, that's when things are really interesting. Yeah. So let's talk about that. Yeah. So in 1990, the end of 94, beginning of 1995, I bought a broker dealer. It was the NASD broker deal, today the term is FINRA, from a guy named Jerry Roth, who was a partner at Spear Leeds Kellogg that tried owning his own place,

And he just wasn't cut out for that kind of thing. He was a very successful trader, huge house, 18 horses, stables, the whole thing, bed for New York. So I paid him $2 million and I signed an amazing real estate deal. It's the best real estate deal anyone knows in the middle of Manhattan on Madison Avenue, 52nd Street, on the corner of Madison Avenue, 52nd Street.

And I paid $23 a square foot, the $250,000 build out, 12,000 square feet. And eventually when I sold the firm, Blackstone took my office space, paying about $175 a square foot. Oh, man. I was paid $23 a square foot. That is a good deal. It's a great story, but I had to make the deal within two hours. Take it or leave it. Bank of America was being acquired by Nations Bank.

And they kept the name Backup America, but the deal was they had a divest of like 10 million square feet of real estate all around the country, and they'd do it one day. So they had a fire sale. My lawyer said, go take a look. It's going to be the deal of your life, but you have to make a decision in two hours. I said, what? I don't like being rushed or hurried, but it was legit. And so I made the deal, and I got a build out, and it was amazing. We had an amazing run. But when you go on your own...

When you work for somebody, you don't really understand the totality of the game. Once you open up your own place, people say, ah, fuck him. I could do this. I could do this on my own. But you never really understand what it's like. Because if you're the captain of the ship, you don't always show up.

To the staff, the underlings, what it is you're going through. You got to be the duck, man. You got to be. Smooth and cool on top of the surface of the water, but paddling like a mother trucker below to keep up. You're an actor. Yeah, you have to. And that's part of the game. And basically a problem solver. And I put together a group of young men, gave them a piece of the firm.

And before you know it, I had like 150 guys working for me, doing tons of business. I sold out in about 18 or 19 months and I made close to $40 million. Yeah, it's a good clip. It was just boom, bing, bang, boom. And then I found my wife there. I sort of just took it easy for a while. I just was trading the market. It was the end of the 90s and it was the beginning of the dot-com boom. And everything I bought just went wild.

Every company I put some money in just went crazy. And I was getting in, getting out, getting in, getting out. And then the dot-com crash came, March of 2000. To give you an idea, Amazon went from $300, the Amazon we know today, to three in like three weeks. The market was the end of the world, part one. Enron.

Fourth biggest company in the United States. Biggest energy trading company in the world. Fraud, zero. WorldCom. WorldCom. Bernie Ebers, fraud. That's the biggest company in the world. The phone company, for God's sake, zero. Fraud. I got burned because of WorldCom. Another business I was doing. Yeah, one of the guys that was a partner in a business that I was in that we were about to launch.

a VP at WorldCom and lost everything in like one day. A lot of guys lost everything. Lost it all. He had his entire, because WorldCom stock was scorching and he just, so he moved his entire 401k into it. Everything was WorldCom and dude, he lost everything in a day and he went in a very dark place and it,

It killed that business that I was starting to run, that I had already invested with with Amazon. Lucent Technologies, LU, a bell darling, an A-plus rated company, went from 82 to zero, to whatever it was. You know, it was crazy. And I'm sitting at the beach. I had a nice beach house on Long Island, and I'm looking at these idiots that are parading on CNBC with their thoughts about what's happening. And I said, what are these people, stupid people?

this is a fucking, this is a bear market. This is a real correction. And I've made, in 1987, I sat in front of the screen and I watched, I had about 110 million on my money line. And I watched it go down to about 20 million. I watched my own $30 million go down to $2 million in the crash of 87. In less than a year, I went from having 30 million to 2 million.

Some people would say we still had 2 million. It's pretty good, but it doesn't work like that. Everything's relative. It doesn't work like that. When you're living on 30, it's a lot. And I was like, you couldn't believe because it hadn't been a crash since 1929. Yeah. We were just flying. I mean, it was so easy to make money. I'd go in two, three days a week. I'd make a hundred grand. You know, I buy a new Mercedes. I go next week, two, three, two, three days a week, make another hundred grand. It was sick.

And I learned a lot. And again, the market, stock market, like golf, the game, it's humbling. There's a humility that even the best have. But once you sort of understand the game, it's much easier to play the game and to succeed. So in 2000, when the markets cracked, I was sitting with a load of cash and a new baby and a beautiful wife, apartment in Manhattan, we're at the beach, sort of semi-retired,

And I said, you know what? I called up my lawyer. I said, listen, I'm going to start a company. I sketched out on a pad what I want it to look like. It's not going to be like my last stockbrokerage firm. This is going to be an international firm. I want to take it public on a foreign stock exchange, preferably in London. My lawyer's like, what, what, what? Where is this coming from? He says, this is going to cost a lot of money. I said, what do you think? He

you know he's like it's gonna at least four and a half million five million just to get started so i want to raise nine i always raise double what i think i need so i raised nine million bucks quickly put together nine million really and uh started to approach people that i'd worked with over the years named the company sky capital because my older daughter was sky she was three months old at the time and so i was i was i wrote a proposition out and created a document around the proposition

was that this correction was going to lead to a prolonged bear market and the financial services industry was going to be particularly hard hit. Because there's less trading, less transactions, less customers, lawsuits, just everything is, you know, you lose your income, you lose your portfolio value. It's terrible for people in the industry. I said, I'll be able to buy assets for five, 10 cents on the dollar. And I bought out nine firms.

And put this together, went to England to try to go public. So wait, so everything you bought, obviously Vulture, you Vulture funded it, but everything you bought was, they were all trading firms. They were stock brokered firms, trading firms, market making firms, firms with black box technology, all these different things. They were all in TATUS. A lot of guys said, listen, just take my guys.

Because if I don't, they're under contract, they're going to sue me to death. So I just took a lot of stripped assets. I paid off some debts. You know, I did the right thing. And I built Sky Capital. And then I went over to England and I had a meeting with the top law firm in the city of London. Because one of the most famous lords in England was a personal client of mine for many years.

I'm very well together. And he set up this meeting and I go up to the top of Tower 42. It's part of the story in the wealth formula, which is a new curriculum that I'm launching literally in three weeks. Bradley and Lightspeed. Yeah, Brad's a friend. And it's going to be, I believe, the most groundbreaking event

uh unbelievable business we'll get to that but i just want to say so i tell this story on the camera at the beginning of this uh the wealth formula the guys at tower 42 i told them what i want to do and they told me young man you should just get in the taxi and go right back to the airport and go home it's impossible i said what do you mean impossible i said is it impossible or has it never been done is it improbable or is it impossible and they looked at each other like it's impossible i said listen

They said the four-minute mile was impossible until somebody did it. And then what, 57 more people did it the first year after? Yeah, crazy numbers. Now everybody does it. I'm the only one that can't run a mile in four minutes. Depends on who's chasing me. I'll say that quickly. You know, when the feds came after me, I was pretty quick. But so, you know, the bottom line is a lot of stuff is up here to the mind. If you believe you can or you believe you can't,

You're probably right. Yeah. Henry Ford. And, um, if you believe you can, you know, impossible is really, I'm possible. Break it down. I'm possible. So it would have never been done. And, uh,

I asked these guys a bunch of questions. They said, well, if somebody was going to even try this, here's what you would need. A member of parliament, a parliamentary appointee, probably a member of the American Congress, this, that, the other. Within two hours, I put together the whole package. A United States senator, former United States congressman, member of parliament, and then a parliamentary appointee, all on board. I had the money. Now it was just running around England finding an underwriter. That was quite a challenge, I admit.

But I got it done. I got it done fairly quickly. And we had a momentous stock offering, what you call an IPO. Yeah. And the reason it was momentous, people probably don't remember, but you might. You're still a little young. We had this dot-com crash in March of 2000. Just when things were starting to heal, the bear market was starting to move into a more positive direction, we had 9-11. Mm-hmm.

9-11, they whacked out the World Trade Center. And the markets closed for a week. In two world wars, we didn't have that. But the stock market, the exchange was almost destroyed. They only had one pipe left. They knew what they were doing, these Arabs. And it was destroyed, really. You know, our whole capital markets. It came very close. And there were no IPOs for almost two years. In England, zero.

And in June of 02, I took my company, Public Sky Capital. It was priced at pound 85. It opened up at two pounds 25 and stayed there for months. And the Brits put me on national television.

And they used me to say, look, see, American guy comes here, does this. Everybody 40% in day one. Everything's okay. And everything's okay. So it's safe to come back into the markets. They literally put me on national television for nine minutes. And they put this whole thing behind me. Like my stock went, the chart went like this because it was one day. Got all of the hockey sticks. And I went to jail, right? And to make a long story short, I had a really had a run and I bought a firm.

Two days later, that had done half a billion dollars in revenue the year before. Wildly profitable. $100 million deal. And I was off to the races. And I started raising money and I built a fund. And I took that fund public in 2004. So life was pretty good. So when did the Fed show up? In November of 2006, I'm having a board meeting. I'm running two public companies. I had offended everybody by doing that.

especially some cats in Washington and lower Manhattan, which I didn't understand. I thought I was doing a good thing. I created a way for us companies to go public for a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the regulatory hassle and for triple the liquidity. I created that footprint. And after I did it the second time, Goldman Sachs came at me, asked me how I did it. I spoke there very graciously, Goldman Sachs. And, uh,

200 companies followed my footprint, including KKR, Blackstone, all the big boys. And they just tweaked what I did a little bit here and there, but you go public over there,

They have only biannual reporting. So you know what quarterly, you know, you're a wealthy guy. You're a smart guy. Yeah. You understand quarterly reporting, right? Whether you're scouring business financial sites or listening to economics podcasts like this one, you'll find there's no secret to successfully managing your company's finances for the future. You just need PNC corporate and institutional banking whose team of dedicated relationship managers bring 160 years of experience, advice, and an array of tools and tech to scale to any size business.

PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. PNC Bank, National Association, member FDIC. In the stock market? Yeah, of course. You have a portfolio? I do. Okay. Do you own any foreign stocks by any chance? I do not. Okay. Now, most people would say the same thing as you. Even if you did own them, you'd say you own them in America because there were different ways to get their paper, to trade their paper from the United States.

But what you don't know is, so you buy American stocks that trade in America because it's quarterly reporting. It's a level of transparency. Every three months, they have to sit down with their accountants and report everything that's going on in the company. The whole rest of the world doesn't do that. Right.

What a shock. You know, nobody knows that. If you listen to this amazing podcast, Escaping the Drift, with handsome Big John over here, I promise you're going to learn something right now. There you go. They only have what you call biannual reporting. The whole rest of the world. You report twice a year, and after six months, you just do a review. It's not even audited financials. You only get audited financials once a year at the end of the year.

It saves the companies zillions of dollars in accounting fees. The PCOAB, I hope they don't come after me, the PCOAB is a professional accounting board in America. They became like the Vatican. They have powers like the Pope in business here in America because you need them to sign off on your financials, on their comments, on the audits, et cetera. And they see how much money you're making.

And they say, your little old accountant, all of a sudden, he's like a wolf in sheep's clothing. All of a sudden, he's like, I want some of that. And you need my signature. So they break balls, just business. They have the leverage, right? So they're going to squeeze you as much as they can, squeeze the companies as much as they can. They don't have that kind of power when they only have one audit a year. Yeah. The rest of the world.

So companies are not prompted to have to perform every three months and put up these crazy growth numbers where stocks are going to lose billions of dollars in value. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's like running a marathon, but every quarter mile, half mile, you have someone regulating you. Very hard to execute a real strategy. A long-term strategy. Right, when you're working every three months at a time. And that's polluted the American economy.

Well, that's why it's so hard for these guys to take a step back to do the right thing long-term because you're going to get smashed. Right, your money, if you're taking a company public and you're part of a growth company like that, I mean, you know, this is your future right here. And every 90 days you're being evaluated, which is quite unfair in my opinion. It's a lot. Right, especially, and so who ends up getting screwed? The public, you know? So I create a wonderful way. You go public over there. You have your, get all your stuff sorted out.

You're already regulated in public. You have audited financials. All you got to do, you bring it back to the United States. You can trade in a number of ways or you go right to NASDAQ. You know, all you got to do now is become reporting every quarter. You've just eliminated tons of fees. You already have a shareholder base. I mean, I created something brilliant and I thought that it was amazing. I learned later on that according to certain people,

In government and private sector. That was the air quotes for those of you listening in our lives. Exactly. Certain people. I mean, Lower Manhattan lost about $100 billion in fees because of the footprint I created. I don't like that. Well, you know, it's like when you're in prison, they say, don't fuck with my money. Yeah. That's what a guy will say to you. Don't fuck with my money. In the business world, they don't say that. They just stick the DOJ on you.

So November 6th or so, November 5th, I'm having a board meeting up at Sky Capital with a parliamentary appointee, a former congressman, a former United States senator, and 40 SWAT FBI agents come in their jackets in SWAT style, guns raised, everybody freeze, nobody move. Well, what the fuck? What's going on? A guy, Kurt Dengler, throws me up against the wall.

And tells me to shut the fuck up. And he says that I better give him all the guns, tell him where all the guns and drugs are, and he'll go easy on me. I'm like, what? Why would I have guns and drugs? Guns and drugs, investment bank. I'm running two public companies. You stupid fuck. I mean, of course, we didn't get along too well for the next five years. Yeah, there you go. But, you know, he's coming at me like, what? Someone fed him information. Understand? They were fed information.

It was a bad raid. It was a bad, they, they, they had called all the New York press with down in the lobby of one 10 wall street. You got per parked out when, no, not that I know. I didn't get arrested for three years after that. That was just a, that was just a search and seizure age. No, just had executed search warrant. Like, is that how you execute a search warrant today? Guns drawn 40 agents locking down a floor calling on the whole New York media downstairs. I'm sure they thought there were guns and drugs.

Someone had fed him some information and they were going to take me away in handcuffs. Guess what? So nothing. A couple hours later, they're like, they got 300 boxes. They said, nobody's getting arrested. Nobody's in trouble. And we went back to trading. You know, I'm in the front page of every newspaper in 130 countries. Literally. And what does that do to your client base? Well, you tell me if you want to do trades the next day. You want to do trades with Sky Capital? No. So they admit, they admit, Southern District of New York today admits that they acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

They should go to jail for what they did to me. I remember I had hundreds of shells on public companies. The next day, the stock exchange calls the Department of Justice, says, what the hell? Are you guys going to shut them down? We need to know. These are public companies. We have an obligation to the public. They refused to comment. But when they came to Sky Capital, they said, nobody's getting arrested.

Nobody's in trouble. But the fact they didn't bother to comment to them. They refused to comment. The stock exchange froze our stocks at that moment. And so literally hundreds, if not thousands of people got hit. And still nobody sued me because what did I do? I'm running a clean business. I'm being audited by the SEC, by the NASD, FINRA, by the London Stock Exchange, by the FSA. Those are the authorities in London. I was being regulated by everybody.

And I had clean reports every year. You know, little teeny little things. My trader didn't punch a time clock, you know, stupid stuff. So when did they actually charge you? So this is in 06, November of 06. Now behind the scenes, they had arrested one or two of my guys for doing scheming with customers, stealing some money, selling cocaine to an FBI agent. And July 2nd of 09. So you're talking about three years. Yeah.

Government calls. So hold on. In the meantime, 18 months became very difficult for me to run this business, the brokerage business. Very difficult. The markets were a wreck. And March 31st of 08, I sold the companies. But before they bought the companies, the institutions and some very wealthy people went to the DOJ and said, look, we're about to buy this company for tens of millions of dollars. If you're going to indict it, we need to know. We need to know. And these were big guys out of the UK. I mean,

big names, royalty, et cetera. And the DOJ said, we have three questions for Ross Mandel. If you can answer these three questions satisfactorily, he's free to go and you're free to buy the company. There'll be no problems. March 31st of 08. Now you're a real estate guy. You remember 08, 09? Oh yeah, sure. Remember what's coming? 08, 09, right? Yep. Mortgage implosion. So when I entered the letter of intent to sell in October of 07,

Dow Jones hit 14,000 plus. It was an all-time high. The day I signed the papers, it was an all-time high. Nobody knew, but that's what happened. By the time we closed, five months later, March 31st, because a lot of due diligence, public company, always shareholders, the government, everything else, the Dow was down to 10,000 and dipping every day.

And I was like, my wife kept saying, you're so smart. You're so smart. I get all this money. And again, tens of millions of dollars. I had done very well, whatever. And she goes, you're so smart. You're so smart. Every day I'm sitting home on the couch watching CNBC and I'm watching the market go down to the 300 points and the 400 points and the 300 points. She's going, oh my God, you sold at the top. And I'm thinking, uh-oh. By now I've got a lot of experience in the market. I have a lot of experience in life. A very bad feeling.

I saw March 31st of 08, and then the mortgage crisis and the mortgage-backed securities. They're too big to fail, and everybody's failing. AIG, we need $120 billion by Monday, and we're going out of business. Meanwhile, it's A-plus rated by all the rating agencies. Companies A-plus rated, and if it doesn't get $120 billion in four days, it goes to zero.

And they indict me. Yeah. My companies didn't never to... My companies were well-funded. They didn't need money or anything else. The guys that bought the company from me put $10 million good capital in it. And within a year, they were broke and they were closing it down. Ugh. That's how bad things were. And...

July 2nd of 09, I get a call from my attorney who had originally told me it's over. He answered those three questions satisfactorily. You're done. No fuss, no muss. I provided evidence. The government said, Mr. Mandel's free to go. 18 months later, I'm being indicted on two counts.

Securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud. The same month, the SEC had a press conference and talked about how many people, they indicted more people up till now than they've ever done in their lives in the history of the SEC because they wanted the investing public to know that they're on top of it even though everything's going to shit.

08, 09, too big to fail because all the banks failed. Here's a great thing that I can explain to everybody. On a Friday, Citibank received a $50 billion cash injection from the government. $50 billion on Friday. On Monday morning, all the rating agencies put a rating on it. You know what the net worth of Citibank was? $20 billion.

On Friday, they got $50 billion cash. They're covering with $30 billion. Monday night, they were rated A-plus with a $20 billion net worth. So they were short $30 billion. Covering those costs. Right, and they came after me. So just so you understand the corruption in government. Well, dude, I got one more. I'm going to ask you an off-the-cuff question because I'm just curious. So the fact that you did have to go to jail for this stuff,

How, what is your feeling about Nancy Pelosi being the best stock trader in the history of the world? Well, I'm going to say this to you. I had a number of congressmen and senators as clients over the years. And they would literally call up, call me up or call my brokers up and say, just get out of, just get out of the session in the Senate. Get out or buy. And here's what we need to do. I need to sell everything I can and buy this. And they were always right. Yep. And so-

The firm would say, Senator Pressler just called. And then, pow! Everybody buy, you know, buy Pfizer. And it would run. And next, you know, Pfizer would get some contracts or some announcement would come out and they're making another $25 billion and everybody would make money. But here's the thing. They're allowed to trade on inside information. They've allowed themselves that. And you know when they approve it every year? You know, there were efforts to curb it. Yeah, yeah. And they have these meetings in the Senate and in Congress at midnight on a Friday. Mm-hmm.

And then they show up at Friday and they put in their little chits and they turn it down. There's still a lot to trade. I think, I think, I think you're going to see some change there soon. I think there's enough noise in, in the marketplace. There's enough noise. You have to get the peanut gallery shaking and said, no, it's like a chance. We're going to do that. Why would they, they got this benefit. Why would they give it up?

I just, I think, what do you look at? AOC was a waitress when she got elected and now she's worth what? $23 million. Yes. I mean, you know, she's very clever. She's very, she's very attractive. So gross. So gross. It's really, it's really unfortunate, you know, with transparency today, connectivity, the internet, everybody knows everything. Yeah. And so to me, you got to start getting honest if you're in, if you're in government. So you still, you still, even though you did nine and a half years,

You still maintain your innocence over any of these charges. Okay. I've learned that you can't use the word innocence in the term. Okay. I don't know. In terms of what? I'm not guilty of the charges that were brought against me. And I can tell you on my children, I'm not guilty on the charges that were brought against me. Okay. Innocent, I don't think anybody would say Ross Mandel's innocent. Okay.

I'm not that type of guy. I'm guilty of so much in my life. But not that. But no, no. I never stole from anybody ever in my life. I never shoplifted. I've cheated anybody. It's just not who I am. Okay. But I've done plenty of things wrong. So after the nine and a half years in prison, now I do want to spend some time talking about the new program that you have coming out. Oh, it's incredible. I got to say. So let's, let's. If you're in the business world or if you want to be in the business world, I have provided means to do that.

For a kid that comes from the barrio, from uneducated, and to even guys like you, if you bought this course, it would be your business Bible for you. You will be stunned at how comprehensive, that's so far the feedback. It's incredibly comprehensive. It's a 108-page written text with 300 hyperlinks to source material, online text, with

with downloadable PDFs and worksheets, and then 13 extremely entertaining modules.

narrated by myself personally, edited by the best in the world. I mean, award-winning editors, producers, the whole thing. And now Brad is making interactive, so it's like a training video. We teach you how to go from all my life, people come to me, Mr. Mandel, you're so successful, you're in the stock market, blah, blah, blah. Will you mentor me? Will you mentor me? Yeah, well, will you mentor me? That's a big one. You get that, I'm sure. But, you know, I have an idea.

How do I turn it into a business? Well, my wife's got this product and my sister-in-law is doing this thing. It's amazing. How do we turn this into a business? Can you please help me? We do it in a step-by-step comprehensive way, but it's really like a...

It's like a business Bible. Okay. Everybody needs. So you're covering startup, you're covering scale, you're covering marketing, you're covering everything. Documentation, vision board, vision plan, business plan, how to raise money, pitch deck. You know, this is for guys like yourself. What sort of legal entity have you wrapped your business around? LLC, master limited partnerships, you know, C Corp, S Corp. Where's your jurisdiction?

Did you incorporate in Delaware? As Elon Musk recently found out is fuck all terrible. And you know, Nevada is actually great. Nevada. Guess where all my companies are incorporated. Nevada, the great state of Nevada. Yeah. I was in New York or Florida, the great state of Nevada. See, I'm going to, I'm going to help you out with something else. I'm going to get you to something. Cause it, when I first moved here from Florida, I did the same thing. It,

It's Nevada, not Nevada. If you say Nevada, people look at you like you're crazy. It's Nevada. It's Nevada. I love that. It is Nevada. Nevada. Which is funny because, you know, when I'm from Florida, depending on which section of Florida you're in, it's pronounced a very different way. You've got scary South Baja rednecks like I grew up with, or you've got people from all over the world that live in Miami. So there's different pronunciations. But here it is Nevada because literally I was on The Apprentice

um saying we were gonna buy tickets to las vegas nevada and uh or nevada right and i got slaughtered when i moved down here yeah nevada's i guess yeah you know what nevada's nevada's nevada so there you go but you know we talk and people ask me why and we explain it because you know the uh

We explain in plain speak. I'm a plain speaking type of guy. And we explain everything and break it down. And, you know, what we did was we went out and bought every single online course that's available on social media and the internet. And there's not even, if you put them all together, it doesn't make half of what we were offering. Right now, there's a pre-sale for $300 online.

And it's really a $5,200 value. That's not me. That's what the market would price it at. But it's something that I want to do. So I'm 67 years old. I've been there and done that. I've been a taker my whole life and I'm good at it. And I just want to give back a little bit. And I want to be an educator and I want to leave a legacy for my children. I've got two daughters and daddy went to prison.

when they were 11 and 14, two young girls growing up in Boca Raton, Florida, like the show me city, you know, and I was very public. I was in the newspapers. I was on television, all that shit. And everybody knew me. I was a big, they seize all your assets. I mean, when you went to prison, they seized, they didn't seize anything because they didn't have the grounds. I didn't know this, but in order to get bail, my lawyer said, look, I'm going to put a $5 million cash in,

No bond. And they say, he says, what, $40 million or so sitting in a Bank of America. He said, you'll have to segregate that money. You can't touch it. Otherwise, they're going to seize it. They don't make it. If they can seize your money, they don't tell you to segregate it. Yeah. But he sucked me in. A very bad guy, Jeffrey Hoffman, lawyer, New York City. Bad dude.

And, uh, Stephen Altman, bad dude, he's a bad guys. And they had their own troubles with the government and they basically sacrificed me, took a board, pulled off the table and they got, uh, Altman got disbarred for 18 months. Bad guys, guilty as fucking sin, uh, uh, conflicts of interest, uh,

I had just said, I got screwed by lawyers. What a shock. I could be the first guy, right? I don't think so. I don't think that ever happens in this country. I don't think so. But I want to give back. I want to educate. I want to create a legacy. So my daughter's come to prison for the first visit. Like, Daddy, Daddy, the kids are making fun of us. Daddy, people are asking me, where's my father? You know, I go on a show for dancing events and all these different things. You have children? Yeah, two of them. Boys, girls? Yeah.

One of each. Right. So you understand being a dad and the kids are bullies and there's all kinds of nonsense, social media and all that. So we had to teach my kids how to respond to other kids and other grownups. I'm teaching them from the prison visiting room. And over the years, they went to high school and they went to college. There's no daddy. Mommy had to move him in. Mommy had to move him out. Mommy had to show up here. Mommy had to show up there. And they became very adept and very clever at avoiding, where's your dad?

What does your dad do? How come your dad's not here? And so I was, anytime the name dad came up, he changed the subject very cleverly. They're both gorgeous, smart, very successful young women today. And I want my daughters to be proud of me. When somebody says, is that your dad? Yeah, that's my dad.

I wasn't allowed to, they unfriended me on social media, my ex-wife and my kids. And I'm not allowed to mention them, I'm not allowed to comment on their stuff. But now, all of a sudden, now I've been out for about seven months and we're doing some really good things. I'm really giving back, I'm an educator, I'm helping a lot of different things. And the kids now take pictures with me.

Well, I think, I think it's a big deal. Like, I think, I think the lesson, the lesson there is it doesn't matter how old you are. You know, you can always change the story. You can always flip the script. You can always write another chapter. You know, you don't have to sit and,

You know, your biggest failure doesn't have to become your legacy. Correct. I want my prison years to be an asterisk when they tell my story. You know, when I was away, I took the time to do something I had been putting off my whole life, which is to read scripture, really study it, the Old Testament, the New Testament. I read the Koran page by page with real Muslim guys, and

And I read Hindi. What prison were you in? I was at the Federal FCI Miami. Okay. Which was considered low security, but it was really mean. But it wasn't a country club. No, no, no. That doesn't really exist anymore, just so you know. Okay, I don't know. It was revealed, you know...

Years ago in a famous book and so defense quickly did away with that. It's fucking hell, bro It's prison as hell. I lived in a room smaller than this with three grown men There's a three level bunk bed for two two and a half years. It's pretty tough prison sucks. Yeah You know prison sucks because it's punishment. That's what they tell it's supposed to be well and it's brutal But I also went to a couple of camps I was it was locked in a detention center in a room small in this 19 months and

at the federal detention center in Miami. Horrible places. Nobody should know about them. It's just horrible. But I got a chance to read the classics. I read Shakespeare and I listened to Mozart and I read Chaucer and I read every biography on Jobs and Einstein, all these meaningful people. And I developed a lot of things. And one of the things in that, I read Kabbalah, 24 books of the Zohar.

I learned the Kabbalah and Zohar teaches you something. It says you can change your past. It's an incredible thing. You can change. It's not just about changing your future, but by doing certain things in your life, you can actually go back and change your past.

That's another conversation that goes on and on, but it's just an amazing thing. And if I use all the lessons I've learned and all the pain that I've been through and to help others and I can help others, I can literally change my past. Yeah. Well, if they, if they want to find you going forward, how do they find you? Ross? Ross Mandel.com. Two S's, two L's. Two S's, two L's. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm on Tik TOK. I'm everywhere. So find Ross. Yeah. Ross Mandel.

mandel i'm in boca raton florida i love that well thanks for coming in brother you're always welcome back whenever you want big john i gotta say if you guys don't know here it comes again this guy is good looking he's smart he's got the see now when i was a young salesman i would have been intimidated by you

you're so good. I mean, it's frightening. Your energy is just amazing. And I thank you so much for having me today. I appreciate it. Let's, let's wrap this up today. And I think today is, you know, I saw something the other day, man, that I thought was so apropos for the conversation that we had today with Ross, which is, I was watching a clip from Alex Ramosi and he was talking about in life. When you see adversity,

He looks at it away and he says, man, this is a story that I will eventually tell. And I want the adversity to be as big as possible because the bigger the adversity, the bigger the dragon, the bigger the hero. And I want to be as big of a hero as I can. So go out, face your dragons, be a hero. I'll see you next week.

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. 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.