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If you feel busy but you're still stuck in the same place.
This episode is going to hit you right in the chest.
You wake up tired.
Your calendar is full.
Your brain is loud.
You're answering messages, putting out fires, handling life.
And somehow the big things still aren't moving.
The goals you care about keep getting pushed to next week.
Your days feel productive, but your life doesn't feel better.
That's what we call drift.
In this conversation, John Gafford breaks down how people hand their life over to apathy, algorithms and other people's expectations.
And once you start to see that pattern, you cannot unsee it.
So he gives you an antidote accountability, not motivation, not hacks.
A real audit of your life without excuses than a plan to change your circle.
Because when your circle changes, your standards rise.
And the best part about this is that it's not theory.
You're going to walk away with a way to spot where you're leaking time, how to make decisions without negotiating against yourself, and how to build relationships that open doors, instead of just filling your contact list.
Let's dive in.
If you could go back in time and change part of your journey, what would you do?
Right.
And I found that most high level guys or women are like I wouldn't change a thing, because the struggle and the strife of maybe who I am blah blah, blah.
I give a completely different answer.
I'm like, bullshit.
If I could get in a time machine and go back and smack my 27 year old dipstick self in the face, I would.
Right.
Right.
And since I can't get a time machine, since I don't have a time machine, that's what this book is right.
This is the user's manual that I would have gone back in time and smacked myself in the head with and said just do this.
Because for me, yeah, the struggle and the strife and all those things made me who I am.
But more to the point, where would I be now?
Where would I be?
I mean, I've achieved a great level of success and I'm very grateful for that.
But where would I be in my journey? had I got started in a sensible manner much, much earlier.
And that's kind of the mission of the book.
And it's the mission of what I'm trying to do, because I and something about for me anyway.
I don't know if you've noticed this, but it seemed like COVID was this hinge point in the way that people think.
And there's been this level of apathy that just permeates through everything.
Like I, I use Las Vegas restaurants because I live here in Vegas and I use Las Vegas restaurants a lot as an example because it used to be when you went out to a super high dollar restaurant in Vegas, you just knew it was going to be a wow experience.
The food was going to be incredible.
The service was going to be amazing.
The maitre d' was going to be incredible.
And now you go out and it's okay.
It's good.
But those moments of just exceptional, exceptional effort, exceptional care, exceptional service are few and far between.
And it's not just the restaurant business.
There's this level of just going with the flow apathy, malaise that everybody seems to just be washments repeating day after day through everything that they do.
And that in itself is what I call the drift.
That's when you're drifting, when your life is being decided by the whims and the ideas of others, when other people are deciding the direction of your life.
And one of my favorite things in doing the book and talking about it one of my favorite people, Erwin McManus I don't know if you know Erwin or not, but Erwin said I love the concept of the drift.
I love this.
And I said, why?
And he goes, because when you're drifting, you're moving.
So you feel like you're making progress.
You feel like things are happening, but you don't realize that you're not really steering yourself, until you hit a rock.
And then you have a problem that's probably too big for you to overcome.
And I think right now, when you take this combination of apathy that I think is running through so many people, and especially young men in this country, the disillusion that they're going right And you combine that with AI coming down the tracks for so many people that have these low to mid-level jobs where it's wash, rinse, repeat, show up the next day.
This is a real problem.
And so for me, I can't go back in time and talk to my 27-year-old self, but I'm on a mission to wake as many people up as I can to what their inner potential is and how to get there and take control of their lives.
That's what the book is about.
Yeah.
Boy, we are starting off hot.
John, this is good.
This is good.
First of all, I am glad I'm not the only person who, when they say, if you would go back in time, what would you say to yourself?
Say, say, I will grab myself by the neck.
Start shaking violently.
Yeah, you're so right.
And the thing is, when you talk to successful people, they all have that same answer, because it's like the only reality that they live in.
Well, there is no time machine, so I might as well accept what I have done.
But if you truly do have the opportunity, you would go back and make some changes.
And that's what you're doing for other people.
Essentially, this book is your time machine to get to people before they start drifting in the wrong direction.
And I think this is really powerful too, because when you think about the metaphor, I think a lot of times the reason why people don't recognize that they're drifting is because so many people are alongside them drifting in the same direction toward destruction, toward a life that they don't want, that they think that it's okay.
Well, and I think the internet has done this, It's really poured gasoline on that particular problem, because these algorithms are programmed to all of these apps that we spend so much time on to basically produce.
Put you in an echo chamber and just produce more content that supports the way you think, supports the misery.
If you're miserable, support that misery.
If you have limiting views of what's possible, to support that, if you happen to be a hater of people that are success, that support that and you are just fed this perpetual stream of nonsense that keeps you trapped in what you, in what you view as a worldview which is nuts.
You know, I'll tell you this.
This is one of my favorite things about the process of writing this book, which is, when you write a book, you deal with a deal with a publisher who They send the book out early through what's called advanced reader copies.
And one of the places they send it is to this place called Publisher's Clearing House.
I think it is.
Publisher's Reading House, whatever it is.
And this is like the review place for places like Barnes & Noble that then read the reviews of this to then see how much they're going to buy, right?
It's kind of one of those things.
This is the wholesaler's reviewer service, if you will.
And I get a call from my agent and they go, okay, we got a review from this place.
And they said, there's some good.
And I said, okay, what does that mean?
And he goes.
Well, before I get too started, just historically, they're not very kind to self-help books.
And I read the review and I got to tell you it's like you know, this is like you work on something for so long.
And the very first thing that comes out about it is is I read it and it wasn't like super positive and it bummed me out completely.
And I know you're thinking, this guy's trying to sell books.
Why is he saying it got a bad review?
Here's why.
There's a method to my madness.
The next day I read the review back and I loved it.
And the reason I read it, the reason I loved it, was this because it said this the reviewer and I keep in mind this is one human being that has a perception of the world, that read this book
And they said that my advice.
They said a lot of positive things but the end of it summed up with The reason that they didn't like it was.
They said my advice can occasionally come off as trite because I refuse to acknowledge the myriad systemic issues and I present all problems as solvable.
And I thought to myself, you bet your ass I do.
Because because, much like you, dude on this podcast, how many guests have you had on this podcast that have no business being anywhere near the level of success that they have?
Some dude that got off a boat from Vietnam at 25, couldn't speak English and now owns a thousand doors.
Like where's the myriad systemic issues that held that guy back?
He just decided he was going to push forward.
So yes, I do absolutely believe that.
That the key ingredient to solving all of the problems you have lies within yourself.
And I believe that so much, I wrote the playbook for how to make that happen.
This is so important.
And let's focus in on this too, because we're not denying that there are challenges, but we are recognizing that we can't change the system.
This book isn't for the government to read and change their system.
We are individuals and I think a lot of times well-meaning people give really bad advice because they dwell on the problems and the challenges and the obstacles and not what you can do and not the solutions.
And then when somebody like you comes in and says hey, you need to have an internal locus of control where you believe that you can overcome, because that is the seed from which the benefits of life grow from.
But if you don't have that seed of belief, then you're not going to take the possible steps to move forward.
But if you just dwell on the problems, then you're going to also embed an excuse within you at all times where, no matter what happens, it's not your fault, which requires a high level of radical accountability and ownership, where you're saying like listen, I know the world is a little bit messed up and I know there are a lot of things that are working against me, and still it is my responsibility, and my responsibility alone, to do better for myself, because I can't rely on the people and the circumstances that created these messed up systems to have my back.
So it's so important because today we can get so distracted.
We have to have a message for individual people so they can actually have that belief and then take the appropriate action.
Dude, chapter one is literally radical accountability.
It's what it is.
It's being honest with yourself and really how to do that.
And what you just said.
I totally agree that you know the way the universe works.
Yes, starting lines can be different for everyone.
But where you finish is up to you.
It's up to you.
And there are plenty of people on this planet that start in a place that is much further ahead than other people and squander the opportunity.
Yeah, they absolutely do, because they don't take any responsibility for what they're doing and push forward.
I get that.
But yeah, that that first step, man, is you've got to be honest with yourself.
And I talk about people talk about goal setting and trying to get somewhere.
Right.
Think about your phone when you're like in a parking garage and you go to your phone to put the address where you need to go next.
Right.
And the satellite can't find you.
So it's spinning.
You know where you're trying to get to.
You already have the address where you're trying to go, but you can't get the directions because it doesn't know where you are right now.
And until you are radically honest with yourself about where your current situation but, more importantly, what you did to contribute to your current situation, then you can't start planning to get out of where you are.
And that's what we try to focus on through the first part of this book.
Is that radical accountability, how to really take it inventory?
But, you know, not take it overboard because some people will take it overboard.
Oh, they want to label themselves.
Well, I'm this way because I'm just not smart enough, or I'm this way because you know I'm lazy, or I'm this way.
No, you got to be very careful with labels.
You've got to be very analytical about the situation.
And it's not about who you are as a label.
It's about actions that you took that resulted in this.
You know, look at somebody and I've done this stuff, right?
I was that guy that would walk into a bank in my twenties and hope to God that they opened a you know a bank account for me because I ruined my credit.
Like it was an Olympic sport.
You know, like I've been that guy like, oh man, I hope they do this for me.
Right.
And the reality of it is is when you look at that situation like me personally with my bad credit like, rather than just take a minute and and take a pause and figure out how to fix my credit, I would perpetuate the problem because I'd be like well, I really want a new car.
So I'll go buy a new car and get this breakneck payment, because I've got an 18 and a half percent interest rate that I can't afford, which perpetuates the problem and makes it worse.
So when the repo man is looking for my car in the middle of the night in my mid twenties, it's not because I bought a car.
It's not because I got a bad rate.
It's because I did all this other stuff before and never hit pause and actually fix the problem.
I just continued perpetuating.
And that's the mentality, that that's the Oh God You know.
Oh, they're coming to get my car because bad car company sold me that.
No, dude, it's all my fault.
And it always was.
And you will never be free until you stop.
You know, one of my famous lines from The Apprentice and we'll talk about that if you want was stop pointing fingers, start pulling the thumb.
I said that on TV and that that haunts me to this day that people say that.
Dude, I think we need to talk about it.
We need to.
We can't not talk about your time on The Apprentice.
So, hey, don't grimace here.
You're the one who brings that experience.
I want to hear all of it, bro.
All of it.
All right.
Well OK, listen first off.
I understand that the talking about The Apprentice in detail is kind of like we talk about how many touchdowns I scored in high school.
At this point,
It was 20 years ago.
I get that.
The answer to the touchdown thing was zero, by the way, just to clear that part of it up.
But the interesting thing about The Apprentice is not really my experience on it.
I mean, here's a spoiler alert.
I got fired.
There you go.
But Most of the people do.
Only one person can win.
Right.
But how I got on that show is the best story of the entire thing because it involves analyzing risk.
It involves developing a plan in real time.
And the value of the apprentice to me was different than what most people think it is.
And I'll get to that.
So how I got on the show was my sister wanted to go.
And so she calls me and says, I'm going to go try out for the apprentice.
This was right after season one had just ended.
They were, they were season two was in production.
They were casting for season three.
I'm like, I don't want to go.
She's like, go with me.
So we went to an open call and then they just kind of kept calling.
And they kept sending me all these applications and it was all stuff and went through it.
And it kept going, hey, maybe send us a video.
And then talking to them, they're like, well, here's how it works.
There was the best candidates we can find.
There's 2 million people tried out that year.
And then we whittled it down to 50.
We take it to LA and that's finals week.
And we go to LA.
That's the week we decide who the cast is.
So I just figured to myself, they keep calling me.
If I can get to LA, I'm going to call that a win.
So They call me up and say, we want you to come to LA.
Cool.
They said, here's the deal.
You can't wear anything that signifies where you're from.
No college stuff, no anything.
And you can't talk to anybody when you get here.
And you're going to be locked in your room essentially by yourself for a week.
So bring stuff to entertain yourself.
Because they want the cast the first time you'd actually meet to be on camera.
And you're there with everybody else that's going to be on the cast.
So we get there.
And the first part of the week they're giving you IQ tests, or you're meeting with psychologists.
You're meeting with all of these different people.
And then you could get out of the room to go to, to go to meals.
And it was at the embassy suites in Santa Monica.
And when you go to the restaurant it was weird to be one person at every table, to be like 51 tops in the restaurant.
And then after about two days, you started noticing there's not 50 people here anymore.
Now there's 30 people.
And I'm like, Oh, they're sending people home.
We're chopping them down as the week goes on.
So it gets to the end of the week and they say hey, we want, Burnett wants.
It's today's Burnett Day.
So all the NBC brass is here, and Mark Burnett is here.
Okay, cool.
So I put on my best suit and the production assistant comes down and he goes okay, they're ready for you.
So I walk up there, and I'm like, walk in, bust in.
How you doing, Mr. Burnett?
My name's John Gafford, and I stick my hand out.
And he places a single peanut M&M in my hand because he's eating M&M's.
Like doesn't shake my hand.
And I start launching into this tirade of how great I am and why I'd be the perfect person to work for Donald Trump and all this stuff.
Blah blah, blah.
And I'm just thinking to myself, I have a really high EQ and I can just feel the room slipping away.
Like they just, this is not at all interesting to them what I'm saying and all of this stuff.
And I'm like, well, this is going terribly.
Burnett's asking me questions like I heard your girlfriend's about to dump you and just random stuff like that.
I'm like, this is not going well.
So, well, hey, I'll get to you why.
So I walk out kind of dejected.
I go down.
I start packing my bags because I know what's coming.
I'm done.
They're going to send me home.
And I'm like that because I knew it went horribly.
And the PA comes down and he says they want to see you again.
And I'm like, really?
Really?
He goes, yeah.
And I said, OK, I'm going to go up there a little different this time.
I said, you know what?
Give me a minute.
I got to hit the minibar.
So I hit the minibar in my room.
I go walking upstairs, get out the elevator and I kick the doors into this double-door conference room thing as hard as I could.
And wham, they hit the walls.
And everybody jumped up.
And I walked into the room and I looked at Burnett and I said before you, open your mouth one more time and tell me why I want to be on your little television show.
Let me tell you why you should cast me.
I said, when you invest in me, you get back 100 times your investment.
And I pulled a bag of M&M's that I stole from the minibar out of my pocket.
I threw him in his face.
I said, thanks for the fucking M&M.
And I walked out.
That's how I got on the show.
The new year always reminds me of the moment that changed my life.
Growing up as a first generation Caribbean American in small town Ohio, I learned early what it felt like to be left out.
That fear of rejection pushed me to become a people pleaser, someone who avoided conflict and said yes when I should have said no.
But everything shifted when I discovered negotiation, because I realized that confidence isn't something you're born with.
It's a skill that you build.
And that belief is what eventually led me to start the American Negotiation Institute.
And here's why I'm telling you this.
A lot of people are walking into the new year with an idea that they've been sitting on for a while, something they know they could build but haven't acted on yet.
The new year isn't magic.
It just gives you permission to start.
If that's you, 2026 is a great year to stop overthinking and start building.
And the smartest move early on is removing friction.
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In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify.
Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash Kwame.
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And the lesson from that story, the lesson from that story is that is real-time risk analysis.
It's a real time risk analysis, because you look at the risk and I'm sitting there and thinking to myself okay, number one, the mistake that I made was there's so many mistakes I made in that story.
The first one is I assumed I knew what they wanted.
So I assumed that they wanted this highly polished, very smart business candidate to be an actual employee.
They weren't hiring anybody.
They were casting for a television show.
They're looking for ratings.
So when I made that switch in my head in between the meetings, I'm like I'm going to go give him some ratings.
And I turned from walking resume dude to okay, this guy might do something crazy and we're going to get some ratings out of it.
And then I did my risk assessment.
So what's my downside here?
I'm already cooked.
I know I've already lost.
My downside is zero.
The upside is 100% getting on this show.
So let's go create a balls out Eminem moment that these people are going to remember.
And that risk paid off massively.
So just switching that mentality and having a plan and evaluating the risk and doing those things was massively.
But that's how I got on the show.
Unbelievable.
Listeners, now you know.
The way to get everything that you want is by throwing candy at the person who holds the tree.
Yes.
I don't necessarily recommend that method, but it was hot.
It was crazy, but it was very effective.
But I'll tell you this.
When I got on that show, I'd done a lot of really cool things.
I had a lot of really cool jobs, but I hadn't done anything that had developed any wealth and I was still kind of a paycheck player, if you will.
We'd had some cool things and had some success, but no massive success.
There was no wealth involved in any of this.
And it was the first time.
I can tell you, being on that show, that it was the first time I'd ever been around a group of people that were just absolutely getting it.
And I mean getting it.
And I don't want this to sound egotistical at all because it's not meant to be.
But when you're someone of relatively decent intelligence I like to think I am when you walk into a room of other smart people, you can kind of figure out where you fall on that hierarchy pretty quick.
I mean, and I've got some friends that make me look like, you know, Forrest Gump.
So I'm not saying I'm the top, but I know where I.
I know where I land pretty quick in the smarts division.
And when I got on that show in this group of 18 people I would probably have placed myself in the top three or four as far as the brightest people there, as far as quickest, you know straight IQ, just burning burning, straight from that.
But because I'd kind of hustled my way a little bit to get on, I would probably put myself in the bottom two or three as far as net worth.
So that was kind of a wake up call to me.
I'm like, well, wait a second.
Where's this disparity?
Like I'm pretty sure I'm one of the smartest people here, but these people are getting it at just a different level.
And that made me see a massive deficiency in myself, because here I was thinking that I was doing pretty well.
But then you get around people that are really doing well and all of a sudden you got two choices.
You can dismiss it as luck, as you know.
Oh they just got lucky, or whatever else, or favoritism, or they had a head start.
Whatever it is, they want to dismiss it as.
Or you can look at yourself and go okay, they're willing to do something every day or willing to give something up that I have not been willing to do.
That has gotten them to where they are.
And I need to reevaluate what I'm doing, what I'm bringing to the table, how I'm showing up, what I expect out of myself.
And so for me, that was the biggest change.
And that was the biggest movement.
Yeah.
It didn't hurt to be on TV in front of 8 million people for, you know, two months but and it did help me with my business tremendously.
But at the same time, that catalyst right there, changing who I was around, made such a huge difference.
Like you live in, what do you live in Ohio?
What do you live in Ohio?
You live in Columbus.
Okay, cool.
At one point in my life, in my early life, I was a multi-unit manager for a national restaurant chain.
And, they moved me to Detroit, Michigan.
And when I lived in Detroit and a lot of those Rust Belt kind of areas that run through the middle of the country like that, especially Detroit.
At that time this was many, many years ago, but it seemed like there was this hamster wheel of life.
Like your dad worked at Ford.
You lived in, you lived here.
You grew up here.
You married your high school sweetheart.
You bought a house within three blocks of your parents and you went to work at Ford and you hung out with the same people the rest of your life.
You went to high school with
And it was wash, rinse, repeat.
And when I was there, I was like, whoa.
I mean, it was the hardest place I've ever lived to make friends, because they're like I already have my friends.
I don't need any friends.
Yeah, I don't need anybody.
I don't need anybody else.
I've already got this.
And it's because it's comfort.
There's comfort in that hamster wheel.
And you think, how many people got trapped in those small towns?
Like I'm from a very, very small town in North Florida.
It might as well be Baja, Georgia.
It's like 8,000 people where I grew up.
It's very, very small.
And it's like how many people get trapped in there?
Because they just, you know, everybody tells them in their circle what's possible.
You just hear the same stories.
We're just meant to do this.
This is, well, we're from here.
This is what we do.
And so it's wash, rinse, repeat of your life.
And it doesn't have to be that way.
Changing your circle is probably the fastest way for you to change your view of the world.
You're so right, man.
I think about so many areas of my life where I saw the delta for the first time, where it's like okay, I think I'm doing really well.
And then I'm in front of other people.
I'm like, there are levels to this game.
And you studying can help.
You can read some books.
But then the best way, like you said, you have to change the people who are around you.
Right.
It's, you have to say OK no, there's something in this room, with these people, that level you up and you see it consistently.
I mean, think about how anybody listening to this podcast would be with their friends.
If they see one of their friends slipping, if they're a good friend, they're going to try to pull them up.
If you start hanging out with bigger, better circles, then they're going to do the same thing for you.
This is really powerful.
And so let's let's outline this.
How?
Because I think a lot of times people get really hung up on the X's and O's.
They're like, OK, well, cool.
So what do I what now?
So I know I need to level up the people who are around me.
How do I do that?
So can you give people a game plan so we can eliminate all of the excuses?
Yeah, no, we absolutely can.
For me, networking groups are paramount.
Being a good networker and learning how to assimilate yourself into new groups in a way that's very efficient and very memorable is great.
Facebook is one of the best tools in the world, because all you have to do is anything you're interested in.
If it involves leveling up in health, if it involves leveling up in fitness, if it involves leveling up financially.
If you, if you're like, let's say, let's say you think man, I really want to level up in crypto which whatever, if that, if that's your game, you want to play, you want to learn, really learn the crypto game.
Dude, go on Facebook and look for crypto meetups in your area.
Wow.
There are meetups for just about everything.
You want to learn real estate?
Go, go look for real estate meetups.
You want to buy real estate?
No money down.
Look up sub two real, you know, meetups.
There are meetups for everything.
And then you just have to go.
The biggest mistake people make here, Kwame, is they don't actively go do this.
They're sitting there waiting for somebody to show up and invite them.
Well, nobody ever invites me to cool stuff like that.
Dude, it's, you just click a button and say, I'm going to be there.
That's all you have to do.
And then you have to go.
And then so many people are just terrified in networking situations.
And one of the things that I talk about in a networking situation is A.
When I walk into any networking situation, I don't care if it's business or social or whatever it is.
I'm trying to accomplish two things.
Number one, I don't care what you can do at all.
I don't care what your business is if I don't like you as a human.
If I'm not interested in you as a human, I don't care what your business is.
Right.
I'm trying to number one, get to the core of who people are, but that enables me to be incredibly memorable, because in a networking situation it's much more important to be memorable than it is to have a good memory, because my memory is terrible.
So bad.
Here's a little secret.
If you ever see me in a networking situation, normally there's going to be a beautiful blonde.
That is my wife, somewhere hovering behind me.
And as we're shaking hands and you're introducing yourself, she's texting me your name and describing you.
That's what's happening in real time, right?
Take a wingman networking.
It will change your whole bit.
It'll change everything.
Because later you can go back and you can do your homework and you remember everybody.
But when I first meet somebody, especially a business networking event, here's a great tip.
When people walk up, I go, oh, tell me about you.
And they go.
Oh, you know, I work at this company and our mission is this and we do that, and blah blah, blah.
And we've been doing it for five years and we're number four in the market.
And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, no, no.
I didn't ask what you did.
I said, tell me about you.
Are you from here?
You got kids?
You married?
Like, where'd you go to school?
What do you do?
And they're like, and people are just dumbfounded in that moment because they're so programmed to just repeat their elevator pitch that they've repeated already 40 times that night.
And so now when I ask that, they're like, oh, hey, yeah, man.
No, yeah.
I got three kids.
Married.
Cool.
They play sports.
How old are they?
And you have a real conversation with people in that moment.
And they're like.
That was because it's so different, right?
It's so different than the.
Let me just try to jam my business card in your hand and get to the next person.
It's like jam it in their hand, because I'm trying to build some decent connections with people and actually be memorable to them.
This is brilliant.
You're absolutely right, because again we go into these scripts and this breaks the pattern which by definition, would make you memorable, because everything that is run of the mill which, if everything goes as expected, you say OK, I mean, that's not memorable at all.
But this guy actually cares about me, me as a person, because it doesn't just speak to you.
It also speaks to everybody else that they spoke to.
John sticks out because he actually cares about me.
There's something about this guy that I like, something that I can actually trust, because he's not trying to just extract value from me.
He's not just looking at me as a means to an end.
He's looking at me, the real me.
And they're probably also recognizing very few people, especially if they're very high up care about them as an individual person.
Well, I'm also.
I'm trying to run them through the pint test, as my good friend Steve Sims, who passed away not too long ago, would say.
For me to want to do business with anybody, they got to pass the pint test.
And Steve would say, I said, what's the pint test?
And he'd go.
If I'm walking down the street in London and I look across the street and I see this person coming the other way, one of two things is going to occur.
I'm either going to duck into the shop that I'm standing next to, so I don't have to talk to them, or I'm going to say hey, let's go get a pint.
And I will never do business with anybody that I would duck into a store to get away from.
That's a really, that's a really good measuring stick.
So yeah, I want to see who they are as people.
Because, man, there's nothing worse than doing business with people you don't like.
God, life's too short.
That's true.
That's true.
And I think that's a source of value that people don't appreciate.
We often just think about money as the only source of value.
We're just trying to get as much money out of business.
But if you can introduce some level of enjoyment into your business life, that'll be huge.
And the core source of that enjoyment is going to come from people, the people you serve and the people you work with.
Yeah.
What you just said, you know, people, we all start out on the hustle, right?
We all start out chasing money.
That's what we do.
We chase dollars, right?
And then when you get some money, you very quickly realize that money's not the goal.
Time is the goal.
And that's what money can buy.
I mean, how old are you, Kwame, how old are you?
37.
You're young, bro.
Come on, man.
See, I'm 53, right?
I'm at that age.
Hold on, dude.
That's not true.
No, I totally, but I'm 53, but here's the deal.
Like I'm at that age where, like I'm in Facebook groups where, like you know your high school, I didn't ask to be member of it.
They just add you to it, whatever your, you know, class of whatever.
And you go on there occasionally, and people that you knew in high school are dying.
And not from a tragic death.
There's no candlelight vigil.
It's like, yeah, dude, that dude looks like he hasn't laid off a carb since 1994.
There's no doubt.
I have no doubt why this guy died.
But even if you take care of yourself, like I do, you still...
You still realize your own mortality a little bit, man.
And I'm just not going to spend my time with people I don't like.
I'm just not going to do it.
Yeah.
No, man, you're right.
First of all, after this conversation, I need your workout routine because you look fantastic.
This is great.
I have a wife trying to make me live forever.
That's good.
You got to keep her.
That's great, man.
And it's inspiring too, because again, this is something that we can all do.
And oftentimes it's our mind, it's our emotions that hold us back from just doing the simple things with regularity that's required to get us to where we want to go.
And I want to actually let me do this before I forget, before I forget, because I know my listeners they they, want to know the answer to this trivial question.
So let's just do it.
Get it out of the way and get back to substance.
So you're on The Apprentice.
What's Donald Trump like behind the scenes?
You know how, man, that's such a hard question, because I don't.
Here's here's the hard part with that.
Here's the real hard part of that question.
I spent a lot of time with this guy 20 years ago.
If you ask me, I mean, are you the same dude you were when you were 17?
Probably not.
Probably not.
And I'm definitely not the same dude I was when I was on that show.
So obviously there's been some things that have happened which might have changed him a little bit in the last 20 years.
But my experience with him that long ago was he was incredibly gracious.
He was incredibly kind.
He was very much interested in us and was also interested in playing a character when the cameras were on.
That made ratings go.
If that makes sense.
You could see the switch.
Oh, for sure.
When the cameras weren't running, he was very kind.
He knew, man.
After that it was like he wasn't what made that show great back in the day.
Um, for those of you that are younger listening yeah, there used to be like television shows on like tv that you would watch once a week and didn't show up just instantly.
You actually had to watch them.
And but that first season it was like he was just hired.
Help, he was just, he was an actor or he was a hired talent.
On the show, mark burnett had total control and it was really like watching a horse race, like it was.
There was no, everybody was kind of equal and they were just pushing.
And then there was that woman Omarosa, that came on and like Nope, I think she did it by design, but everybody in America hated this woman.
And when Trump fired her, everybody was like so happy and loved Trump.
And if you don't know this, he likes that.
So subsequent seasons, when he came on as an executive producer, it didn't turn into like everybody that was going to get fired had to get villainified a little bit.
They had to like turn you into kind of an evil thing.
And it would got to be really predictable, because it was like when the French horns start playing, when you're doing something you're like okay, this person is better than fried chicken.
And, and yeah, it got that way.
So, He very much was playing the part because that's what they wanted to see.
They wanted to see him, you know, lay the wood to give the Cobra or whatever it was to, you know, America's biggest idiot that week, or whatever they wanted to do it.
Yeah.
OK, no, that's very helpful.
That's very helpful because I know that the curiosity was killing people.
So I'm glad we got some insight here.
And yeah.
I want to talk about some of the business that you've been doing, because the book is incredibly powerful.
You're a real estate mogul and obviously a negotiation expert.
You can't be one without the other.
So first of all, just tell us about the business that you've built.
But I'd also be interested to talk about the relationships that you've had to negotiate in order to get there.
Not just the properties, but actually the relationships behind the scenes.
We talk about a lot of that.
So when I left back to the apprentice again when that show was over, I was the CEO of a tech firm that I ended up leaving that position shortly after the show was over.
And I was kind of took my buyout and I was kind of retired and I was hanging out on my boat in Tampa and Kendra Todd that won.
My season was in real estate.
She was like, come get a real estate license and sell real estate with me.
It'll be fun.
And I was like, all right, cool.
So I started with her actually in Florida and And then at the time it was when the real estate market was still booming.
So we were doing these traveling road shows where we would go to different markets and pitch condo conversion projects all over the country for a company called SunVest, based here in Nevada.
And on one of those trips that we were selling, I came out here and the guy that was actually my roommate on The Apprentice was also in real estate in Vegas and his father owned a very large brokerage.
So on one of the trips around here, I met a girl in Vegas on one of those trips.
And we ended up coming out to see her every other weekend.
And then, you know, we've been married now 18 years.
So that worked out.
But I ended up moving out here because I was like well, if we're doing these road shows, I don't need to be in Tampa.
I can be anywhere.
And Chris is there so we can kind of get this going as it was.
So I came in here and just started doing real estate just as a team at his parents' brokerage.
And very quickly because, coming out of the tech industry, I had some knowledge that at the time nobody knew.
I mean, I knew how to use spiders to crawl and scrape email addresses off off the board website where I could get everybody's email address.
I understand how to use email as a weapon.
I understood how to do flash embedded emails.
And so we started a team and hired 27 agents.
The first day like before we had a website systems or anything I had 27 agents that worked for us.
It was pretty crazy.
And that just kind of kept going, kept going.
And then, you know, I wanted to own my own company.
So I ended up leaving that situation, which was a hard leave.
Again, I talk about that in the book, but this is one of the things we've talked about negotiating relationships into a deal.
I was going to open up a Keller Williams franchise myself, and word got out to my previous broker, who then locked us out.
And so I had to move very quickly and I moved into another existing Keller Williams.
And after about three days of the guys there watching me operate, they came to me and said Hey, you know, they've been open for six years and had 40 agents total.
I said, hey, we've got this third partner.
You can probably buy him out.
And just instead of going off into opening your own, you'll just be a partner here.
And it was just at that time, it was path of least resistance.
I was like, yeah, let's go.
Bought him out, built that company up to 200 agents inside of 18 months.
So I can say that I did that because they had six years to do it.
They didn't do it.
But the problem with that relationship was this.
And I talk about this in the book.
When you're dealing with partners and when you're negotiating things.
Any partnership, this is the first biggest you know.
It's so funny.
People in their offices, I love people that have trophies like in like awards and stuff.
My office is like a serial killers trophy room to my own past mistakes.
Like I just have it's.
It's literally filled with stupid things that I've done like little trophies of like to remind me of this stuff.
And one of the things that I have in my office is a little three legged stool to remind me of this story.
I was not clear going to this partnership of two things.
Number one, the relationship between the two existing partners was they were best friends.
So anytime there was going to be a vote, I lost two to one, a hundred percent of the time.
They were always going to be against me and they always were.
Number two I did not have a clear if you're going to go into partnership with somebody.
People get these partnership agreements and they're like you're going to do this, you're going to do that, you're going to do this, but they don't take the time to to do the prenup.
There's no like, if this doesn't work, what happens?
And that is so clutch if you're getting into business with people.
And the third mistake I made here was I didn't need these guys.
So many times we go out and we take on partners in a business because we're just too scared to do it ourselves.
Or it's the path of least resistance in the moment.
And I didn't need them because they didn't compliment my skills.
They were essentially the same as me.
There was nobody bringing a different skill set to the table.
We all kind of did the same thing.
And so very quickly, I knew that was the wrong situation.
And after 18 months I ended up leaving that situation and starting this company we have now, which is Simply Vegas, with a dear friend of mine named Gavin Ernstone, a great partner of mine.
Gavin and I, what makes us good partners is, A, we bring very different things to the table.
And in any great real estate brokerage.
We're now the number two highest volume real estate company in Nevada.
We have been for several, several years.
We sell more homes over a million dollars in Vegas than any other firm.
So we specialize in luxury.
That is our business.
We're completely vertically integrated.
We own mortgage.
We own title.
We own escrow.
Everything that touches the transaction we own.
And we've also scaled those businesses through joint venture partnerships with other large brokerages across the country.
So we own a lot of that stuff through the real estate transaction.
But what made our company go in the first place was we had complimenting skills.
So Gavin was one of the top luxury real estate broker brokers in our agents in Vegas.
The guy will do this year, 250 million by himself.
It's he's a machine.
And you need, like we needed to open the doors.
We needed that magnet, which was like, I want to be this guy.
But then you need the engine behind it that can make all of it go.
They can set up systems that can understand KPIs and build out SOPs and build out operational stuff that makes the company go.
And that's my specialty.
That's what I'm really great at.
So over the years, we've had this great working symbiotic relationship.
And off the kick, too, we also said like, OK, here's the buy-ins.
Here's what happens if it doesn't work.
We've never had to exercise that plan because it's always been so good.
But if it went wrong, we would literally have a plan we'd go to and say, here's the exit.
And every partnership that comes through, because a lot of agents like to team up.
I'm always like, all right, what happens if this doesn't work?
We need to figure that out right now.
Because most agent-agent team relationships end up failing.
They do.
That's, you know, that's that's our business kind of in a nutshell and what we've done.
And through the course of that, we do everything in real estate.
You can imagine I flipped hundreds of homes.
I mean, there's just all of that stuff, everything that's real estate involved.
We do.
Amazing.
Well, first of all, kudos.
This is incredibly impressive.
And it also speaks to the just how important these relationships are.
Right.
And the.
When it comes to negotiation, we often think about the transactional side, the dollars and cents and everything.
But these same negotiation skills can be utilized to gather information that you could make to utilize to make a better decision.
Because going into the one where you were one of three partners, then if you would have been a bit more curious, you might have been able to say you know what?
It seems like they might be double teaming me here.
This might not be the best opportunity for me.
But you learn from that and negotiate it at a much higher level.
And now the partnership is still going through.
But you also did that with an exit strategy in mind.
And you're right.
I'm a lawyer by trade.
So one of the things that I would do is before, when people would come in to say hey, I want to do a business partnership.
Can you write up the partnership agreement or the operating agreement?
I say, first, let me put you through this little program.
So I created this kind of based off of marital counseling, premarital counseling.
And I told him, I said, listen, my goal before we draft anything is to break you all up.
Because if you break up after the fact is going to be really messed up.
So I'm going to try to put you through the paces and push these difficult conversations through.
Like scenario planning.
So you could see where you are aligned and where you're not.
And if you're not aligned, see if you could work that out beforehand, because that'll help me to make a better operating agreement or partnership agreement.
And I think a lot of times people don't do what you did in that last one when they think about OK, I'm going into this.
What happens if I need to get out?
That exit strategy is always crucial.
Well, the X factor that people don't figure into these dots is emotions.
They just think, oh, we'll just figure it out.
It'll be X. It'll be this.
I did this.
Yeah, you did that.
So we'll just split it up and it'll work.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Because if you're separating, one of you is going to be pissed, right?
Somebody is going to be scorned and it's not going to be that easy.
So it needs to be very black and white and done very carefully.
But I think any time you negotiate anything, I think the semantics of what you're negotiating are far less important to me than anything using your EQ to understand how this is how this person is going to react in situations as you go along.
That's always what I'm looking for.
You know, people ask me what my superpower is.
And I always say I have an incredibly high EQ, which makes me an incredible deal maker.
That's what I say.
I know.
And it's so funny because you know we list very expensive property and with very high dollar clients.
And I People ask me like one time somebody asked me in a class I said well, you know what's your, what's your best thing in a listing presentation to get the listing.
And I'm like, if you want to know the most powerful thing that I ever said in a listing presentation, it was this.
And this was a person that was very successful in the tech industry, but I could just tell from talking to them that he probably wasn't the coolest person in high school, right.
It just wasn't the coolest person I could tell.
And I said, I'm going to tell you a story.
I said in eighth grade and this was in the listening presentation we were talking about marketing, we were talking about numbers, we were talking about this.
I said in eighth grade my mouth wrote a check that I wasn't willing to cash with somebody in eighth grade
And it was, let's pick on this guy, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, until the guy turned around and went, you.
And I went, me?
And he's like, yeah.
And then this guy wanted to have a physical altercation with me, which I didn't have a whole lot of interest in after this.
And then immediately all of my quote unquote friends decided to kind of flip it on me.
And I got teased mercilessly through eighth grade and ostracized.
And it was a really hard time.
And I said that that situation, that little bit of trauma.
And granted, I understand that is not David Goggins level trauma.
I get it.
But it affected me.
It affected me.
And I said that.
That level of trauma that happened to me through that, that that hardcore bullying developed something in me which was this need to be a people pleaser.
There was a need for people to like me.
I had this need for people like me based on this experience.
And it caused me a lot of problems through my early 20s.
But now I've flipped the switch with it and I realize that that is my part of that of needing people to like me is I've developed this really high EQ when it comes to knowing when I've got somebody and when I'm losing them.
I know, I know it.
And so I know exactly how far I can push and exactly when to pull back, when to pump the brakes, when to push the gas.
I know exactly when to do that, which makes me the best deal maker you will ever sit in front of.
And that got the listing.
And Because in that moment, I used that skill to understand that this story was going to be more powerful to this guy than anything that I was going to produce when it comes to like marketing materials.
He didn't care.
We all do the same stuff.
Here, here's a newsflash.
Realtors, we all do the same stuff.
There's nothing magic about what we do.
There's nothing magic.
Nobody, nothing new has come out for marketing real estate in like eight years.
Nothing.
We do the same stuff.
It's just how well you execute.
At least I'm honest, right?
It's just how well you execute it.
John, this is brilliant, because what you've done in let me use nerdy psychology terms and then let me bring it back to real talk.
There's something called affinity bias where you are like me, so I like you.
Right.
And so that is one of the fastest ways to build trust.
And in real talk, it's like, hey, this person gets me.
You showed him that you get him.
And the listeners who are audio, John is cool.
John appears cool.
He's fit, strong.
Looks like he's 23.
Apparently he's lying and talking about his age.
But it's not readily apparent from the way that you present yourself that you had that connection in common with this guy.
But you knew that if you told that story from your childhood it would resonate with him and he would say this is a guy I can trust.
This is a guy who gets me.
And then the other thing, I know Simone's probably thinking about it.
The audience that has followed me for a while, they're probably thinking about it too.
Are we brothers?
Because we have the same origin story.
Oh, do we?
Because I grew up in a small town called Tiffin Ohio, and there was a playground experience that made me a people pleaser.
And so my, my origin story in negotiation and conflict resolution isn't like Chris Voss coming from being like a badass FBI agent or anything like that.
It was like, no, I was a people pleaser.
I was a pushover for a long time and I had to learn how to get over it myself.
And now this is what I do to help other people overcome the same thing.
And the emotional intelligence part man, I think it is something that people sleep on, especially when you get into the world where we're talking about real money here.
Like in real estate, we're talking about dollars and cents.
It's one of the most obvious examples of negotiation that we have.
So I want you to talk more about how you're able to utilize money.
Emotional intelligence, not in a theoretical or academic type of way, but how you actually do it in a real way to create that connection with other people.
Well, I think the first step in it is you've got to develop it.
And how do you how do you how do you develop emotional intelligence?
Like, how do you really do it?
And the biggest, most important thing, which is becoming harder and harder to do, based on what I said at the top of the show, is understand how other people live, understand how they think and understand their point of view.
And when we are being huddled together so quickly in these echo chambers of this, I saw one this morning that is unbelievable.
That I'll talk about right now because it was just.
It was shocking to me this morning.
So, for example, I happen to be friends with the guys in the Zac Brown band which are a big country act.
And John Hopkins, who has one of my best friends since Florida State in 1993.
I've been friends with this guy forever, right?
He has ALS now.
He's battling that.
We did a fundraiser last Saturday night.
They just started playing at the Sphere here in Las Vegas, this show.
Nice.
Nice.
Yeah.
So they're doing they're doing they have they have a standing residency at the Sphere.
Zach is releasing his new album.
I had talked at length about what the show was going to be and what the idea was.
And the idea behind the show is it's kind of Zach's personal journey from like being in a place where he had issues with substances and all this stuff and kind of getting it the breakthrough and kind of where it is now.
It's like like it's kind of this going from going through the depths of hell to get breakthrough and get to heaven, whatever.
Right.
It's what it is.
And in the show yeah, I mean like when he's talking, when he's doing like the hard part of it yeah, there's some pretty heavy imagery on the thing.
That's like skeletons and stuff running around this and that.
But it's just, it's a theatrical performance of doing this.
And these are like the nicest dudes in the world, right?
Like they have a camp. for underprivileged kids that they run every year.
And they just give so much charity, do so much for veterans.
And they are getting murdered right now online because one idiot said Oh, he sold his soul to the devil.
And look, he's, he's a, he's a Hollywood demonic.
Like he's part of the child eating domino thing.
Well, I don't know what you're talking about.
Like, but they're getting killed online because of this.
And I'm like, how can you, this dude's just trying to put on a show, right?
He's not trying to, there's, there's no, like, what are you talking about?
And it's because these people can say, oh, well, I read it online.
Zach Brown now worships the devil.
We have to talk about it.
And it's these echo chambers that happen.
So if you want to start to develop yourself, A, like, listen to everything.
Like.
One of my favorite things that's ever been said in my podcast studio is I've never met a well-traveled racist.
I love that statement.
Wow.
Go out and see how other people live.
Travel if you can.
But even if you don't, you can travel with your computer.
People are like, I don't have the money to go to Egypt.
I don't have the money to go to India.
I don't have the money to go to these places where if you go there, it will change your life.
But you know what you can do?
If you read a story on Fox News, you can also try to go to CNN.
You can also try to go to BBC.
You can also try to get and get the full picture.
And then maybe the truth will fall somewhere in the middle of that.
Yeah.
Echo chamber.
Get out of your echo chamber, because if you don't understand how other people view the world, you'll never get there.
And the second thing I would say is you've got to, you've got to understand that, that you are not the main character in anybody's movie, but your own.
People try to act like they're the main character.
Like, dude, you might not even get in the credits of somebody's movie.
Like, why do you think you're this important that you're going to have this level of influence?
Everybody is on their own journey.
Everybody is viewing the world through their own lens.
So you've got to understand that and try to meet them where they are.
It is much easier to meet people on their journey than try to pull them off their path onto yours.
I mean, how many internet arguments over politics have you won in your life?
What's the scorecard?
You're bright, dude.
Okay, still, you're an attorney by trade, right?
The understand negotiation, and you're still shooting a donut.
So why do you, so why does Max...
What is Max, the night manager at the tire shop, think he's going to talk you out of who you're going to vote for?
For president.
I don't know.
But yet here we are.
This is where we live now, right?
This is where we live, because everybody's trying to force people into their way of saying things instead of meeting them where they are.
Right.
And so, if you want to change your financial future by getting other people to want to do things with you whether it's buy what you're selling Go out with you on a date.
Invite you to a meetup that gets you in a different circle.
Meet them where they are instead of trying to drag them where you are.
Oh, that's powerful.
You're right.
You're right.
It's it's recognizing that they have their own story.
And I love the fact that the approach of you're the main character in your story, but also respect the fact that they are the main character in theirs.
And that helps you to have that self-confidence and self-worth for yourself while at the same time, interacting with people and navigating the world with some degree of humility and recognizing that they have their own thoughts and beliefs and goals and everything like that.
And you have to make some adjustments to make space for other people.
And when it comes down to this book, Escaping the Drift, because it's powerful.
This message is powerful.
And I can see and feel the passion behind what you have for this.
And hypothetically, let's say, there's a world where everybody reads this book, what change would we see in the world?
Oh man.
I think.
I think if there was one change that I would see in the world, it would be there would be a lot less finger pointing and a lot more self accountability, because I think one of the reasons that people are do point the fingers and blame others for their issues or wait for somebody to come save them which is what I did for a lot of my early life, thinking I had some sort of a safety net that wasn't really there is because there's comfort in that right.
There's solace in that.
If it's not my fault, I'm okay.
But when you start saying hey, maybe I did contribute to this, now all of a sudden it's a little uncomfortable, right?
And no growth in any area of your life will ever come without some level of uncomfort.
It just won't.
You can't do that.
So I think you would see a lot less people blaming others.
So I would say the overall impact would be literally, if everybody on earth read this and practiced it, I think you would see an improvement overall of relationships across the board, because there would be a lot less resentment to others for things that maybe they didn't have as much, maybe they weren't as as at fault as people like to think they are.
That's so good.
That's so good.
John, I'm excited for you.
I'm excited for this book.
I'm excited to get this episode into the hands of other folks.
Now, if somebody wants to follow you, connect with you and work with you, what would be the best way for them to get in touch?
I'm at the John Gafford everywhere.
My website is the John Gaffordcom, but yeah, at the John Gafford on Instagram.
You know it's 2025, dude.
We don't use business cards anymore.
It's all the gram.
It's just flinging the gram around.
That's right, man.
Listen, man, I appreciate you.
This is powerful work, and thank you for coming on the show.
Ah, bless, man.
Thanks.
