Transcript of The Business Strategy That Made Him Millions (Vertical Integration Explained) 🏢 EP152

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast, where we cover three core topics: how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. This guest has actually got me to come to his studio. Normally, you know I do this podcast inside of an RV motorhome traveling around the country for the last two and a half years. You guys have helped us support the podcast by sharing, commenting, liking, and subscribing. As you guys know, this podcast will be under 40 minutes for your listening pleasure because the average workout is 45 minutes, the average commute to work is 45 minutes. So this episode will be around 35, 38 minutes. Now, I want to dive right in. We're going to cover these core topics, but this person, this guest, you might see the book. If you're watching this on video, you might see his new book that just came out that's already topping the charts. He has covered all things real estate, been all through the grinds of business. So I'm very excited to introduce John Gaffard. If you can give us a quick two-minute bio, so we get straight to the money.

Two minute bio. Let's see. Fired by the 47th President of the United States on live television. Yes, I was a Canada on the apprentice. Been in real estate now for about 20 years. Built what is the largest luxury real estate brokerage in Vegas. We sell more homes over a million dollars than any other firm. We're a completely vertically integrated firm, which means anything that you touch that happens to be with a real estate transaction, from mortgage, from title, to solar, to construction, to anything we own a part of. And through that business, we have been able to, like you said, with purpose-driven stuff, help a lot of great charities along the way.

That was fantastic. Okay, you said a couple of things there that already stand out. On the make money side, what the heck does vertically integrated mean?

Well, vertically integrated means you have two ways you can grow. You can grow wide or you can grow tall. And for us, wide would have been opening a brokerage in Vegas and then growing to Scottsdale, then growing to Orange County. But when you name your company Simply Vegas, as we did, makes it a little geographically tough to do so. So it wouldn't really work to do that. But when you go tall, vertically integrated means looking everywhere that your customers are spending money and then figure out a way to become part of those businesses. The way that we do it is, and I talk about this in the book, called the Tony SopranoCurriculari is what I call the Tony Soprano corollary, is what I call it? Yeah. Here's effectively what we do. If there's a vertical that we want to be a part of, we find who the best people are in that vertical, and we say, Okay, how's your business? Great. We start driving all of our customer base to that one sole point. Then if it's going well, after about 6-8 months, I'll call the person and say, Hey, how's it going with our business?

Oh, great. I'll ask one question. What percentage of our business is your total business? They'll say, Oh, you guys are probably now 25% of our business. Oh, wow, that's great. As soon as I can tip that number somewhere between 45 and 50%, now the conversation changes. It changes to, Okay, cool. We've proofed the concept. I've proofed this This will work. This is functioning. It cost me nothing to do the startup. No marketing dollars, anything. It's just simply driving a business in a direction. And then at which point we say, Listen, we're going to change our relationship. We think we can grow you bigger, but we're going to become partners. And so then what we say is we become partners in that business and take that business to bigger heights from where it is.

So is that going from literally what we call the customer flow before, during, and after? The four is the marketing. So maybe you have a part of marketing, you need to get leads for real estate. Then the during. They need to get a notary, they need to get a loan, they need to do paperwork, maybe they need a lawyer. What are the things that they need in the during? The after is, what can we sell them? Do they need gardening, pool service? There are so many things that happen in the customer flow before, during, and after. As you're going through it and you're deciding who to work with, you've got a lot of options. There's unlimited notaries you could pick to partner with. There's unlimited with mortgage brokers, unlimited banks and refinance and all the things that happen in between, how do you decide the vendors you want to work with?

Yeah, for us, we normally ask our people. We've got 585 agents that we're for. We just put out normally through our network, Hey, who knows somebody that's really good at X? And then we get feedback from our people as to who the best person for those things is. And that gives us a really good indicator of the type of job they're going to do going forward. Because one of the things about vertical is you can very easily damage your primary brand by attaching it to people that don't do good work. Or they don't perform, yeah. Or they don't hold the standard that you hold within your main company. And I think the key to that is definitely Going to the people that are doing the deals that are in the trenches every day and saying, who should we use? It's been really successful for us.

So why Vegas? Why take over this market? Were you born and raised here? Did you migrate here? No.

You know, man, I came out here Back in my younger days, I used to run around with a bunch of rock and roll bands, and I was out on tour with a '90s band that was doing a tour out here and met a girl and started flying out here every weekend to see her. After maybe five weeks, picked up my tent and moved out here. Yeah, that was just the idea. Luckily, it's worked out. We've been married for almost 20 years. That's a bet that worked out in Vegas here.

I always talk about Vegas, and I say it's become a real city. The evolution now with the sports teams and they're winning with the amazing stadium. Some of them are. Some of them are. Let's be clear. Sorry. I mean, obviously on the hockey side, what they're doing is amazing. But it's the best restaurants in the world. The best chefs literally in the world. 24 hours access to everything. It's easy to get around. There is traffic now, so I will say there's traffic, but only on main arteries, if you will. There's ways to get around. But Vegas is a real city. I lived here 10, 15 years ago, and I still have a 702 To me, I'm going to end up in Vegas again and living here again. And so when you are taking over a market, how important are relationships, networking? Do you go to networking events? Is your 585 reps? What are they doing to take over this market?

I think you have to do something that's just special. When I first got here, I was coming out of the tech industry, not the real estate industry. When I was on The Apprentice, I was the CEO of a tech firm at the time, and then I ended up exiting that. Then I didn't have a whole lot going on. I was just a semi-retired sitting in Tampa. Kendra Todd, that won my season of The Apprentice, was like, Hey, why don't you get your real estate license and sell real estate? It'll be fun. That's how it got in the business. I was doing the traveling roadshow during the boom of '05, '06. We would go to these markets like San Francisco and go up on stage and present five different condo conversion projects across the country, all the hotspots for foreclosures later, ironically. We would sell 200 condos. It was crazy. That's how I got in the business. But Vegas chose me again. When you talk about how you grow the business, I was coming out of that tech firm industry, so I had that mindset. I knew how to do things at the time that are so rudimentary now, but I could make some really cool stuff that nobody had ever seen before.

I was the first guy that I knew that understood how to scrape with spiders the realtor websites to get all the realtor's email addresses. I was one of the first people that knew how to do that stuff. We were just came out of the box. When I first moved to Vegas, I set up shop, and I built a real estate team here right out of the box. I never was a solo agent. Because I had really flashy marketing, I knew how to do email marketing, I knew how to build flash websites. I hired 27 agents to work for me the first day. Before I even had a website, I had no lead source, I had no anything. I launched that recruiting platform at the time I was an agent at a RE/MAX here in town. I launched that recruiting platform out. We had so many people come in, I hired 27 agents. And then I was like, okay, I got to figure this out. For sure. But no systems, no process, no SOP, no anything. Just never running a real estate team, Hired 27 people and let's go. That's how I did it.

So going from that to now having to oversee 585 reps, how do you get them to stay? When there are so many options, there's so many companies, Century 21, RE/MAX, all these different brands that are Coldwell Bank or whatever that they could go to, why do they stay here at Simply Vegas?

Well, they stay here because of who works here, and it's not just me. People want to be around winners. They want to be around people that are successful. And we really guard that more than any other company I think, here in Vegas. People know, if you're going to come work here, we expect production. This is not a place Realtors like to, hang a license somewhere. I've often said, if I was your license, I'd hang myself, too. Oh my God. Because you have to remember, the majority of agents don't sell real estate. 50% of them haven't sold a house in 12 months. For us, we expect We expect success out of our agents. We expect them to sell things. We expect them to be productive. If you're not, we do something here called the purge every six months. I know it sounds terrible. We don't play a horn and kill people or anything. Exactly. Every six months, We'll go through and pull everybody that has not done well or has done below our standard. Then we have a conversation. That conversation goes one of two ways. If it goes, Man, everything I'm doing, nothing's working. I don't know what the problem is.

I'm just really struggling. If that's the conversation, I've got you. I'm all in on that person. I will help you. I will do everything I can to make sure you're successful. Unfortunately, here in Vegas, what you hear more often than not is, Well, I'm not really focused on that right now because I took a job at the pool at Haccazón or whatever. They took a job. 9 grand a month. Exactly. So all of a sudden, it's like, Okay, cool. I'm going to invite you to not work here anymore. Because the people that work at Simply Vegas aren't interested Are they selling real estate? This is what we do.

Are they selling real estate?

Yeah, we're not interested.

You'd rather have 584 than 585. We're committed.

Yeah, I get freaked. When our number, and occasionally, it'll peak up to like 600, hit, it'll hit 600. And my partner and I always freak out. Because we're like, there's just no way we can have 600 of the right people here. There's no way. When the market's good, it's easy. But right now, it's a challenge. The market's been tough. It's been a hard year. There's a lot of people that jump from one to the lead pad to the next. I always say, I don't think it's personal responsibility anymore. This is a big part of what my book is about, personal responsibility is in short order, I think in every industry right now. When you look at people, the last thing they want to do is look in the mirror and say, I'm part of the problem. For sure. That's really hard. It's hard for people to say, Maybe it's me. Maybe it's me that screwed this up. It's easier to say, Well, if I just get a different logo on my business card, or I go over there and I get this, or they have this piece of software, dude, I I don't care what software you have.

I don't care what your CRM is. I don't care what your website. If you don't get up and grind and do the work every day, you just can't be successful in this particular business, especially.

All right. This book is sitting here right next to me. Yeah. On the make money side of life, making money from your core business, it takes time to write a book. Even when people have ghost writers and marketing agencies, whatever, there's still a lot of time involved to put out a book. It is a 12 months to 24 months process when you're going through. Longer. Sure.

36 for mine. There you go.

And you're an efficient person. Imagine people that are not efficient, right? Why? Why spend the time to write a book? Why put the information out there?

Well, people ask all the time. I think successful entrepreneurs get asked a lot. I ask it when I'm in that chair, and I get asked it when I'm in this chair, which is if you could go back and change anything, what would you change? I think most people have this programmed response of saying, I wouldn't change anything because all the trials and tribulations and all the mistakes and everything I had got me to where I am today, made me the forged in iron, the person I am today. To that, I say, Bullshit. If I could go back in time and smack my dipstick 27-year-old self in the face and say, Dude, wake up, do this, how much further along would I be? Sure. That's what this is for me. It's a time machine where I can't go back and save myself, but I can help as many people that are just drifting on this wave apathy. So many people, Dan, exist in this universe on the whims and cares of others. What I mean by that is they are not in control of their lives, and they don't realize it until they get fired, they get moved across the country in some way, they get broken up with, they get kicked out, they get stepped aside.

And then all of a sudden, it's like, whoa, what I thought I had total control of, I have no control of. So this is about analyzing all the places in your life where you can take control and how to build a plan to really craft a direction is what I want to do. That's what it is.

What's the title Escaping the Drift? Where did that come from?

So again, part of The Apprentice. We were sitting on the set of The Apprentice one day, and Mark Burnet, who was amazing. I learned more from watching him than from watching Donald Trump during that time. Burnet was... Everything was going wrong. Shit was just going crazy. And Kristin Kirchner, who was one of the contestants on the show with me, she yelled, Tread in water today, aren't you, Mark? And Mark just shot her look, and he's like, I never tread water. I swim. And then as he's walking off, he's like, You drift with the currents. I'm like, How many people are just drifting along with the currents of life. They wake up every morning, every day is... If you wake up every day is Groundhog Day. If you're waiting for the right time to do something, but it never seems to be the right time, dude, you're in the drift. You're drifting along. And Erwin McManis, who sat in this chair, we were discussing this, said the coolest thing. He goes, I love the concept of the book. I didn't even thought of this. This is all Erwin. This isn't me. But Erwin said, I love the name.

I love the concept because the problem with drifting is you're still moving. So you feel like there's momentum. You feel like there's progress. You feel the inertia of the world moving around you. But you don't realize you're drifting until it's too late and you've hit a rock. I thought, I was like, yes, sir. When that is exactly what I thought. I did this. It's exactly what I thought.

All right. So the investing part of this podcast. Why is real estate still one of the top main things to invest in?

It's the top thing. I mean, For me, there's nowhere else where you can take somebody with very little education, you can take somebody with not a great college degree, and they can become fabulously wealthy and pay little to no taxes by using smart investment strategies in real estate. And now, since the information has come out there so prevalently by my good friend Pace Morby, who's amazing, with sub 2 and being able to buy properties with not needing your own credit, and and being able to take over payments. And there's a lot of people through the economy, they're going to be in trouble that have great mortgages that aren't going to be able to afford to make their payments because they're going to get replaced by AI or whatever else. So There's a massive opportunity for you to do this. And not only to build and grow long-term wealth, but to use the tax code to its full advantage by doing cost segs and maximum depreciation on things to avoid paying taxes legitimately. Not weird gray areas. This is straight up black and white tax code that you can use to your advantage in ways that you can't do when you're investing in the stock market.

Short term capital games are going to kill you. You don't have those problems if you do it right with real estate.

There's a lot of options in real estate. Yeah. Storage units, multifamily, commercial, Airbnbs, fix and flip. How can someone, a researcher, decide what category to focus on in real estate?

Well, I think it depends on how much capital you have and how much time and how active you want to be in the process. For me, there's different levels to the game, right? I'll tell you, what I'm doing right now that I love is I buy notes. I'm the bank. That's where I am. I have a good friend of mine owns a very large fix and flip lender based in Dallas. They are always needing to recapitalize because they're just having hockey stick growth. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it means if you're a flipper, you need to borrow somebody short term to finance both the purchase of the house, but also the renovations. That's called a fix and flip loan. These loans are very short term. On his term sheets, they're normally between six and nine months. But what I'm doing is, though, is I'm sweeping in on the back-end and I'm buying them when he needs to recapitalize on 60-day coupon. So I'm lending the money at 60 days in first position on a 70% LTV property hoping that they... No offense, I don't ever want anybody to foreclose.

If they foreclose, it's a massive win for me because I get the property. I'm in first position, 60 days out, 12% interest with a 1% discount.

12% interest paid for the 60 days?

12% interest for the 60 days plus 1% discount. Because I'm helping them... No, I'm sorry, the 12% is annualized. But the 1% discount, when you look at the compressed time frame, the acceleration of money is great. It's wonderful. We're crushing on that. It keeps me pretty much liquidity because my money is never out for longer than 60 days at a time. I'm not doing it like where I'm doing the big blanket investment of like, Here's a million dollars. I'm buying individual notes. So this might be $125,000 on a loan, $140,000 on a loan, $140,000 on. I'm allowed to say no to stuff if I think it's too risky. But I know that these guys have already underwritten these loans. Does that make sense? Right.

So for me-You're coming in later.

Right. So for me, I have this hands-off approach, super hands-off, then I'm making money. Now, I don't get any tax advantage from that. That is accruing massive tax liability by investing that way. But we We also have a 37-story high rise in Nashville that we built five years ago. That K1 that comes in is my favorite piece of mail that I open every single year from the depreciation on that building. It's an $80 million project, and I love opening up that envelope because that depreciation, that K1 is marvelous. It just depends on what you want to do. But if I'm living somewhere and I'm like, How do I want to buy stuff? Here's the number one piece of advice I can do. Just go on to Facebook and search for this phrase, real estate meet up. And just go.

I love it.

Just go. Because being around people that are doing what you're doing or doing what you want to do is the fastest way to get there. You can sit in your room and watch YouTube videos, and you can learn everything you need to do from YouTube University. I get that. But there's nothing more motivating going around other people that are actually doing what you want to do. Because hopefully, everybody has this little toxic trait. This is my biggest toxic trait, right? And hopefully, everybody has a little bit of this in them, which is when you hear somebody that is making money that's doing something, you think to yourself, I could do that. Of course. I could totally do that.

For sure, and better.

Yeah, I'm smart than this guy. I could kill this. I'm going to crush this. But you don't get that feeling unless you're actually around other humans that are doing this. That's how you decide what you want to do. You don't know until you get around it. But here's the thing. The only reason I have the opportunity, like I just talked about, I didn't Google opportunity to buy notes. I'm in a very high-level mastermind group with real estate investors. I met that guy at that mastermind. There's a reason that I have that. I have that return, that opportunity, because of that relationship. I know how big you are with networking, and it all comes down to that.

My next question is about investing into yourself. Why is it important to invest to go to real estate masterminds if they're in the real estate category? Why invest in real estate masterminds, real estate coaches, watching free things on investing the time, not necessarily money, the time to watch things on YouTube, et cetera? Why is it so important to learn and network from investing in yourself?

Because most people sell themselves short, I think. Going back to the book, right? Most people tell themselves a story about who they should be, the economic ceiling that sits above them, what's possible, what's capable, what you can do. Until you, the fastest way to change your situation is change the people that you're around. When I talk about The Apprentice and that experience being on reality television, the biggest thing for me to take away wasn't, yeah, being on television, having eight million people watch every week was great, and the exposure we got from that was, I can't even quantify what that value was. But the real value to me was that was the first time I'd been around 18 people in a confined space like that that were getting it. I mean, that we're just really, really getting it. When I went on that show, because I did, I hustled my way on it, I was probably... I figured out pretty quick, and this is a gun about changing your room and investing in yourself and understanding what's possible. When I got on that show, I hustled my way on. Pretty quick when you walk in a room, you can surmise it.

You can look around and say, Where do I rank on the smart category in here? Where am I stacking up here? Pretty quick. I can surmise pretty fast where I am. On that show, I would say I was probably in the smart category in the top five. Of the 18 people there. But financially at the time, I was probably bottom two or three. And so I'm like, Wait a second. Why is there this disparity? And the answer was within me. So investing in yourself to learn new skills is great, but I think it's more important to understand what's possible.

When you go to a mastermind event, what are you hoping to happen? Are you there to learn, there to network, all of the above? What do you want to happen going through a three-day mastermind weekend, for example?

Well, okay. I think there's different kinds of masterminds, and there's some that are really heavily built on networking and shaking hands. Then there's some that are like, one of the reasons I love his mastermind my boardroom, is because you present your business and they pull it apart. Sure. They beat you up. I mean, I used to say it was the only eight days a year where I didn't feel sexy. Nobody told me how great I was for those eight days. They pulled it apart until I was dumb you are. I was always looking there. But for the most part, for me, it's all about creating relationships. The way that you create great relationships is by creating value for people. I'm always looking to, how can I help as many people here as I can? I think if you walk into that room with, how can I genuinely help as many people as you can, you'll be really surprised at what comes back to you. But I also think you've got to... It's a fine line, dude, because you want to help people, right? But you've also got to maintain this humility. Sure. One of the stories that I love is a guy named Leon Washington.

Do you know Trap? Wall Street trapper? Have you ever met him? Oh, yes. All right, Trap. Trap came, and nobody knew who Trap was. First day, I'm sitting next to him, we're talking. We're just talking, and we're He was just so gracious. He carried himself through so much grace through that room. As we walked around, as we talked, he was like... When I talked to him, he was like, Man, I paid six million dollars in taxes last year, some crazy number. I was like, or 2 million, whatever it was. I was like, What? What are you talking about? Then we started talking about his business, and I was like, Here's this guy that's sitting in this room, so grateful to everybody that's pouring into him. And financially, he probably could have turned out the lights of half the people in that room. This guy is balling at a level that they're just not there. And then he's being like, Thank you so much for helping me. It was a great lesson. Like, as much as you want to be the man sometimes, we all get a little competitive, and that ego kicks in, to sometimes walk with grace, learn a lot more.

Sure.

So on the investing side, there's the stock market, cash flow in businesses, cryptocurrency, and obviously, real estate and so many other things. With having all these different options, how can someone decide, I'm going to dive into real estate. I want to gamble and go invest into cryptocurrency. I want to just buy Tesla, Amazon, Google, Netflix stocks. There's so many options. How do people decide when there's so many things that are going on in their minds?

Well, I think real estate investing, for me, you're already doing it, especially if you're young. Buy a house, get three roommate. If you buy a house and get three roommates, guess what? You're a real estate investor. That's fun. Because those three roommates are paying your bills. They're covering the whole thing, and then you can go buy another one. You can start that way. I know everybody likes to talk that buy a duplex and live in one and then rent the other one Yeah, if you live in Vegas, there are no good... Don't even call me about a fourplex in Vegas. There are no nice fourplexes in Vegas. They do not exist.

Let's see if I have six figures to remodel.

It's the place you start. The one problem I have with so many of you is many of the big influencers are talking about real estate, even if you look at Grant, right? He says, owning a house is the dumbest thing you can do. My dad used to say, Don't ever buy a protest sign from the guy that tells you about the cause. That's what he used to say. And I love that statement because the same guy that's telling you, Don't go out and invest in single-family homes or buy a home, but send me all your money so I can put it in my fund to buy multifamily. Okay, is that necessarily-Congruent? Congruent, right? Is that true? Because to me, it's a bigger risk to send your money off to somebody to invest in a multifamily deal. Right now, a lot of those syndicated multifamily deals are getting murdered because they were all based on All of their performance, all of the financials on those multifamily syndication deals were all based on the fact that rates were going to come down, and they haven't. There's a bunch of them that are in deep, deep trouble right now.

You're going to see probably a lot of those deals fall apart and go to foreclosure. You're going to see that soon if rates It's not going to change. But you can go out and invest in real estate by yourself with no money down by doing sub-2 and structuring deals creatively to do that. You have control of the situation. The one thing about, like you said, crypto and stocks and all those things. Dirt is never going to go to zero. There will never be a time on planet Earth when somebody says, How much is that lot? And they say it's zero. Sure. It's never going to happen. Now, could a company go to zero? Absolutely. Can crypto go to zero? Tomorrow. Coins go to zero every day. I think the problem with it is when you talk about crypto, especially, and yes, crypto should be part of your portfolio. I think it's an aggressive growth strategy. That's fine. But crypto So to me, in a lot of the ways that people use it, especially with the meme coins and all that stuff, that's gambling. Literally gambling. That's not investing. So when you're thinking about, Oh, should I invest in crypto?

Or should I invest in real estate? That's not even the same sport. That's completely different. One is going to the casino and one is going to the bank. So go to the bank first. Yes, play at the casino, keep your money at the bank.

All right, let's talk about the charity side, about giving money away. Why do you think that businesses or business executives should have a charity component for their customers, clients, vendors, employees, et cetera, to see them doing something to do with philanthropy?

Well, I think there was... Not that I think. There was a study that came out that I think Harvard did a study, I don't remember how long ago it was, saying that they did a... Was it a study or they did a survey? But it was something like 8 out of 10 consumers said they would want to do business with a company that has a charitable component. So if no other reason, I think that's a good reason to do But more to the point, if the money... It's like Cole Hatter says with Thrive, making money matter, right? And yeah, we all like to get nice stuff, and you hit a certain point where it just gets a little hollow.

You become numb to it.

Yeah, you get a little numb. And then you have something happen that really affects you. For years, we've always had this thing where the for sale sign's for my personal real estate team. A lot of them say, have writers on the bottom and say, pull, honey, stop the car, whatever that nonsense is that realtor's on the bottom of the signs. Our signs say a portion of the commission from the sale of this house will go to, and then the writers are the actual charities. We normally do four and let the seller pick which charity they want to have hanging in front of their house, is what we normally do. But unfortunately, a good friend of mine a couple of years ago came down with ALS, John Hopkins, who's the bass player in the Zack Brown Band. Now, 100% of what we do goes to Hop on a cure, which is his thing. Because I think when you get really personally affected by that, by something that's tragic, I think it changes your view on charitable.

And you put more energy into it.

A little more energy into it, yeah. We got an event tonight with him, actually, which is great. Oh, really? Yeah.

I'm going to break down. You guys have heard me say this probably once every six months. You will become numb to your second and third watch. You will become numb to your second and third car. You will never visit your fourth bedroom at your house. If there's just you and your kid, one person, you're never going to go to the fourth bedroom. It's not going to happen. And everyone wants this big patio. You don't go on your patio that much. You go in your backyard. You don't go on the patio on the second floor that much. It looks cool. You don't really go on your balcony that much. I say that because too many times we've watched people raise their overhead. We watch them go from making eight grand a month to 10, 10 grand to 13. 13 grand to 25. Start crushing it, and they have the exact same amount in their bank account and a little more debt, actually. Because we went from a two bedroom apartment to four bedroom. You got a second and third car. You got a second and third watch. You will become numb to it. Now, I am not saying to If you're not going to have a goal of your first watch, your first car, the thing that you want, upgrading your car one day.

I can pinky swear from the bottom of my heart. John's got hundreds of friends and clients over the years that will tell you the same thing. You will not care about that third car, ever. Once that new car smell goes away six days later, it's just another car in your garage. You're probably sticking to your Tesla or your Range Rover, your daily car. You're not going to drive the Lamborghini that much because it's not comfortable. You're not going to drive it. And so I just say this because we are trying to be flashy for people on social media that don't actually care about you. I care about the people that are going to be at my funeral. There's only going to be 100 people in my funeral, if that. And so because of that, the other million people that see it, they don't actually care what they think. That's why I'm not wearing a watch right now. That's why I don't show flashy cars. I don't have a flashy car. I don't own one because I don't care about building that perception. And I've watched so many of our friends, peers, people we look up to, and billionaires and zillionaires that are numb to the second, third, and fourth thing.

And so I implore you, go have the goal of that one watch or that one car, that one thing that you want. But please don't waste your money buying the other 40 grand thing and 200 grand thing to try to impress other people. John, on the charity side, what about in your household? Why is it important for a household? You have kids or wife, husband, etc. Why should they see some type of philanthropy part or take part in it, not necessarily the money part?

Well, two reasons. Number one, one of the goals, I think, when you raise kids is you want them to be the best humans they can be. You want them to grow up to be kids that set goals, that are kind, that have feelings and empathy for others. I found when you raise children with wealth and around money, it becomes harder for them to do that. Exposing them to acts of kindness, acts of charity, does two things for me. Number one is it's going to build that empathy muscle within them. It's going to build that the world is a bigger place than my 7,700-square-foot house. The world is bigger than first class. But what it also does, it allows them to see, Hey, the coin can be flipped pretty quick. Like your mom, my wife grew up on the verge of abject poverty. It's not that far away. You guys are not like six generations, Rockefeller deep away from2 classes away. Yeah, from being here. This isn't that far away. So you want them to see a little bit of how the other side lives. I love when we travel, we don't just necessarily go to all the tourist places.

We try to go to where the locals are. We try to go to places where they can see how the world is. One of my favorite sayings that's ever been said in this room is, I've never seen a well-traveled racist, but I've also seen... I've never seen anybody that's seen abject poverty in third-world countries that doesn't really appreciate daily what they have.

When I went to India, it literally changed my whole soul. Yeah.

That was Cairo for me. It was like, wow. You go to parts of Dominican Republic, whatever, when you're on vacation, you're like, Oh, this is not good. But man, I haven't been to India, but I'll tell you, Cairo was something else.

Yeah, in Cairo and in India, they're literally on the sides of the street, on the freeway, living on the side of the freeway. Yeah. Just like hundreds of thousands of people, not a couple of hundred. Hundreds of thousands of people. And then you have to step over them to go into Nobu. It's a weird dynamic in these countries of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. It's stuck in my soul, stuck in my mind. So there's only one question I ask the same on every single episode, and I've never gotten the same answer before. Fifty years, 100 years from Well, unfortunately, John Gaffard finally passes away. What percentage of that net worth, after you built Simply Vegas from 585 reps to 5,000 reps, you built this humongous company, what percentage of that networth you leave to your children?

I want my My children... The answer I've always given to this, I want my children to have enough money that they can do anything that they want, but not so much that they can do nothing.

I love that.

That's it. I want them to have every opportunity that all of the things that we've done, the hard work that we put forth, can offer them. But they're not going to be able to sit around and do nothing.

All right. Tell people about the book more in-depth. I want to hear more about it.

Again, the book is my user's manual to my 27-year-old dipstick self. But it's one of those things where when you look at what's happening in the country right now, I think you've got this whole generation of young men that are drifting along. You've got a massive problem there. Then you combine that with AI coming down the pipe, there's a tsunami coming, and nobody is coming to save you. You've got to be willing to save yourself. I think When I wrote this book, I didn't want it to just be hyperbole. I didn't want it to just be stories. I wanted it to be real stories from my life of things, problems and things that I had, but also lessons in actual planning that you can do. Okay, do A through Z, and then you'll get this. This is the actual playbook for what you need to do to get yourself out from being at the mercy of somebody else and taking control of your life. Because I promise you, if you do not take control of the direction of your life, somebody else is going to do it for you, and you're not going to like where you wind up.

Where can people follow you, check out the book, et cetera?

You can find me. All my handles are at the John Gaffer Instagram, all those places. Podcast, Escaping the Drift as well. And everywhere, books are sold, man. It's out there, and check it out.

The podcast is called Escaping the Drift?

Podcast is also called Escaping the Drift. That's great. Stayed on brand.

All right, guys, I'm going to have to write a Money Monday's book now because I'm inspired by John. All right, as you guys know, these episodes are not just for you. Your friends, family, and followers from your past, present, and future might want to be listening to this episode. Not all these episodes are going to be for you. I might bring on Gary Brecker to talk about health, and then I bring on John Gaffer to talk about real estate investing in charity. When there's people in your world having these open lines of communication to talk about money, talk about business, investing, taxes, things that we're talking on these episodes, it's super, super important. So we can change the narrative that it's rude to talk about money. It is not rude. It's ridiculous to not talk about it because it's part of our daily lives. You making money, you spending money on your family, your parents, health care, insurance, bills, electricity. All these things are part of your normal life. We have to have these discussions. I appreciate you guys sharing the Money Mondays with your friends, family, and followers. When you see these podcasts, make sure you're liking, commenting, and subscribing.

It helps us keep this ad free. I did take a sponsorship deal, as you guys heard, with Go High Level because I actually use it for years. You've seen me use Go High Level, and I talk about it with passion, but I'm not offering you discount codes or coupon codes. Just go research Go High Level. It's very useful people that have courses, businesses, and online sales. And I've done it ad-free this whole time because I want you guys to have this intense time to really listen to everything that we're talking about because these guests care. You can see that John cares. He's built up a great business here. So check him out. Obviously, if you're in the Vegas area or you know someone in the Vegas area, they need real estate. Obviously, they are all encompassing here at Simply Vegas. I appreciate you guys listening to Money Mondays. We will see you guys next Monday here on moneymondays. Com.