108: How Real Estate Mogul Built A 9-Figure Empire with Ari Rastegar

Today, I’m sitting down with Ari Rastegar, a real estate investor, best-selling author, and the Founder of Rastegar Property Company – a vertically integrated, real estate investment firm based in Austin, TX that focuses on recession resilient assets.

Over his life, Ari transitioned from an English major to a lawyer to a 9-figure real estate CEO who has been called the “King of Austin Real Estate.” He has developed more than 3.5 million square feet of property across the U.S. and has been featured in publications like The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and The New York Times.

In this episode, Ari joins me to talk about the building of his international real estate company from scratch, how he used the time during the COVID pandemic as a springboard to exponential success, and the tenets of philosophy and biohacking that guide his personal and professional growth.

Inspiring Quotes

• “Our entire business model is centered around people.” – Ari Rastegar

• “​​I’m a nobody from nowhere. Someone like me is not supposed to make anything.” – Ari Rastegar

• “We don’t make sales, we make friends.” – Ari Rastegar

• “All of this started with hunger. I hear some of these podcasts talk about the single traits that change people. I hear grit, I hear resilience, I hear determination. None of that can exist without hunger.” – Ari Rastegar

• “I find that our greatest enemy is always going to be ourselves.” – Ari Rastegar

• “If you jump enough hurdles and you fall enough and you have a hunger that pulls you to something that’s bigger than you, your chances of success are exponentially higher.” – Ari Rastegar

• “You’re not a manager of circumstance. You’re actually a creator.” – Ari Rastegar

• “You would think that when people invest they just want to make money. That is a massive, massive misnomer.” – Ari Rastegar

• “Being a great follower first is how you become a great leader.” – Ari Rastegar

• “​​Bulls make money. Good markets make money. Bad markets make money. But pigs? Slaughterhouse — every single time.” – Ari Rastegar

• “The greatest luxury in life is peace.” – Ari Rastegar

• The size & scope of Ari’s real estate business
• How Ari structures real estate deals
• Investing in markets, humanity, and empathy
• The most valuable entrepreneurial trait
• Lebron James, Drake, and investor capital
• Operating in multiple real estate asset classes
• Changing your reality by conquering the self
• Is there a best real estate class to invest in?
• The value of being an apprentice
• Ari’s daily personal improvement routine

Brad Weimert: Ari Rastegar, I appreciate you coming out to the studio, man.

Ari Rastegar: Thanks for having me.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely. So, you are one of the few, not really few but native Austinians.

Ari Rastegar: It’s true.

Brad Weimert: I love connecting with people that are actually here, building here, quite literally in your case. So, I want to get into history a little bit and talk about your current journey but can you give me some kind of size and scope of your current enterprise? So, it’s a bunch of different real estate, and I know that you have done deals in something like 38 cities, 12 states, 7 different asset classes. So, you’ve got this overarching real estate empire that you’re building. Anything else you can elaborate on there to give everybody else an idea of the size and scope of what you’re doing?

Ari Rastegar: Sure. I think kind of figuring out where you are is kind of looking back and where you came from I think is a good gauge. I started the business with a $3,500 loan, and it’ll be the nine-year anniversary on February 7, 2024. And as you said, we’ve been in 13 states, 38 cities, 7 asset classes, and 2 countries. And our approach has been about job growth and population migration trends more than anything. And Sunbelt has really been our focus but there can be micro-population changes like we’ve invested in parts of Connecticut at one point that we’re seeing a resurgence as people left parts of New York. Our entire business model is centered around people. And what we found is that even as we’ve become a more technological enterprise, we use that data to inform deeper human relationships. So, what I found in the real estate business is that it always ends in a person. Like, even data centers, we have 600,000 square feet of industrial next to Tesla’s Gigafactory, next to the F1 track, more specifically, that we bought before the Gigafactory was there and about 50 acres and partnered with a massive firm out of New York.

And in the process of doing industrial, you would think that with logistics and cold storage and all the different things that go in, it’s about business. But what I’ve learned in this process is business is people. And that’s become a little cliched but at this point in my life with we have close to 1 million square feet under construction in Austin alone that’s completing over the next 30 to 60 days, if you fully develop everything we have, the 318 acres in Kyle that we’re doing horizontal infrastructure work on for a thousand houses, 1,400 multi-units, 50,000 square feet of retail, and building the new elementary school, all of that is actually in development and pre-development now. So, that stuff alone is well over $1 billion in value. And it’s probably a small part of our portfolio if you took everything under consideration. So, the scale is certainly from in the billions. And I’m the sole founder. I own 100% of the company. Never took equity at the corporate level, per se. Our investors are predominantly public pension funds, first responder like the firefighter groups, the firefighters of Tyler, of Port Arthur, long-view fantastic human beings all the way to Texas medical liability insurance company, athletes, celebrities, doctors.

We’ve run the gamut on the type of investor base that we’ve spoken with. And I think it’s a little bit unique about what we’ve done is when people start to raise capital because so much of the private real estate investment business or private equity in general is about investor capital. It’s about sourcing good financing, finding good deals, and then sharing in profits together. We have focused more around performance than on fees. When I was in New York on Wall Street, proverbially, the way that those businesses are run and I don’t think it’s anything nefarious. I think it’s just a different business model is people are rewarded for capital raising. And there was something about that to me that I want to be rewarded for performance. And that model has really permeated everything we’ve done. So, Nietzsche used to say that, “I don’t believe in trust but I believe in mutual self-interest.” And I found that when you look at people, we’re not nearly as philanthropic as we’d like to believe. And most people are stuck in their own heads.

And if you start to accept that, as people being obsessed with themselves, you start to find ways to hook in self-interest that’s mutually beneficial. And it sounds a little bit cynical on its face but it’s quite human when you peel that onion. One of my least favorite phrases I should say is, “It’s just business.” I don’t know what’s more personal than my kids’ money or a doctor’s retirement or a firefighter’s pension that’s saving people’s lives every day. So, to me, there’s nothing more personal than business and that’s the approach that we’ve taken to everything we’ve done. So, if we go buy a deal, we speak with a broker. It’s a person with a bank. You have a representative. They’d issue a loan and they pool them together, and they sell it as bonds on the public market and put it in human beings for one case. We’ve started to see in the world that is filled with noise, we’d like to amplify humanity. And that goes into the way we’re designing our Kyle project, letting design inform community whether that’s larger sidewalks, whether that’s alley-loaded homes, whether that’s eliminating dining rooms to make larger kitchens, ways that bring more human interaction by the very nature of the bricks themselves. That is the way we actually look at the world.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, I want to dig into some of the specifics of the real estate but the metrics around the company, I think, they’re super important to me because in a world filled with as much noise as we have where people are trying to pontificate and be important and be the guru, it’s really relevant to know what’s actually happening behind the scenes. So, looking at what’s on the table, it’s being developed, I think it’s super helpful to let people know, “Hey, I should listen to Ari.” The other…

Ari Rastegar: I don’t know about it. I don’t know about all that.

Brad Weimert: Well, the other is you said mutual self-interest. I have long said that altruism doesn’t exist, and I truly believe that if even… And that’s not a bad thing. It’s even if you want to do something good, ultimately, it’s at a minimum. It’s because it makes you feel good to do something good, right? It’s still the self-interest that drives that. So, I love that framework. Before we dive into the specifics or more into the current things we’ve got on the table and what’s going on, can you give me an idea of where… You mentioned a $3,500 loan, I think, to start the business. Can we start there and how you got into business in the first place? Was it real estate? Was it something else? What was the jump-off point?

Ari Rastegar: Well, I’ve screwed up pretty much everything in my life over the years. Start with that.

Brad Weimert: One other thing. Can you pull this a little bit closer to you?

Ari Rastegar: Sure.

Brad Weimert: Thanks.

Ari Rastegar: I guess, I want to start with I pretty much screwed up everything that I’ve ever tried in my life. And, in fact, I wrote an entire book called The Gift of Failure. And the first line of the book is, “I hope you fail and I hope you fail a lot.” There was a time that I thought that these hardships or these problems were, in fact, problems and not to get into the personal development world, which I’m a huge believer in because I’m a kid. I’m a nobody from nowhere. You know, someone like me is not supposed to make anything. I don’t have any special talents, not tall, athletic. I’m just a regular guy. I mean, I’m flipping burgers at Johnny Rockets when I was in high school and delivering pizzas through college. In fact, I didn’t even get to Texas A&M. I graduated top of my class when they finally let me in but that’s not before going to Blinn College, before being able to transfer in. I’m very much a late bloomer. And coming to terms with that was quite the journey for me. And there were several tools that went into that. I wanted to build myself. And then the natural iteration was to build something if that makes sense. It started when I was at St. Mary’s Law School right before the 2007-2008 market correction. I was driving back and forth to law school in San Antonio.

Brad Weimert: Can I ask you a question on the law school thing real quick?

Ari Rastegar: Sure.

Brad Weimert: So, had you not decided… So, law school is an interesting choice because for a lot of people I know, they get into law school because they don’t know what else to do or they get into law school because they want to be an attorney.

Ari Rastegar: Or they have an Iranian father that only accepts being a medical doctor or a lawyer as validating your own self-worth.

Brad Weimert: Perfect. Well, there we go. That’s what I wanted to know.

Ari Rastegar: But my dad’s exact words, and it’s in the book, he said, “Son, after you become a lawyer, you can be an exotic dancer for all I care but after that, you’ll be an exotic dancer-lawyer. Whatever you do this and lawyer. You’ll be a businessman-lawyer. And I think that’s still true what you said. I certainly didn’t have the directionality. I knew I loved to read. And so, I was an English major in undergrad. First of all, I don’t know what kind of idiot writes a book called Failure who manages money for a living, nor who goes to Texas A&M University Agriculture Mechanical and studies English Literature. But reading has always been something for me and to say the least, I’m a voracious reader. Anybody that knows me knows that it’s not strange for me to go through 200, 300, 400 books a year for the past 25 years. People ask me a lot, like, “When do you have time to read?” And my response is always like, “I don’t know when do I have time not to read.”

One of my great meditation and kind of mentors, so to speak, recall something that one of the sages, I guess, of the past would talk about as, say, the person that doesn’t have 20 minutes to meditate should meditate for an hour, and the person that doesn’t have the 20 minutes to read should be reading for three hours, if that makes sense. And going along that path of driving back and forth from Spring Branch, Texas to San Antonio, I started to see these signs. It was like say, “Oh, for sale. Sold. For sale. Sold. For sale. Sold.” And I got a $10,000 scholarship when I went to St. Mary’s Law School. Dean Patty Roberts is a dear friend of mine, is actually a client of ours as well. And the former dean, Dean Charles Cantu, was very gracious with me during those years. He kind of asked me, he’s like, “Why are you in work boots? It’s like you’ve been late to classes you’re going to fail out from. What are you doing?” And I was like, “Well, I took part of my student loan money, $3,500, and I bought a lot in Spring Branch to build a house.”

And I kept seeing this name, Dougan and Dougan and Dougan and all of these signs. And I showed up at the office one day and said, “Look, I bought this lot for $3,500. I don’t have any credit. I don’t have any money. You know how to build it. But if you will go and sign on this loan with me at the local bank, Security State and Trust Bank, I’ll pay the interest payments. I’ll put them in an escrow. And when the house is sold, we’ll split the profits 50/50.” That exact model is still my model to this day.

Brad Weimert: Wow. So, you are, what, 24, 25 doing that?

Ari Rastegar: 23, 24, yeah.

Brad Weimert: Had you heard about this from somebody? Heard about the model? Or was this like shooting from the hip, “Let me just see if they’ll bite on it?”

Ari Rastegar: I was just trying to get away to get in the door, and I didn’t know how to say, “You don’t have to put any money in. You don’t have to take any ill. Let me put the onus on me to buy this thing,” or find it in the area it was growing. And when we completed the house, we sold it to my girlfriend at the time’s father who passed away, yeah, I say recently. To me, it feels recently. It was about ten years ago. He was a mentor of mine. Beautiful, beautiful man. He bought it for $115,000. That’s for his wife, who’s still a dear friend and a client of ours, still lives in it today. And I think it’s worth close to $400,000. So, the macro of it was really powerful because it had to do with this growth. And I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination, I was smart enough to understand what we were doing. It was just something that felt authentic to me, and it felt aligned. It felt right. And in hindsight, going back and forth. Steve Jobs used to say, you don’t connect the dots moving forward. You connect them going backwards. So, I’m looking backwards and mining for gold. There’s been this golden thread of authenticity between them and a lot of hurdles and a lot of failures along the way.

And I think we like to beat ourselves up when things happen. I’m at the top of that list but the difference, I think, is how we continue to show up first for ourselves. Because if you can’t show up for yourself and you can’t get to know your demons by their first name, it’s very hard to lead people. And if you look at our million square feet, you’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands of construction workers, teams, architects, engineers, asset managers, lenders, and you factor in all the people that are touched. A single loan, CIBC, the largest bank in Canada, financed our industrial project next to Tesla. The loan, I think, was around 46 million. When you take that loan and you look at where the loan ends up pooled with other hundreds if not billions of dollars of loans and then packaged and sold, you start to respect the amplification and the sheer breadth of the people that are involved.

And in looking in that, I kept thinking to myself, “Well, I want people to trust me. I want people to believe in me.” But if I’m second guessing myself and not believing in myself, and I’m riddled with worries and riddled with doubt whether I care to admit it openly, there’s an energy that’s permeating that shows that. And it wasn’t until I had deeper confidence in our model that the biggest institutions in the world started to listen and started to come along and started to believe in our project. And just because we made money over these years doesn’t negate the risk that they took. And I think when you put people yourself in other people’s shoes and you recognize that they’re human beings, they’re not making investments, these are real people, you start to garner true empathy. And they talk about, “Well, how do you make sales?” People say all the time, “Well, at Rastegar, we don’t make sales. We make friends.” And there’s a way to do that by talking to a stranger. If you truly ask what a salesperson would call qualifying questions, if you actually start to ask questions and find commonality, sorry to break to everybody, you’re not that unique.

You have a human condition. You both eat. You both have family, your friends. You have worries. And when you carve into that, you say, “Oh, well, my sister went to Bolivia.” “Oh, I love Bolivia.” “Oh, you like food? I like food.” And you start weaving these personal things, then you start to develop a true relationship in the process. Profit, to me, is not a bad word. Profit is employment. We are custodians of capital. And as builders, the builders of the world have been the custodians of community. Design has informed the growth of civilization. And when you look at that through the eyes of an artist because I’ve told people for years, “I’m not a businessman.” Jay-Z I think said it best for me, “In the parlance of our times, I’m not a businessman. I am a businessman but I’m an artist at my core.” The building on East State around the corner we were able to rezone a small property that I think a lot of people have overlooked. We rezoned it to build a two-story office building that has balconies, that has staircases on the outside, has profound Hepa filters because we did it all during COVID. So, it was in response to saying, “What is the…”

You know, people are going to continue to work, contrary to popular belief. Remote work is hurting the human condition in a lot of ways because the productivity from the business enterprise is one thing but the human connections that we gain from working together and being in the trenches, we are tribal beings. And so, we thought, “Okay. Maybe building a 70-story office building in Austin is probably not the best choice at the moment but a two-story building that overlooks the entire city that we call Infinity Views that’s in response to COVID is needed. And we’ve seen a wild interest for a boutique super class A project that’s here. But again, we find that the best businesses in the world not to say we’re in that category by any stretch of the imagination is in response to a true need or illuminating a need that people might not consciously have known at the time, i.e., the iPhone. But this time is a very peculiar time. We’re reaching an inflection point where information technology not only grows exponentially but it accelerates exponentially. So, for us, middle child, I’m actually the oldest millennial. So, to the young people, I’m the old guy.

Brad Weimert: Right. Geriatric millennial.

Ari Rastegar: I am a geriatric millennial. Never heard that. I love that. I’m going to use it. But I’m the young guy. I was a 41-year-old CEO running a multibillion-dollar platform. And for the record, I’m just getting started. Like, I’ve never felt better in my life. I take health and wellness more seriously than, I guess, a Google search would probably show more about what I’m doing as my health regimen because I believe businesses are an extension of self, and I think we’re in our best selves. We’re not bifurcating business, certainly as entrepreneurs, with life. Like, doing business and doing life is a very similar thing. So, when you look at the 600,000-square-foot industrial project, it’s on 130 on the tollway. 130 starts up in Round Rock, Georgetown. It loops around the east and ends and Buda just north of Kyle. So, the industrial backbone, when Tesla moves their headquarters, Oracle moves their headquarters, you need people to work. But where are they going to live? Those types of workers are priced out of the market.

Of my Austin, I was born in Seton Hospital in 35th Street and we live at Chevy Chase apartments. It’s still there. I’ve been trying to buy it for years, a little more expensive than I could pay. But if anybody’s listening, I’m open to buy. But that’s responsive. That’s responsive to building that thing because those workers are going to need a place and then they’re going to need housing that’s within a viable distance between Austin and San Antonio. The assets themselves, we don’t invest in individual assets per se. We invest in markets.

Brad Weimert: Well, I want to get there because you hit on a whole bunch of stuff, some around leadership, some around personal development, who you have to be to be the right leader, some perspective on those things. The people-first mentality is an interesting one coming from the Iranian father that said, “You can be a dancer if you want but you’re going to be a lawyer-dancer.” So, you start with one house and you end up with seven different asset classes. People first. There’s a big gap there. And there are tons of questions with that path about where your focus is, how you learn the things, right, the tactical things that come into this. Where did you go from one house after being an attorney and diving into real estate? And with that, I think it’s important to note, why did you think about buying the house in the first place? You saw the signs but had you looked at real estate investors? Had you learned about real estate investing? Did you see some infomercial? Where was the beginning and what was the next step there?

Ari Rastegar: My good friend, Jay Abraham, used to say, “Questions are the answer.” So, I appreciate the question because if you don’t ask the right question, you’re not going to get the right answer. And that certainly is the right question. I’ve studied greatness my entire life for being an awkward kid that didn’t really fit in, wasn’t too good at school, parents divorced when I was really young, and there was a time that I thought that life was happening to me. So, I found inspiration and reading about the greatest people. And I’m not a big sports guy but when Tom Brady was playing, I watched. I don’t really care for basketball but when some of my clients that are some of the greatest athletes in the world, I watch them. You know, when Michael played, I watched him. I didn’t watch the Bulls. I was interested in what Kobe thought about Michael so much that my thesis in undergrad was why Mark Twain resented the real William Shakespeare.

And so, I’ve been always interested in what great people think about each other, the relationship that Teddy Roosevelt had with Czar Nicholas. He said to his daughter one time that, “The path that we walk is so lonely that our enemies are oftentimes our only friends.” And in learning these things, I knew that I didn’t want to be poor. And from being poor most of my life, and knowing that my family in Iran were quite literally royalty to some degree. You know, my grandfather was the Shah of Iran’s medical doctor. My namesake, General Rastegar, was number two in command. And when the regime changed, they killed our whole family. And my grandma and grandpa escaped by the skin of their teeth, literally. My grandpa said, “Leave me here and I want to die,” when they were escaping to the mountains of Iran to Turkey, and my grandma wasn’t having it, put him on the back of a donkey, and they went to Istanbul for a year.

And hearing the stories, I remember my grandfather and my dad still to this day telling me these grandiose stories of this empire. My grandmother, to tell you where Iran was at that time, went to law school. She passed away in her 80s. So, for those things to happen at that time and imagine a world, and my grandma, grandpa, and my father would very early tell me to close my eyes and say this government housing and the things that we’re living like, “This is not your life. This wasn’t supposed to be your life,” they gave me the gift of dreaming, and I knew that I didn’t want to be poor. And so, my father moved us incredibly sacrificial and powerful, he moved us into Highland Park, which is the richest neighborhood in Dallas. But we lived in student housing. So, college kids were on the other side of our duplex but I got to go to one of the richest schools. So, the poorest kid in the richest neighborhood but I got to be around wealth, and it made me highly insecure and very conscious of my shortcomings, which created an insatiable appetite to build and to create.

I tell you all of that because all of this started with hunger. I think I hear some of these podcasts and things talk about what are the single traits that change people. I hear grit. I hear resilience. I hear these different determination. None of that can exist without hunger. I was literally starving. And I still am today. It’s like I have a tapeworm in my stomach. No matter how big it gets. But I’m not a very materialistic person. I don’t do Rolexes and Ferraris and things like that. I’d wear a nice, tailored suit. My tailor has made all the suits for every president since Eisenhower. He’s an Auschwitz survivor in Brooklyn.

Brad Weimert: Wow. I bet he’s got stories.

Ari Rastegar: Yes, he does and his son, Jay, who’s a very dear friend of mine. So, I go there to get my suits made to put on this uniform, so to speak. My grandpa would say, “Put on the uniform of a general and try to lay on the couch.” It just doesn’t work. And so, the suits and the ties, I might be the last idiot in Austin that wears a three-piece suit to work most days but you either find me in kind of pajamas. My friend, Daniel Patrick, designed these sweats that I love so much. He’s out of Los Angeles. Just unbelievable human being. Close to some of the greatest people in the country. And I like hearing those stories about entrepreneurs that people go out there and fill a need and follow their passion because they have a hunger for something. But I really believe that it starts with your own hunger of self and in the way of serving yourself first. The greatest performers in the world are all selfish on its face but until you look at the impact that the selfishness becomes transmuted into contribution. So, being around the people that are doing it that have their hands dirty, I’m still on the front lines of talking to new clients.

To this day, I know every single one of my investors on a first-name basis. I texted every single one of them on Thanksgiving with no CRM. I’m not a big computer guy. I’ve done most of the stuff on my phone. But I found that the more that I built myself and the more that I took responsibility and the more that I stopped pointing fingers, the bigger the business got. And so, every time you’re hitting a road, a roadblock, so to speak, if you think about it as a hurdle. So, one of my friends, Ashley Spencer, she’s an Olympian, amazing, amazing athlete, human being, she runs hurdles. And I’ve come to find that I think life is running hurdles more than anything. Running a straight line on the track, I feel like is not as difficult as every time you’re running, something else is put in front of you. So, I’ve asked, what is the advice for entrepreneurs? And the advice is, “Look in the mirror. Go look in the mirror and get to know yourself before anything.” Because if you go out there and you try to build something for somebody else and you don’t know yourself, Julius Caesar used to say, “The greatest enemy in the world will hide in the last place they’ll ever look.”

And I find that our greatest enemy is always going to be ourselves. And then coming to terms with that enemy but we find that our enemies actually can be transmuted into the best friends we’ve ever had, if you play it right. Pray for it for a worthy enemy because it brings out the best in you and that ends up being yourself. And I know that some of this discussion wasn’t supposed to necessarily be about philosophy. It was supposed to be more about taxation and some of these other things so we can talk about them but I have some of the best accountants in the world. We have seven years of audited financials. We put together, we hired a third-party fund administrator very early on to handle all the back office because I am not an accountant.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Ari Rastegar: And I think that sometimes when you’re starting these businesses, you try to wear so many hats and you don’t acknowledge that your superpower is not accounting. Your superpower is not visioning or whatever that is but being honest with yourself to say, “This is what I am great at,” and having the humility to say, “I’m going to go get a great accountant. I’m going to go get a great marketer. I’m going to go get a great…” And we are going to build a team. Because doing it on your own and being a sole owner, I’m more aware today of my shortcomings because sometimes these VCs you see at the beginning, they come in like, “Oh, they took so much equity in the company,” but they also brought their processes and their systems and their networks to where you might have half a watermelon but it’s better than a whole grape.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that those are, you know, it’s really good to hear that. And those lessons come out at different points in people’s journeys or they don’t ever. Hopefully, that’s not the case but back to starting with one house, you have those realizations or you had those realizations at some point and you said, “Hey, I’ve got the self-awareness now to recognize I’m not going to be the tax guy.” Like, let me get other people that can be the tax people because I’m not that guy. Fill in some of the gaps here. So, when did you get to that point and like when did you start to realize, “Hey, I need to have a significant team around me?” It probably wasn’t after the first real estate transaction.

Ari Rastegar: No. Well, after that, we were able to sell the first two houses we did. It didn’t make too much money but made enough to keep going. As a lifetime kind of writer, mediocre writer, but overthinker, professional overthinker, I decided I wanted to go to Hollywood. And so, my wrestling coach growing up, and most of this is in my book, by the way, which is I think spelled out a little bit better that if anybody is bored enough to figure out what I did, they can pick it up on Amazon. But my wrestling coach growing up, and I was a mediocre wrestler at best, his cousin was one of the most decorated financiers in the history of Wall Street. I think he’s done now over $400 billion in financing. He’s a big Cowboys fan, just in spite of his father, who was a lifetime New York Giants fan, makes Sundays fun.

Brad Weimert: Awesome.

Ari Rastegar: He came to Dallas and my best friend, we were ten years old, Major Miller, who’s our Chief of Staff, was invited to that because he worked for my coach in the Venetian plaster business. He said, “Well, maybe you should go to that dinner.” And everything changed. I sat at that table and a few days later when I was practicing law, LeBron James and Drake’s representatives showed up at a law firm that I was working at that was run by someone I call my Uncle John, who is a dear friend of my father’s, dear friend of mine to this day because the NBA All-Star game was in Dallas. And he’s a Vietnam War vet. He’s a six-degree black belt. He doesn’t really watch basketball or listen to rap music. And I get a call on the intercom and says, “Aria,” which is my real name, “Can you come up here for a second?” And one of the gentlemen says, “Do you know who LeBron James is?” It’s like, “Yeah. Yes.” He’s like, “Do you know who Drake is?” I said, “No. I have no idea who that is.” I’m a hip-hop head through and through. I was so upset we had to pay him $5,000 for this performance. I’m like, “Why are we paying this Canadian rapper I’ve never heard of?” It’s like he was here with LeBron like I get we’re paying LeBron $150,000 but why are we paying this guy? Like, who the hell is this guy? He doesn’t have a song.”

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Ari Rastegar: They wanted to do a party in Dallas during NBA All-Star, this typical promoter kind of deals, and the club that they had contracted with lost their liquor license. So, kind of putting my lawyer/growing up in Dallas hat, called a couple of my buddies that had some parties going and I said, “Hey, do you want LeBron to come to your thing?” And it’s NBA All-Star so, obviously, it was like, “Absolutely.” I was like, “We have to bring this guy, Drake. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s going on.” So, we found a venue for them and Drake performed. Bron showed up. Party went off without a hitch. They didn’t lose their money. And I told them that story at dinner and said, “Well, Super Bowl’s in Dallas next year.” He’s like, “You think you can do it again?” I was like, “Find a venue?” He’s like, “No. Idiot. Like, throw a party.” So, that’s when Capital A Entertainment was born. He was the Capital. I was the A, and we went and signed the Black Eyed Peas during the halftime show. We had Diplo, David Guetta, P. Diddy, and we had 400 celebrities walk the red carpet. And those relationships is what was the impetus to that started the capital for the investment business.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. So, this is a great bridge from attorney, flipped a couple of houses to real estate empire. And I know that because I’ve done a little digging. I know that that one didn’t go off without a hitch.

Ari Rastegar: Not only did that one not go off. We had everything done. I went to sleep a millionaire in New York. And then the greatest ice storm in the history of Texas hit. And all the chargebacks started. And I remember looking at the count at negative 800,000. We still have the parties, and the parties were absolutely epic beyond belief and the plan was to do kind of the trifecta and hit NBA All-Star in L.A., which was the next weekend. So, during that time, I was able through some relationships, shout out to my dear friend Gavin, Kylie, and GBK, his event business for running the logistics around figuring that out. But he got us a meeting with the Playboy Mansion, and we cut a deal with Hugh to rent the Playboy Mansion to bring Snoop Dogg to come perform at our Super Bowl. So, L.A., Snoop Dogg. Some nobody kid from Dallas grew up listening to Doctor Dre, it was a dream. And all set up, tickets for $1,000, $1,500 a ticket sold out, ready to go. Legionnaires disease broke out two days before the event.

I watched it on the news. I was sitting in Venice Beach at a little hostel we’d rent. Several of my best friends had come in, and we’d put the thing together, and we had to figure out whether we’re going to cancel this thing. We ended up finding another venue at the Conga Room where tickets were $75. But again, we still had the party. In searching for that venue, I walked into a nightclub in LA that used to be a strip club called Voyeur. And you can’t really make new strip clubs in LA and most parts of the country but if you convert it, you can still keep the license. It’s a voyeur. Voyeur had become this very chic, sexy. They had a little bit of nudity with people up in like nets above the club and just had this really cool mystique. And I was sitting there and one of my dearest friends in the world, he met this young lady that initially kind of told me, “Eh, not interested,” and he kind of did the, “Over here.” And so, being a single guy went over and we spoke and I can just tell she’s a little bit annoyed. I was like, “What is it?” She was like, “Oh, my boss is just here.”

And I look over her shoulder and Johnny Depp is standing behind her. I was like, “Holy sh*t.” It’s like I had the Cry-Baby poster on my wall, embarrassingly, when I was a kid, and I was like, “Oh, holy sh*t, that’s Johnny Depp.” She’s like, “Yeah, it’s my boss.” And by the way, he’s a beautiful human being. Forget the tabloids. Like, for the stories that I know about him of firsthand knowledge, you know, maybe not a saint but a very, very good, beautiful man. Always good to my wife, all the years that she worked for him as his corporate flight attendant. She ended up coming to the party, and we got married nine months later.

Brad Weimert: Crazy.

Ari Rastegar: And in finding out, she told me about this epic party she went to in Dallas that was just unbelievable. And it was just inspired her to come to LA. Turned out she was at the party. We never met.

Brad Weimert: Amazing. Amazing. Wow. What a fun origin story for you and your wife, and from a business perspective. So, filling in some of the gaps here, you start an entertainment company, Capital A, is that what it’s called?

Ari Rastegar: Yep.

Brad Weimert: Started an entertainment company, Capital A. You bring A-class talent to the Super Bowl and the parties around it but because of this massive ice storm, it crushes profitability. So, you launch it. It happens. People enjoy the party but you get so many chargebacks through the process. and people just don’t show up, presumably tied to that that it’s not profitable. You do the same thing for the NBA All-Stars in LA but, again, quiet pandemic hits and wipes out all profit. So, you also don’t make money on that one.

Ari Rastegar: Correct.

Brad Weimert: So, where does that leave Capital A as a company and how does it bridge into full-force real estate?

Ari Rastegar: Well, my investor in that was a real estate mogul and still a very decorated financier in New York and I wanted to be like him and being in those circles and in the true Italian style, big dinners at the fancy restaurants and entertaining big clients. Met someone and met someone and it just migrated into working for a small private equity firm that grew pretty big and learning more about real estate and kind of this kind of fast forward felt like we were in kind of like hyper mode of learning stuff but hearing and learning through osmosis, what was going on in New York, how things worked, how structures were, and realizing that real estate is contracts on its face. So, I was like, “Oh, see, by this and someone,” and demystifying all of the jargon and the internal rates of return and all these different things and seeing success, and seeing that I could talk to people and talk to them about the vision, about the project, sharing the stories of what it was and becoming fast friends with people. And the success of that over a couple of years of working inside some things he was doing, some of his colleagues and people he’d financed, I was too dumb to know that I could do it myself.

Brad Weimert: That’s amazing. So, one of the questions that I always have for people that do multiple asset classes aggressively in real estate is why not double down on one and sort of shiny object syndrome versus deliberate diversification, right? And immediately when I hear you start from private equity, I have a totally different frame for that. Because when you start for private equity and you articulated some of this, you’re coming from a numbers perspective and you’re coming from an investment first perspective, not a mechanical perspective of how do I operate the business, which is embedded in a particular asset class. Running the business of a single-family home or a hotel or a retail center or a warehouse are all fundamentally a little bit different.

Ari Rastegar: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: But the financial mechanics of them from a PE perspective perhaps are similar.

Ari Rastegar: That’s a great point. I looked at it more as a fund-to-fund. I looked at it as because of my relationships and the people that the circles that I was running in, I utilize people that had expert track records that I knew from their lenders, and I knew from the people around. So, I started to introduce people through my own kind of SPV, so to speak, into other people’s deals. So, the inherent diversity I had was working with unbelievable operators in those different asset classes and watching them from a side and garnering their track record, learning their things, and sitting and listening and trusting our clients’ capital with them because of their expertise in multifamily in Connecticut or office in Dallas, or self-storage. And because of that, it made us look a lot smarter than we are. And basically, when those deals started to exit and started to make money, all of a sudden we had a track record investing in 20 cities, even though we had $200,000 in a deal we invested successfully in businesses and reviewing the financial statements and seeing how they did things and asking tough questions that I had no idea what the answers were going to be and just taking diligent notes.

We ended up knowing a lot more than we did and then we’ve translated that now into the, you know, we have four different asset classes we’re constructing at the moment. But we were able, through the knowledge of working with other best-in-class operators, to ask the right questions of the builders, of the bankers, and putting excellent engineers and project managers. We don’t build these projects ourselves. Like, Rudick Construction is an example. Clay Rudick is a dear friend. He’s building our office building there on East State. Raymond Construction. These are phenomenal builders. And we went to them and said, “Here’s the plan. Here’s the vision. Will it work? What do you think?” And by being humble enough to listen to people that are experts and each individual, experts in architecture, experts in tax, experts in audit, having the audited financials, and having the third party admin that could ask other questions of risk controls and great attorneys from DLA Piper and Greenberg Traurig.

And you started to surround yourself by people that knew so much more than you, but as Ray Dalio would say, are believable people. And leaning into people that were believable and doing what we loved initially best was sharing the vision and curating the best operators and the best technicians in the world, and just putting them in the same room.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. I also, first off, Principles is top five ever for me. Yeah, I agree.

Ari Rastegar: Well, he actually published it on the Bridgewater website seven years before it came out as a book. And a friend of mine gave it to me in a PDF in 2014. And I don’t think I lifted my head up for three days. I mean, it was just… And I got to tell Ray in person.

Brad Weimert: Oh, amazing.

Ari Rastegar: I sat front row at a conference in LA and he spoke, and I went up afterwards like a Van Gogh fan. And he told me then to learn to meditate, and I immediately went and learned transcendental meditation. I’m now done all the advanced techniques and I have become what they call a siddha, which is their yogic flying level. I spent a lot of time in Fairfield, Iowa, which is the meditation capital of North America and afterwards I went to another conference. I went up to Ray, had told him he wouldn’t remember me for anything, I’m sure, and said, “Hey, I did the meditation.” And the way he looked at me, he said, “It’s good, right?” I was like, “Yeah, it’s really good.” And he go said, “It only gets better.” And that type of conversation or those kinds of moments, the conferences I did with Tony Robbins and his son, Jairek, has become a good friend of mine who’s an unbelievably epic, epic, epic life coach himself. Being around people that are great in their own right and remembering that I have two ears and one mouth for a reason, and a kid that had a speech impediment and a lisp so bad that I become a little bit better at talking over the years but that was seven years of speech therapy. That was a natural, inborn talent.

You learn that when you believe in something from the depths of your heart, and you share that with another human being, you can tell that they feel what you’re saying. And whether you’re right or wrong is irrelevant but if you believe it with a depth of authenticity, people are going to follow you, whether that’s staff, whether that’s partners, whether that’s deals, whether that’s employees or investors. But to me, it all comes down to the authenticity that you have with what you believe in. Like I said, nothing’s guaranteed in life. I’ve learned that from all my physician investors. You can go get hit by a car tomorrow, God forbid. So, nothing is guaranteed. But we come to learn in degrees of certainty. So, when I think something is great, I kind of just do the, “We’ll see.” I have a high degree of certainty but we’ll see. And we learned that in COVID. We learned it with this black swan event of interest rates rising. And you learn to jump the hurdles over little by little by little. And if you jump enough hurdles and you fall enough and you have a hunger that pulls you something to something that’s bigger than you, your chances of success or exponentially higher.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I was talking to somebody this morning about this frame of good and bad, which I fundamentally don’t believe.

Ari Rastegar: I agree.

Brad Weimert: You are closer to your outcome or further away. Nothing is inherently good or bad.

Ari Rastegar: I like that.

Brad Weimert: But yet people say, “Hey, what’s good? Or how’s everything going?” And I’m like, “I don’t f*cking know. Like, what kind of question is that? Like, things are all the things, I’m experiencing all the things at any given moment. There are 15 important things happening and some of them are towards the outcome and some are pretty f*cking far away from the outcome. And it’s what I signed up for.”

Ari Rastegar: That’s a good point.

Brad Weimert: I feel good about that.

Ari Rastegar: Are you familiar with Dr. Joe Dispenza?

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Ari Rastegar: So, Becoming Supernatural, I recommend to anybody that’s on a journey to be better. And he said something in one of the podcasts about one of the biggest realizations that he learned along this journey. And he’s a quantum physicist. He’s unbelievable. I haven’t met him personally but I’m a big fan. He said, “I learned on the journey that all of my thoughts aren’t necessarily true.” So, when you have 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day, you find that you’re a product of the thoughts that you had the day before. And so, we have these inherent reactions to moods, to feelings that are programs at the quantum level. So, at the Newtonian level, we think in terms of predictability. This is going to happen. The apple falls. It’s going to go down. But in the quantum world, we think in terms of cause and effect. And it’s really comforting for those of us that want to improve, to know that over time, we can work on the cause and effect of our own lives.

And when you know that your thoughts are basically, as they say in The Untethered Soul is your inner roommate that’s just talking and talking. And sometimes you listen, sometimes you don’t but being very cognizant that your brain is just a thinking machine and you’re not obligated to listen to all of them or be beholden to them, you are the one that is in charge of creating the life that you want to create. You’re not a manager of circumstance. You’re actually a creator. And when you digest that fully, you have to swallow a couple of bitter pills to realize you f*cked up a lot of things, which for me was tough. But once you come at that, it’s an amazing amount of peace to know that I have some say in what’s going to happen and what’s going to be created, and those are the points where everything starts to change. And it all starts with self.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, and you have. I mean, you have two choices, right? One is that or these. They’re not two. They intersect. But the recognition that you have the capacity to program your own mind and program your inner roommate. And then the other is I have a great friend and artist, J Hobbs, who has a song. I can’t remember if it’s the title of a song or a lyric but he says, “I am not in my mind.”

Ari Rastegar: Wow. Powerful.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It’s this reminder of exactly that, right? All the thoughts that run through.

Ari Rastegar: I am not my mind. And the reason you know you’re not your mind is you’re the observer. You’re the one listening to the thoughts. How do you know that you’re not me, per se? Because you’re listening to me and vice versa. So, if I’m the one hearing the thoughts in my head, how the f*ck could I be it if I’m the one listening to it?

Brad Weimert: Right. I love that. I love that. So, the personal development journey I want to dive into a little bit here but I want to also close the loop on this transition into heavy real estate because one of the things that inevitably happens with entrepreneurs is they hopefully make a bunch of money and have to do something with it or give it to the government or some combination or both. And it is both.

Ari Rastegar: It’s usually both.

Brad Weimert: It’s usually both for everybody. But one of those vehicles is real estate, right? And so, from an investment perspective, with wealth and preserving and growing wealth, your approach to this big jump into a bunch of different asset classes, find the best people possible to run it can be a daunting task for somebody diving into new real estate. And I look at this, you are somebody that is, you are running projects, right? And when I look at real estate investment for my peers and the entrepreneurial community, I see two camps, largely, excluding somebody that’s actually an operator. I see sort of, well, small time, “I’m going to run my own projects but I don’t have a fund. I’m just going to run my own projects.” Or maybe I’m a small GP on something. Or actually, that’s the other camp. The other camp is I’m just investing in a project and looking for a return. If somebody is looking to build wealth in real estate and they have some capital, let’s say somebody is taking a million, a few million off the table every year, do you have an opinion on asset class and/or deployment strategy?

Ari Rastegar: I don’t. I don’t. I think investing is something that’s highly personal. There are so many different strategies. There’s people that Jeff Bezos talks about this a lot. There are so many different types. There’s long-term investors, short-term investors, bond investors, passive investors, active investors. Just as unique as people are is how many types of investors there are.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Ari Rastegar: And you coming to terms again with what your objectives are, because you would think that when people invest, they just want to make money. That is a massive, massive misnomer. You go tell one of my medical doctor clients, “I’m going to make you ten times your money but we’re going to take the Bobby Axelrod Billions and we’re going to go take over this company. And a million people are going to lose their pensions but we’re going to make ten times our money legally.” Not one of them would do it because it doesn’t sit with their moral authority of the person, the frame that they’re in, the social good frame that it is to be a doctor.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Ari Rastegar: So, understanding what your true objective is, is one of the most important things that if you look to being an operator, so to speak, the best investment you could ever make is to become an apprentice, which is the way of the world. You know, you look Socrates to Plato, Plato’s teacher, you know, Aristotle’s teacher was Plato. We see it all throughout history of being a great follower first is how you become a great leader. This is the law.

Brad Weimert: Yes. So, I love that if you want to be an expert in the space, right? If you actually want to be the operator and expert in the space, if you want to and these are not mutually exclusive, right, if you want this to be an investment for you but you have other objectives. So, I love what you said about you have to look at what you’re actually trying to accomplish. In one might be a return but what are the other things?

Ari Rastegar: And return is part of it. Anyone that’s investing, there is a return. Is it a return in your emotional capacity? Is it a return of money and emotional capacity? Is it some sort of stature? Is it to have a thought? There are so many different frames.

Brad Weimert: Totally. So, like, for me, real estate…

Ari Rastegar: Investing in your health is eating is an investment.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, definitely. So, let’s keep the frame of real estate because I know you’re kind of good at this. So, the phrase…

Ari Rastegar: I’ve been called worse.

Brad Weimert: The frame of real estate for me, the secondary benefits for real estate for me are I want access to the physical property. So, I love investing locally, and I love light commercial because I can do other things with it. It serves a purpose for me to be able to, depending on the asset class.

Ari Rastegar: Therein lies the rub.

Brad Weimert: Yes. Entertain, store, house, whatever.

Ari Rastegar: Perfect. You know yourself well, which is what’s going to make you successful to me.

Brad Weimert: Well enough and learning. But here’s the question. So, the question is in this frame of being an apprentice, if this is a, and I’m a very active investor, so I’m not actually the use case but for somebody that’s getting started and has some sense of awareness, do you think that it behooves them to be the apprentice when they’re trying to figure it out? Yeah?

Ari Rastegar: I am an apprentice right now. One of my dearest, dearest friends is a man named Jeff DiModica. He is the president of a little company called Starwood. It is arguably the biggest real estate company on planet Earth, behind the Catholic Church maybe. His son, Brad, also works for us. He’s a mentor. He’s an advisor. So, no matter what has – he’s a lender by trade. He runs Starwood Capital. So, they’ve done billions and billions and billions of dollars of financing across everything. I am an apprentice and a mentee of his. I call him about certain things that… So, there’s levels to this sh*t.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Ari Rastegar: You go ask Elon the other day and said, “How does it feel to be the richest man in the world?” He goes, “What the f*ck are you talking about? It’s like there’s trillionaires in Saudi Arabia. I’m not the richest man.” There’s always levels. And once you know where you are in the level and the type of rich to somebody else is not rich to me or vice versa. And so, these are all so, so personal again to dovetail the entire conversation but it’s about having wild, radically transparent values around who you are and making sure. Because if there’s a moment that you cease to be an apprentice in some capacity, it’s the beginning of the end. Innovate or die. And the only way you can innovate is by running behind someone that runs faster.

Brad Weimert: I like it. So, clarity around the term, apprentice, is probably relevant. So, when I heard it, the immediate frame that set in was…

Ari Rastegar: Employee.

Brad Weimert: Traditional apprentice, which is work for free to learn. And what I think I’m hearing is learn and worry about the rest as it goes, or learn and tack on the other things. If you need a certain return, great. That can be part of the equation but learning is the predominant function for you there.

Ari Rastegar: Always. And it’s always the minute you cease to learn is the minute you start to die. That’s a mantra that I absolutely live by. And I’ve been a very arrogant, outspoken person for saying it lightly for many years of my life and having an 11-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter teaches you a level of humility pretty quickly when your four-year-old just stomps on your head when you’re laying on the ground, lovingly. But true humility is about being in awe, I think, because when you get kicked in the teeth enough and you see that not everything is always the hard work, there is this element that somehow it just works out for a reason beyond you while you’re also working on the things that you could actually control. But being an apprentice of life is really the point. So, that’s why I think personal development and the word development for real estate and personal development, there’s a reason I think those words are used interchangeably because the philosophy of building and the mechanics of building are almost identical. So, they keep going back to the same things. And I find that COVID was the best thing that ever happened to us.

We closed 16 major deals during COVID that landed me number 93 in the world, the most powerful real estate people in the world, and probably the youngest inductee ever. But for us, we saw an opportunity. We saw an opening that we could go out and go do something powerful. So, anytime things are starting to go down, so to speak, in the public eye, that’s when we get ramped up. People right now, they’re not building because that’s too expensive. Well, we’re about to close 580 acres in North Austin. Because the best time to do these things and to grow and develop, you only grow from uncomfort. Being uncomfortable is what fosters growth. We learned that in weight training. We learned that in human character development. It’s the same. Everything is the same. And when you can wrap into that deeper and deeper because I think you get lost, you lose the point when you get too much into the mechanics and forget the reason that you’re doing all this, which is to have more fun. We should have more joy.

Brad Weimert: I love it. Well, I also think that it ties back into the point of things being good or bad, and that being a false narrative. Right?

Ari Rastegar: It just is.

Brad Weimert: It is. And when you look at business and you look at business being good or not good, which is a frame that people often use in real estate, “Oh the market’s good. The market’s not good.”

Ari Rastegar: According to who?

Brad Weimert: Exactly.

Ari Rastegar: Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered. That is the old Wall Street maxim that is true to this day and is worth repeating. Bulls make money. Good markets make money. Bad markets make money. But pigs, slaughterhouse every single time.

Brad Weimert: Yep, I love it. And it’s just different challenges, right? So, in the real estate market, interest rates are low. There are a thousand bids on every property.

Ari Rastegar: That’s right. It drives the pricing up. Interest rates are high. Values on paper looked down right now. The office market is in disarray, not because occupancy is so low. It’s because nobody’s buying them. We don’t know what the price of anything is because there are not enough f*cking people buying it. And then the bonds for them, nobody wants to buy either. So, it’s just because we can’t put our finger on it but I promise you, someone a lot smarter than me is going to go start buying those office buildings if they haven’t already, and they’re going to look like geniuses like Michael Burry shorting the market in The Big Short and looking like a hero. This is when you find out who can do it and who can’t. It’s in the discomfort of all of it but can you do the Jocko Willink like, “Good.” Like, “Oh, this didn’t work out? Good. We didn’t get that great new hire? Good. We can work harder,” or whatever cliche that you want to use but cliches are cliches for a reason.

Brad Weimert: Right. Yeah, I believe that. And I think it’s worth repeating because as you just did, when you say something, if you follow it by reminding people that, hopefully, it sinks in. So, we’ve talked a little bit about working on yourself, and I have no hesitation to use the term personal development, particularly with our audience because there are entrepreneurs that are working on themselves. But that term has negative connotations for people that probably should work on themselves and don’t or haven’t yet. But people, entrepreneurs in particular, I think this era is a little different because we are now in this world where it’s cool to be an entrepreneur but people find the value in self-awareness and development at different parts of their life.

Ari Rastegar: I agree.

Brad Weimert: For different reasons.

Ari Rastegar: Usually from desperation.

Brad Weimert: Yes. And for you, when did it start? Because it sounds like in different cultures operate differently and have similarities, right? So, your culture that you grew up in, I don’t think necessitated personal development so much as the whip is going to be cracked and this is just how it is.

Ari Rastegar: My father was a hybrid because at 14 years old, he handed me Think and Grow Rich and my life is never the same.

Brad Weimert: Oh, amazing.

Ari Rastegar: And if anybody that has not read Think and Grow Rich, you should turn this off immediately. There’s nothing I have to say to you that is not in that book and said profoundly better than I ever could. I’m actually doing a Think and Grow Rich workbook for my 800,000th time as we speak. Because as we grow and we change, I saw a quote the other day that Tim Ferriss posted that said, “My tailor is the only reasonable person in my life because he’s the only one that measures me every time that he sees me.”

Brad Weimert: Wow.

Ari Rastegar: And I think that part of measuring our self of today is one of the most underrated things that we can possibly do. If the most reasonable person in my life is my tailor, I’m in big trouble.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. For sure.

Ari Rastegar: So, I beg of everybody to be their own personal tailor.

Brad Weimert: So, what do you do on a routine basis today?

Ari Rastegar: I could tell you what I did today.

Brad Weimert: Perfect.

Ari Rastegar: I got up slowly. I listened to a recording of Dr. Joe Dispenza. I did an Egoscue menu for posture management. I meditated for about 20 or 30 minutes. I did some visualization of what I’d like, some outcomes I’d like to see. I did a 15-minute Tony Robbins priming exercise that’s on YouTube. That is a little bit of a gratitude exercise. I drink some really high-quality hydrogen water with a supplement called Manna Vitality, which is a mineral supplement. And I went and stood outside for a few minutes and took my morning very, very slow and took a time to feel the feelings that I felt and listening to my inner roommates, or to kick me in the teeth a little bit and told them to shut up a couple of times. And we went back and forth a little bit. And then I started my day. That’s a very, I’m not as much into a strict routine person because I think that you want to make more money, you work more typically. So, I think people overly cold plunge and overly, “I miss my morning routine.”

When I was building the business, I didn’t do any of this at all. I worked 20 hours. I slept under my desk, literally. There are still times I sleep in my office to this day. But when you do have the chance to do it and to recharge and to refocus because your growth or whatever you focus on grows. It’s very simple. Like, if you in your mind, you catch yourself going to something like we all do, because this stinky machine that keeps bugging you all day long is going crazy so you have to build up resilience and discipline to focus on what you want. And most people don’t know what they want.

Brad Weimert: Yes.

Ari Rastegar: They say they do but they don’t. They have some vague interpretation of being on a yacht in Tahiti or something but have no feelings put to and they haven’t taken the time to give themselves the gift to figure out what they really want. Because I promise I’ve been a rich man. I am a pretty rich man, I guess. I’ve been a poor man, certainly. Same cheeseburger or vegan burger or whatever.

Brad Weimert: Well, and also I think, this illusion of sitting on the yacht in Tahiti or whatever right on the beach drinking mai tais, ultimately, the values and character traits that drive the person to riches are totally different set of values and character traits in a person that’s going to be happy sitting on a beach, drinking all day.

Ari Rastegar: And it’s a wonderful observation because to really gain the truest luxuries of life… The greatest luxury in life is peace. That is the ultimate luxury. Poor rich people buy Lamborghinis and Bugattis unless you are a true car connoisseur. And there are out there. There are some F1 folks. They know that’s different.

Brad Weimert: Sure, yeah.

Ari Rastegar: But 95% of the purchasers, according to Lamborghini and Ferrari, are your flexors.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think you have some. I think you’ve got as with most explanations, you’ve got some middle ground there where there are people that are exploring, right, that are like, “Hey, I made a bunch of money. I don’t know what it’s like to have a Ferrari. Let me try it.” And so, you have some of those. But I tend to agree with you in general. So, usually, if somebody is flexing like that, I’m like, “Eh.” And one of the benefits that we have is I see financials for people all the time, as you do with investors, right? Perhaps. But people would tell me stories then I see their financials. They tell me stories. I see their financials. They tell me stories. I see their financials. And over tens of thousands of people coming through these systems, the patterns start to emerge. And now my radar around that is so sensitive that I will, my own limited data points, I will validate that when I meet a person that is flaunting fancy stuff…

Ari Rastegar: All they’re flaunting to me is how bad they feel about themselves.

Brad Weimert: So, I try not to jump there but I will say that it’s rare that that person is the person that’s actually wealthy.

Ari Rastegar: And luxury was designed to keep poor people poor if you look at the history of luxury in general. Look at Bill Gates, the way he dresses. Look at the way Jeff Bezos dresses. Look at the way Elon dresses. Look at the true power magnates of the world. Look at Robert Smith. I saw him wearing socks and Tevas the other day with a three-piece suit on stage. And he’s the greatest African-American entrepreneur of modern history. I have all the respect in the world for Mr. Smith. He’s a f*cking genius, and I don’t use that word often. Real rich and wealthy doesn’t need a label. In fact, they disdain it more than anything. And like I said, we all go through the Louis Vuitton, Gucci phase as we’re trying to get to that place and there’s a place for it. I think there’s a time where we are looking and feel a certain way because it elicits an emotion that allows us to move forward. But when you really reach the point where you actually have a 10, 11-figure business plus, you start to realize where value is. And value is not cost. They are not the same things and they’re often used interchangeably. Value is peace.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. Well, Ari, there are a million other questions but I know you’ve got a time schedule here as well. If people want to find out more about you, where do you want to point them?

Ari Rastegar: I think that if people want to find me, I’m pretty easy to find. My book, The Gift of Failure, is basically a compilation or a Cliffs Notes of many of the self-help books I’ve ever read. So, if somebody wants to delve into this personal development realm and get a condensed copy that’s written for an eight-year-old reading level that is tactical, that’s simple, that is not overwhelming. And is somebody that’s coming from a place of incredible vulnerability and wants to get a taste of what some of the greatest minds in the world have said, not me, I think they’ll find value in it. And the rest is people find what they want and what they’re looking for. And if I told them where it was, I’d be doing them a disservice.

Brad Weimert: I love it. All right. Ari Rastegar. The Gift of Failure, we’ll put in the show notes. I appreciate you coming out.

Ari Rastegar: Thanks, buddy.

Brad Weimert: Absolutely.