Episode #232 – Tales and Strategy From The Most Interesting Man In Real Estate, Ken Van Liew, Part 2

You're listening to the REI marketing nerds podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords nerds, a high tech digital agency focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition and live a freer, more awesome life. And now, your host, Dan Barrett.

(0:40) Hey, guys, welcome back, you're listening to the second part of last week's episode. Let's jump back in. You know, it's interesting that you, you talked about taking this step back, you know, I had someone on the show recently, we were talking about people who are able to pivot and adapt to difficult times. And one of the things that he pointed out was that one of the biggest challenges is, in the good times, sort of build up your self image to a certain point, you say, like, I do this type of work. And when times get tough, you know, his example was a lot of times you got to get out of the corner office and you got to go man, the phones or you got to go sit at the kitchen table, or whatever it is, whatever it takes to make it work. And he's like, some people really struggle with wood because their self images is sort of their self worth, in a lot of cases is, is a routed to this role that they have in their head, they can't shift it backwards. So is that hard for you? Was it easy for you? You're like, Yeah, I know how to do this. No big deal. Did you hesitate? Like, what was that decision? Like in order to just or was it like, Well, I gotta do this, you know, you know, time's up your guns against my, you know, tempo or whatever. I gotta make it work.

(1:53) Yeah, you know, it was really, you know, the great question, because I tell you, it was you were you were hearing stuff on the news. I remember one guy, like, was a billionaire. And he lost like seven of 9 billion and he killed himself. So, you know, and it really came down to moments of going, Okay, this is not my identity of what just occurred, you know, what do I do now? How do I kind of get my arms around what just occurred, you know, what's going to be the impact? There was some litigation that occurred, you know, because then, you know, investors started coming after you. You know, so it was it was a time where I just kind of wanted to throw my hands up. I think I mentioned to you, I started performing magic and Jacob Javits Center, I literally was, was a little depressed.

And I was reading one of my magic magazines, and I literally read about this guy, Joel Bauer, who was doing tradeshow magic and doing a million dollars a year in trade show magic, and I was a really good magician. And I said, If I could just learn the business of trade show magic. I'll do magic for a couple 100 Grand i, i did my thing, real estate, I built skyscrapers. I don't need to, like prove myself to anybody. And I tried to buy Stewart's root beer. I was in contract, you know, it's gonna take root beer to China. And then, you know, I found out that the Snapple on the international rights. I was working in a car, Simon Ising thing. And then, you know, I, I was in doing magic, you know, and crashing a couple shows Jacob Javits Center, I learned what Joel Bauer really didn't got into informational marketing. But, you know, really, it was just a real transition point, like kind of what do you do? What do you do?

You know, but learn in that, you know, it was able, you know, gave me a little chance to figure out through my magic, believe it or not, I was I was a really good card magician. I was studying under these two card magicians that had talked about mastery. And they talked about having to have 10,000 hours to become a master. You know, it's funny, and all within like a month, I was in reading his book called Mastery by Robert Greene. We started talking about 10,000 hours again. And then I'm reading another book called outliers. And it talks about 10,000 hours. So at that moment, I'm going Dang, like, the light bulb goes off of like, Hello, how many hours he got in real estate dope, you know. And I went and sat down and calculated. And that was when I had this epiphany that I literally had 137,000 hours, 137,000 hours in engineering, construction of real estate.

And that day, I was like, Okay, you build skyscrapers in your sleep, you engineer sites in your sleep. You don't have to fix anything. When you're doing that. You go to informational marketing. You got to figure out how to build a funnel. You got to try to upsell somebody, you got to deal with Google program. You got to go do an event. I don't need any of that right. Bottom line is nobody knows who I am. But when they find out you know, we're soon going to hit a tipping point. You know, now that we've you know, have a couple accolades, and, you know, we had a chance to do some stuff with Dennis and Fox News. And, you know, the good thing is it's not a race, you know, it's, it's a journey, you know, and I and you know, I didn't mention see, but one of my books, the other two books, one is called quitter, and the other one's called Leap.

Leap is the one I want to mention to you about my journeys is leap Life begins at 60. And, you know, I took the, the 10 leaps that children have, from zero to 36 months, I believe it is and created seven leaps for adults. And it's a story written from a woman's standpoint, you know, where sometimes you're not given a full shake in life, you know, because most men are taken advantage of everything, you know, especially in the corporate world. And then they have to have kids and everything and their bodies change, and then they decide, you know, to, to go sit, I call it in the stands and get off the field for a little while. And there's no reason why it's 60 years old, people just can't come out and force and create what they want, instantly like that, as Tony used to say, you can you can change it in a snap of a finger, you own it.

And the other thing I like to just share is, you know, I've turned, quitting into a good thing, you know, in my book, and there's an article that I published on Forbes, you know, it's about the seven principles of quitting, to make you happy, you know, and to give you peace really, right. Because, you know, happiness is, you know, being on top of the ocean in a sailboat, but when there's a storm, you're not real happy, right? Peace is being in a submarine, when it doesn't matter about the storms, right? So you're at peace, and in order to get the peace, you know, the happiness to the peace, you know, you have to quit things in life.

You know, and you gotta quit the things that you're addicted to, you got to quit, you know, people telling you, you're not enough, you got to quit the people that you know, you know, things that are around sometimes, but there's principles to it, you know, and I just share that because it took me a while to figure it out. You know, and not a lot of people will sit here and say that, um, you know, I'm not I'm not, you know, I'm not going to call the tight to my breasts, you know, whatever, right, whatever I want. You know, I know learned about morning routines, countability, productivity, engineering, real estate construction. You know, I'm a walking book.

(7:25) I love that. And we had discussed Lee briefly in our in our other car. And I just thought that was such a cool idea. I really, I want to come back. I've got to ask, because we're coming up on time. And I want to keep you super long, because I literally will just be here for hours just getting rolling. This is getting good. Yeah, I won't do that to people rather just have you back and support.

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(8:18) But I want to ask about magic. We talked a little bit about magic. You know, your magic career goes back quite a ways. You've been doing it for a really long time. And I wanted to ask what you've learned from magic, whether that's about the way people work, whether that's about business, whether it's about yourself, what did you learn from the experience of doing magic? And kind of learning it and getting good at it over time? Ah,

(8:44) great question. You know, I'd say because it's taught me so much about life. And you know, magic is an art, right? So it's, it's like painting or, you know, pottery, you know, it takes years and years to master. You know, I, I have accumulated 300 books and, you know, hundreds and hundreds of videos through studying the the art. At eight years old, six years old, I was always fascinated by the magicians at the Christmas parties. And there was a magic shop that opened up in my, like, literally hometown that I go to every day, you know, on the off seasons from sports. And I entered a magic contest at 12.

And I'm still friends with the guy today who won it. But through that, you know, my first show, I had a limitation that I was doing it was called the flying carpet. I had a dagger chest I would put daggers in and I had an assistant, you know, and we did a little act and eventually it led to a tails act where I was wearing tails and I had doves fire, and probably by 13 My dad would drive me around and I would do about 30 magic shows a year it's $75 and I would just put it all back into magic and by the time you know I was 1617 I started getting into the close of magic but I would perform at the coffee houses is with the rock bands and stuff.

And you know, at the churches, and I was always doing shows, and when I got to college, you know, I started doing restaurants where I would, you know, I had studied under top magicians and later on, when I got my career back in New York, I would go see magicians late at night after work, and I would session with them and some of the famous magicians that work at the Magic Castle. And, you know, I'd always do magic, you know, and, you know, I still to this day, I'm always carrying in coins and cards, entertaining for children, adults, just making people smile. And what I really learned about it, is, you know, people don't want to get fooled. So magic has to be an experience. So for every magic trick that I've ever learned, I take probably 60% of the time of figuring out that magic trick to come up with a personable script, and how to get that the person I'm entertaining for, to have a human touch with me and to feel part of the magic.

I learned about presentation, you know, and really, you know, not letting people know, when you make a mistake, you know, just keep going, you know, I'm had to get on stage and being totally nervous and having to get a pre stage routine. So I wasn't like shaking before I got on, you know, learning how to dress, learning how to pack, you know, what just went on years later, that helped me on business trips, being able to have community you know, like, because magicians would never give up their secrets until like, after midnight, you know, so you'd have to hang out, while everybody else left it in there be like two or three guys, and they're really good magicians would give it up, you know, knowing that you were committed, you know, and it taught me about commitment.

It taught me about like dexterity and training, like getting in front of the mirror getting like presentations today, when I get it up on stage, I could talk about anything in a heartbeat. That's all because of my magic, you know, and it just goes on and on. And I think the biggest thing is it it just it there's a magic inside me that I that I just feel magical. You know, I I think I told you my, my mantra, you know, I am integrity and honest and loving leader with magical empowering skills to create endless opportunities for all mankind and to leave everybody with power, freedom, self expression and peace of mind, you know, and that's really what it's all about.

(12:11) I mean, it's so cool. I like the use of that it's an art form, right? Because it really is. And it's one of the really rare art forms. I think it's actually in many ways, right? It feels more similar to music than a lot of different art forums, because it's pre verbal in so many different ways, right? Like you, you can take somebody that does not speak your language comes from a different culture, and they can immediately get what you are putting across, right. And a lot of cases, it's really, I like a big fan of magic, nowhere near like what you do, obviously, right. But it's like I just, I'm so fascinated by that. So I think that's so cool.

(12:49) So so just by if you just kind of reach into the air, you can actually take a coin and you can actually take that coin, place it right in your hand, just give it a little wave and a rub and kind of just on the best part, you can just take a piece of dust and just place it back in your hand and then bring that back again. So it's pretty cool. You can you're living my life can eliminate my dream wife. Well, thank you, sir.

(13:15) I was I just got past the age where my kids they just stopped being blown away by there's a thing in your ear. You know, I mean, so I'm like, now I need to you know, I need the next step. So I'm gonna I'm gonna have to figure that out. But yeah, we can. We could show you some good stuff.

(13:32) I'll do I'll do it. I will do it off the camera. But so I want to ask about the because I think reap is such a great idea for a book. And I kind of want to ask you like, what is next for you? And so we talked about this big project, like you said, you have been through pretty much every possible piece of the real estate investing world you've been up you've been down write it to an extent that I think most people would have trouble imagining right? And you are you really seem like from the outside, right? You really come across as someone who just knows yourself, you know, what you like, you know, when you want you know what you're good at. So when you think about your next, what's a 10 years, right, what does that look like to you? Or do you not plan it out that far ahead?

(14:18) Now, you know, it's funny, I have, you know, I you know, I created the global real estate investment enterprise one year ago. So the next 10 years is really, really exciting. You know, not only, as I mentioned earlier, my three children got married. So, you know, we're sitting here thinking like, what are the grandkids gonna look like but as far as you know, my career and paying it forward. You know, the journey has just started for me. And what we've done is now that we have all the programs we give all the programs away in the global real estate investment enterprise and the global real estate investment enterprises, our 10 year program t and u er, where you can become a professor in real estate, how we teach to both the practical and theoretical side, so you know, people get all my programs.

And we now have and the goal there, why did I build the enterprise because I believe in and talk a little bit about deeper emotional rapport. I like to build an emotional port. I'm not just selling this to anybody. I'm bringing people in that are professionals, I professional engineers, professional architects, and I'm building an ecosystem that if Dan wants to learn about real estate, he comes into the global real estate enterprise. And he immediately has 100 people that he can tap into with their bio phone number and email to get in touch with them. And if Ken says, Call Dan, they call Dan, right? That takes years to put those relationships in place. So what I envision one years ago is that I'm going to create 1000 boots on the ground, my son is a US intelligence Marine officer and reconnaissance Eagle Scout, black belt in karate, never had a beer never smoked in his entire life.

He's superhuman, but uh, but he's, he's, you know, he's keeping an eye on the Chinese and North Korean force. And, you know, we need more boots on the ground, right, and real estate that that was my whole thing, you know, I'm going to create that, to reduce friction for people that are really committed to real estate, you come to the one place and become a professor in real estate, the global real estate enterprise, and you can find out more about it on my website. And that's really, for people, you know, as I was mentioning earlier, you know, that don't know anything. And you know, they're hearing our new documentaries as they want to get involved in real estate. Well, they can find out, you know, do we want to passively invest and we want to actively invest? Or do we want to stay in the stock market? You know, so it could be a combination of a bunch of things, you know, but um, you know, that's really it,

(16:44) man. Well, I just want to say, I mean, you have you really brought Tuesday, I really didn't know we were dealing with technical stuff, but many of you bring so much value to the conversation to really appreciate it. Probably the most interesting dude in real estate investing. I don't know if anyone's ever called you that I'm gonna go ahead and coin it trademark, it would be fine. If you are listening to this, you want to check out more of what Ken is doing, and there's a lot of stuff to check out. So you should check it out. Ken van lew.com That is ke nvanliew.com Ken van lew.com Han van Lew. Thank you so much. Man. This was a real treat for me. I really appreciate this beautiful. I really had a good time, Dan. Let's hang out more often, buddy.

(17:31) That is it. That's it for this week's episode of the REI marketing nerds podcast. As always, you can get the show notes for this episode, all the links everything that we talked about and all the links for our past episodes at AdWords nerds.com/podcasts. You can go there and download them and grab transcripts and there's no opt in and nothing shady as always, I just want to say really appreciate you listening to the show means the world to me. And if you could leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. I'd really appreciate it. I read every single one. I hope you're having an awesome week. I will see you soon. Cheers.

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