Michael: Hello, this is Michael.
Jordan: Michael, Jordan, how are you doing?
Michael: Jordan, real good, how are you?
Jordan: I’ve been in like constant webinars since I woke up this morning. It’s crazy.
Michael: I was going to ask you. How many interviews have you been doing a day?
Jordan: It’s a lot. Mostly I don’t do webinars. Mostly, I do a lot of press interviews. I’m going on four again, and I’m leaving actually in a couple of hours to Switzerland, and then I’m on a loop around the world. I’m going from Switzerland back to LA for the weekend for my own seminar, and then I’ve got to go to Australia for a six day seminar. Then, I go to South Africa for a seventeen day tour, and then back to Australia for six days. So, it’s like I’m you know.
Jordan: I do massive PR. I go to these countries. I’ll typically do maybe thirty interviews for each per country.
Michael: So, who is promoting your seminars?
Jordan: In Australia, a company called Empowernet.
Michael: You’ve got a lot of promotion, a lot of Australia. How does that work? How do you hook up with like a seminar promoter like that?
Jordan: Empowernet is the biggest promoter in Australia. They promoted Tony Robbins for years and years, and I actually went – let me just say this. I’ll give you the answer if you want for how I did it, or how I would tell someone else. My way is not going to work for other people because I came with the international best seller, and a movie with Leonardo Dicaprio.
Michael: Right, tell me how you did it. I’m curious.
Jordan: I’ll tell you how I did it. I can teach people how to do it without having those assets behind them. I did it simply by – my book was selling like crazy all over the world, and what happened was I eventually was getting pressure from my publishers. They wanted me to write another book. I don’t particularly like writing. It annoys me. So, I said, “I’m willing to go write a book. You know, though, actually I’d rather just kind of want to do a little speaking.” So, I said, “Let me go out and give a couple free speeches.” So, I went out to colleges, and this was right after the wake of the financial crisis, and I started giving speeches about ethics to kids.
Michael: Did you get a promoter to help you line those up?
Jordan: No, I booked it myself free. I did it for free. I went there, and I don’t need fans. One day I put on my Facebook wall, “Hey, look out, I’m going to give an ethics speech to a college. Let me know if you want me to come to your school.” I got like two hundred requests from school. So, I picked the three best ones. I think Berkley, and I picked U Mass, and one other and Bentley College up in Massachusetts.
Michael: Did you have anything to sell at that time?
Jordan: No, it was free. So, it’s supposed to be about ethics, but what happened was as soon as I started speaking, about half way through, of course, I switched to my typical stuff, which is more motivation and the kids were clapping and cheering. So, I got that kind of thrill back. I said, “Let me actually go out and just kind of dominate this speaking business.” So, I had been getting requests from all these different places to come and speak. I’ve just been ignoring it all. On Facebook, they say, “Hey, can you come to my country?” The one person sounded seriously in Australia, so I emailed the guy back and said, “Tell me what you can put together for me,” and the guy sent me a very, very detailed proposal, some nobody, and it looked good. So, I thought I’d go out and give it a whirl. Let me see if you can put some corporate speeches, just corporate speeches not seminars. So, he called me back a few days later and goes, “Listen, the demand is far greater than I can’t believe. Everybody wants you to come speak.” So, he goes, “I really can’t handle it.” He told me that he is actually very wealthy but a legitimate guy. He goes, “You need to hook up with this guy named Nick Fordham. Nick is the top PR guy, brand talent manager in Australia. His family is really well respected.” I got on the phone with this guy Nick. Nick and I hit it off, and Nick became my manager, and we went down to Australia and did a big – this was about a year and a half ago, about fifteen months ago, and we did a tour of just corporate speaking. Then, about three weeks before, I called and said, “Nick, let’s do this. Let’s – I have so many fans down there. Why don’t we just do a public event where I’ll just get on stage for a few hours, and I’ll just tell my story, and we’ll charge admission. So, we came up with this idea we’ll charge $200 for a regular ticket, $500 for a VIP ticket, so you can see up front and have a cocktail party afterwards, and then $2,000 if you want to meet with me after the event. That’s like for up to fifteen people. So, we did one in Sydney, one in Melbourne, and we literally cut a deal with the Australian Financial Review which is like their Wall Street Journal, a barter deal where I exchanged a dinner, a corporate dinner for $40,000 of advertising, and bam, we sold out two stadiums, 1,500 people in Sydney.
Jordan: Like 900 people in Melbourne.
Michael: What’s the split on that with like your manager? I’m just saying for any students who want to set up a deal like this? Is this a 50/50?
Jordan: No, my manager gets ten percent.
Michael: Just ten percent?
Jordan: Just ten percent, but that’s different with him because he’s not a promoter. He’s a manager. There’s a difference. We had an event company that took a cut, but there was no promoter. We didn’t have a promoter. We didn’t even need one because I was a brand name out there. So, I just put an ad in the newspaper and people bought tickets. We sold out two shows. So, then what happened is I didn’t sell anything from stage. I just made money from ticket sales. I made a few hundred grand. After I was done with the dinner – I had this dinner here, a $2,000 a plate dinner, and it was a couple then, one guy halfway through dinner says, “Listen, here, I came. I bought the dinner ticket because I want to meet you in person. I’m a promoter. May I ask you a question? Why didn’t you sell anything from stage? You could have made a million bucks.”
Michael: Was he a US guy?
Jordan: No, huge UK promoter. So, I said to him, “Oh my goodness. I didn’t know the business. I didn’t do any research on it.” I go, “Explain to me.” He explained to me how to close from stage. His name is Greg Sector. He is probably the best stage closer out there currently. He’s a top currency trader guy in the world in terms of closing from stage, very, very good.
Michael: He sells his own info products.
Jordan: No, he sells currency trading systems.
Michael: All right, his own trading system.
Jordan: Something called Miles to Action, so anyway, so from that, I said, “That’s it. I’m going to go into that business.” I made a strategic decision with my manager Nick Fordham, who is still my global manager, and I said, “Nick, let’s leave the US for last because I want to get a – let’s get a wide open season. The market is so vast for me in the United States especially with the movie coming out this year. It’s just nuts. So, let’s go back and do Australia again.” So, we took our time and basically and we found out who the biggest promoters were in each market, and we called Empowernet, which is huge and this other company called Universal Events, Success Resources of Canada, the top three of four biggest promoters in the world, Celine Prosia from Power Within in Canada, and of course, it was me, and I had no – they’re, “Oh my gosh, of course,” because they’ll sign you up because here I have this model that people are paying to come see for a few hours. So, we just did a tour of Australia where we did about 5,000 people, and they paid an average of $200 a ticket just for a preview of that, the three hours. Then, I up sold them from there for a three day seminar at $3900. I had like 300 people at that seminar, and that’s how it built from there. Learn how to sell like Jordan http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/HPSOE.htm
Michael: Let me ask you this. So, are these seminar promoters, are they looking for hot people to promote all the time?
Jordan: They’re looking for people who can close from stage, who have good products who can close from stage.
Michael: Because they’re going to get a piece of action of the gross sales?
Jordan: They get fifty percent. In a case of like a Michael Burnett, who from Empowernet, that’s a 50/50 split. He fills the rooms, and then he pays all expenses. I don’t pay any of the expenses, and then I pay – let’s just say I don’t, but everyone else does. I have a different deal because he can make more money with me. So, the way the standard deal is, I pay my expenses. He pays his expenses, and then we split the revenue 50/50, and then we split the upsells – ticket sales 50/50, upsells 50/50. Then, he organizes the next three day event that I’m selling, and then we split those upsells again. So, of those 300 people a month or two away, I made another million dollars on the deal because I upsold into a much larger $20,000 program.
Michael: So, he fills the room. You’ve got your manager setting everything up. You’ve just got to show up and do your thing.
Michael: That’s sweet. Now, do you think any of this would ever happen if you never written that first book?
Jordan: I mean, yeah, of course, you can do without writing.
Michael: I think the point I’m trying to make. A lot of my students here are into book publishing, and having a published book especially a best-selling one is such a great first thing to do to build credibility-
Jordan: Listen, clearly that again, I probably saved myself years and years of sort of having to go out there and sell myself, who I am, and I would have never been able to fill rooms of paid people. In other words, yeah, it’s not that hard. Let me tell you something. You can – and I say not hard. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but I’ll say it’s only plausible to be able to fill rooms up with sixty to a hundred people or 150 people free. They go for free, and then you try to sell them something once they’re there for free. People do that that don’t have a brand name. It’s a very dicey business, and you can lose your shirt in it. Also, if you don’t sell well, you probably make nothing. So, the model I created was we would actually charge people to come in for a preview is based on the fact that yeah, my books, I was a best-selling author which spring boarded me into a career with TV. I’m commentating on CNN and CNBC and all sorts of different stations, Sky News, around the world, and then from there, I brand myself as – I’m branded as the expert for sales persuasion and marketing and motivation stuff. To answer your question, yeah, the book is of course amazingly effective and perhaps the single most important thing that you can do as a first step to get your name out there is to write a book and get it published or simply to self publish the book, if you can’t get it published by a real publisher which is very often the case the first time off. At least, write the book, self publish it, get a cover on and start promoting your book. So, when you get on stage, you can say you wrote a book. That’s a huge thing, but that’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle which really has to do with branding yourself as an authority figure in whatever field you’re in. For more exclusive interviews on business, marketing, advertising and copywriting, go to Michael Senoff’s To get on stage to talk with conviction and clarity and focus and authenticity and be able to essentially position yourself as the expert in your field, promote yourself in a way that’s elegant, that gets the job that doesn’t come off as tacky, and doesn’t cheapen your brand, and the next step is to learn how to close, be a closer so you can get paid for it. You line up those three elements in a speaking career, you’re going to kick ass.
Michael: Now, your branding, you had a lot of help. I remember in your book, you were talking about, you went to them or you didn’t really what your success system was until Bandler kind of narrowed it down to those four principles. What’s your feeling about building a team and getting coaches to help you, and in the branding department who was your mentor, and who helped you clarify thing on what Jordan’s brand was going to be or did you have an idea on that?
Jordan: The question is that in terms of – Bandler didn’t help me brand myself. What Bandler did – I went to Bandler for a couple of reasons. The first reason is I had heard a lot about NLP, and it was all these different people who purported to be experts or certified at NLP, and then I actually said, “Okay, if I’m going to go out there on the speaking circuit and really do this at the highest level and try to make quick change in people’s lives, I want to know every possible technology, every technique that’s out there,” so I started to investigate NLP and then stumbled upon some local course in NLP in San Diego. I went through a six day NLP seminar that was fucking worthless. It was just so awful. It was terrible. The guy – nice enough guy but not – and he might be okay himself, maybe even using it. I don’t even know. NLP is sort of like it’s almost like – I compare it to a beautifully crafted saber. In the hands of an expert, it could be deadly affective, and in the hands of a novice, freaking worthless. That’s like what NLP really is. So, I went to this seminar with this guy. I was like, “Well, that was a waste.” I said, “I want to find out from the horse’s mouth exactly what this shit’s all about,” so I hooked up with Bandler. I went down and spent the week with Bandler, and that’s why I went to find out. That was the first reason was to really understand this sort of murky body of knowledge, and I wanted to find out what the truth about it was. The second thing that I when I start to have a basic understanding of NLP, I was like, “Okay, it’s really about modeling and breaking down people’s strategies,” and that was really what Bandler really helped me crystallize in my life in terms of what I had done that allowed me to not just make money, but allowed me to take any person basically, any young kid without any sales experience, without any entrepreneurship skills, without a high level of self motivation, without standards that were very, very high – kids from poor families without – how did I take any of these kids and make them all rich? That was really what I wanted to get to the bottom of, and that was what I learned with NLP through Bandler and through the exercises that I did with Bandler was to understand what my strategies were and what was the sort of almost like the – I don’t know if you know anything about NLP, but part of it was about listening to people like Milton Ericson, the famous hypnotist and Virginia Setera was the top family therapist. These are people who are getting results who were far more greater than any other therapist. The idea was that Bandler and Grender when they were doing their dissertation on this was to figure out what it was they were actually doing, and what was the distinction that actually made the difference. So, you can break that down, model it and then duplicate it. That was really how NLP got started as a college project. What that found out was that 99 percent of what Virginia Setera was saying to her clients was irrelevant. It was just the one percent that she was doing unconsciously. She didn’t really know her own strategy. So, it took her a very, very long time to make changes in people because she’d beat around the bush, beat around the bush, and accidentally, or just simply by sheer trial, she hit on the distinction that really made the difference. So, that was the idea of NLP was to boil down what we do unconsciously down, make it conscious, slow it down, and turn into these task points which you can then line up and say, “Which are important? Which aren’t?” Then, make the strategy much more elegant, much more right to the point. That’s what NLP really allowed me to do. So, then when I went out now and I started sharing my message with people, the response I got was staggering versus just going out there and saying, “Hey, I remember before I actually did NLP of going out there and speaking to these college kids.” It was about ethics, but I quickly switched to motivation, success stuff that I found myself almost stumbling for the right words and thoughts. I wasn’t really sure what I had done. I knew I had hit something, but I didn’t really knew. Once I distilled the formula that I could share in thirty minutes or thirty months, of course, the deeper layers are exposed, I found myself able to go into any corporation, any charity whether it’s homeless people or kids on drugs, any sales organization, and of course, any seminar room where I kill it when I go on stage. The first one I did in the US was at – I don’t know if you know who Frank Kern is. Frank (inaudible) we used to have a business together, and Frank asked me to come speak at his event that he had. I went up on stage, and literally I just killed it. I mean, (inaudible) five times as many or seven times as many people. It was like 700 percent. He’s a pretty good stage closer. It’s because I really don’t do things by accident. I have a strategy, and how to distill down my message to the important points that connect with other people, and empower them and also gets me what I want. So, that’s really what it’s all about.
Michael: So, this straight line system, when you met with the UK guy, and he said, “Why don’t you have a product promote?” You’re like, “Okay, yeah, I need to do that.” How did you get the product together? How did you do your product creation? Did you hire someone to do it? Did you distill it down yourself? How did we get the straight line system all organized and ready to?
Jordan: The straight line system was something that I resisted. I resisted teaching it to people for a very long time.
Michael: Why? Learn how to sell like Jordan http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/HPSOE.htm
Jordan: Because it was so effective, it was so incredibly effective at closing people and really literally it’s mind boggling effective, and I had some negative beliefs attached to this straight line because I had used in a way that wasn’t ethical.
Michael: So, this was a system all your brokers were using.
Jordan: They were all using it. It’s still being used all over Wall Street today.
Michael: Let me ask you. So, did you learn it in your early days on Wall Street from another mentor, or forms of it?
Jordan: No, I came up with it myself, and I learned certain forms – yes, there were forms of it. There’s different parts of a straight line system. Some of it has to do with tonality. Some is structure. There’s different things. Lehman Brothers, back when they were in business, back in the eighties, was using a very, very – they had a very, very aggressive operation in Wall Street. They were calling people on the phone and selling them stock. They had lots of scripts written that were loosely organized. I got a hold of these scripts that I read through. Some of the stuff was very, very powerful. It was very powerful language patterns, and very powerful ways to move people to take action.
Michael: Were all the brokers in those days using scripts to sell? If you were with Lehman Brothers, you were going to be using scripts.
Jordan: Yeah, yeah, they were famous for it, Lehman Brothers. Back in 1982, a guy named Marty Shafroft who wrote a book called Telemarketing for the Eighties, he came up with this sort of loose, this sort of not the straight line system, but it was just using scripts and stuff, and it was very primitive compared to what I ended up inventing later, but it was still the base stuff that I read and learned about. I could model some of that stuff. Then when I worked as a rookie cold caller, I sat next to somebody, and I at six months I couldn’t even cold call myself, I would go on listening, listening to people on the phone for months and months and months, every single day trying to convince people to take action. I noticed some very, very important things, and those things that I noticed I ended up adopting into a system I created about a year later when I had to essentially – I hit upon a niche in the market that no one had been in which is really selling five dollar stocks to the wealthiest Americans. To do that, it requires a lot of finesse and training so, I need to figure out a way to train people who were really without much talent so to speak. They weren’t quite closers. They weren’t educated. They wanted high aspirations. How do I train these people to become world class closers? I came up with the straight line system out of frustration one day because I was trying to say to these guys, “Guys, don’t you get it? It’s like a straight line. Every sale is the same.” I drew a straight line on the board, and everyone started writing. There was sort of this great visual about goal oriented communication. There’s the open. There’s the close, and bah, bah, bah, controlling the conversation. It worked. It was one of those things that worked better in practice than it did in theory. When you read about it, when you go through the home study course, you’ll say, “Wow, this is great,” because hit is really powerful. I felt better stage. Everybody is like, “Oh my god, this is great.” Everyone loved it because it made so much sense. It’s even better in the real world. It works even more effectively in the real world. It’s one of those things that works better than it’s cracked up to be, and what happened was that I had this power and I was great at teaching people this, and I was great at motivating people. I fucking misused it. I got greedy, and I didn’t have ethics, and the system because it was so effective allowed me to make my mark on the world. So, instead of making a mark on the world, and using it to sort of empower people and do great things, I used it to do some darker things and I paid the price for that, so many years later, flash forward, I go to jail. I come out. I start writing – I write this book. It becomes a huge best-seller. DeCaprio is playing me.
Michael: Tell me how you got the idea. Do the story about when you were in jail, and who you met there and who gave you the idea about writing a book.
Jordan: That came from Tommy Chong from Cheech and Chong. He was there for – I didn’t go to penitentiary. I was at one of those camps. So, there’s all mild people there. So, Tommy Chong was my bunkmate. They put us together. We were both high profile people, so we shared a cube, and each night we’d tell each other stories, and eventually by night three, it was like, “God, I feel like you were kind of making some of this shit up,” because I called my wife and (inaudible) on the internet. You really lived this insane life. He goes, “You’ve got to write a book.” So, that was how it started, and he convinced me to try to write a book, and in the beginning it was very difficult. I was not a writer. I never had written before.
Michael: Did you start writing in jail?
Jordan: Yes, I started writing in jail, and I had tremendous difficulty mastering that skill, but then I stumbled upon a book called Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe, and that just blew me away, and I modeled that book. That’s really one of the secrets to success is finding someone that you can model, someone that’s done it before and does it at the highest level, and then learn their strategy, and that’s why I did. As soon as I started modeling Tom Wolfe, my writing dramatically improved. I’m a very intense guy. I used his book like a text book. I underlined stuff, and I found patterns, and there’s patterns in everything in life. I found his patterns in writing, and I took that and I used to write my own best-seller. That’s what happened.
Michael: Had Tommy Chong written a book before?
Jordan: He was writing a book when I was in jail. He called it I Chong. It’s out there.
Michael: So, you had this manuscript of this first book, and so what was your vision. Let’s say you were in the middle of writing your book, what’s your vision about this book? Did you have a plan at that time?
Jordan: At the beginning?
Michael: No, at the time when you were writing the book.
Jordan: I literally, I was doing just to keep busy and to keep my brain vital. What I was saying to myself was that I was playing this own little game with myself. I’m saying, “I’m going to write this book. I’m going to show people how to make lemons into lemonade.” I was just saying that to make myself feel better because when you’re in jail, you’re always trying to play the mental to make yourself feel better because it’s a very lousy situation you’re in. So, I was doing that, and I never really thought the book would get published because I didn’t know how to write, and it’s such a long shot, and then what happened was when I got out of jail, I had about 200 pages. I ripped them out. I just didn’t like them, and I got out of jail, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was kind of confused. I said, “Let me give writing another shot,” and I wrote five pages, and I knew someone very casually was a book agent. I sent him my first five pages. He was blown away, and then I was like, “Whoa,” this is getting real. Then, I sent ten more pages, and he just said to me, “Stop what you’re doing, and you’re an amazing writer,” and this whole thing, and that was how it started. It became very real, very quick and I sold it to Random House before the book was even done.
Michael: Let me ask you this. Let’s just say for all these book publishers, they all have a dream of writing a book and landing a deal and getting it to be a best seller. So, you met this agent. Did the agent, was he your agent? Did you guys strike a deal?
Michael: So, what kind of deal does one strike with an agent? Just an idea of what’s the relationship between you, the writer, and the agent.
Jordan: He takes a percentage of the sale. He takes ten percent.
Michael: Ten percent of any-
Jordan: Revenues from sales or royalties.
Michael: Okay, so this agent’s now has the - I guess the contract to market and sell your book. Does it work like that, one agent exclusively?
Michael: Then, so he went to work and what was he able to do?
Jordan: Sold it to Random House the first day, right away. He went to New York and sold to Random House.
Michael: Did he get an advance against royalties?
Michael: So, what kind of royalties – what’s a good royalty deal for a book publisher to try and get because I know – isn’t there a big variance between what one or two percent up to fifteen percent?
Jordan: Well, it depends on – it’s very complicated formula, when I say complicated, not hard to learn, it’s just very long-winded because there’s all different types of mediums out there. You have regular hard cover. You have trade paperback. You have soft cover. You have digital. You have stuff that’s sold in this place, in that country. My book is in fifty countries.
Michael: Okay, so what kind of deal was a Random House an all inclusive deal meaning they had the rights to do anything from digital, hard copy, soft copy, whatever.
Jordan: Random House bought world rights from me.
Michael: Exclusive world rights, and so they have pretty much all control to do anything with the book.
Jordan: Outside the movie.
Michael: Except not the movie rights, and was that something you negotiated or your agent knew how to do that.
Jordan: My agent knew how to do that.
Michael: All right, and what were they able to do? How did they get it to be a best seller? How long did it take?
Jordan: It was a best seller right away. I mean, it was believed to hit the best seller list, and then-
Michael: How many books sold?
Jordan: I don’t even know. I really don’t. I sold so many books all over the world, and the books sold millions of copies all over the world. I guess another royalty statement I think this month. October, I’ll know.
Michael: Do you figure, can you make a quarter a book, fifty cents a book for every one sold?
Jordan: You make more than that.
Jordan: An awful lot more than that.
Jordan: You make four dollars for a hard cover and about a dollar fifty for soft cover. That’s an estimate.
Michael: That’s pretty damn good worldwide. Now, so you’ve got this best seller book. Tell the book publishers what’s more valuable – the spin-off from the best seller of the book, all the potential opportunities, or the actually royalty money from the book?
Jordan: It all depends who you are. If you are smart, you take the book and leverage that into a career as a speaker or whatever else you want to do, or a coach or whatever. That’s really where the money is. I make a lot more money off of my speaking and my consulting than I do off of writing, but the writing serves as a platform for you to really become known to brand yourself. So, it’s sort of a launching off point. Now, some people make more money writing. If you want to make writing your career, yeah, I could have probably just put my nose to the grindstone and just been a professional author just on that, not done any speaking. I could have built myself a very nice living doing that, but I enjoy going out there and speaking, so that was the choice I made.
Michael: In the book, when the book was published and were you allowed to put your direct contact information in the book so after people read it, if they wanted to get in touch with you they could go to your site or call your offices, or was that not doable?
Jordan: I didn’t because at the time I wrote the book, it was definitely not something I had on my mind at all. I wasn’t thinking that far ahead at all. At that point, I was just like, “You know, I’m just going to be a writer.” I was a little shell shocked from what happened, and in a different headspace. I’m an expert at selling myself. I sold myself to be a writer, but the true me is a speaker. So, I’m sure you can – I know Harv Eckert, his book is just a promotion for his speaking tour. So, I get that.
Michael: I just want the best sound quality. So, can you just talk right in the a little bit closer? All right, so tell me. The book becomes a best seller. Where did the – tell me the story how it did, the movie came about or the making of the movie. Give me the transition from best selling book, to did your agent shop it around for a movie deal or you?
Jordan: Yeah, the book wasn’t even out. The book wasn’t even published yet when it was sold to Hollywood. What happened was as soon as the manuscript was done, someone named Alexandra Milshone, very, very powerful woman in Hollywood, her dad is Arnold Milshone who owns Regency, billionaires, very wealthy people, very connected people, very good people. She had read – when my book agent, when I was writing my book, when I got to page 75, he actually slipped the first 75 raw pages to this woman, and she fell in love with the raw manuscript, and we started becoming friends and meeting for lunch. She is really a very sharp lady, and as soon as the book was – back then, she was like, “Oh my god, you don’t understand. This is going to be – I’m going to get Leonardo DiCaprio to play you. Martin Scorsese.” I thought she was delusional. I really did.
Michael: You thought she was full of it.
Jordan: No, I didn’t think she was full of it. I knew she was a legitimate. I just thought – no, because I knew she was legitimate.
Michael: She was legit, but you were expecting the worst, hoping for the best.
Jordan: I just thought she was delusional. I loved her. She wasn’t a liar. I just thought she’s just crazy. It just seemed so absurd. What’s the freaking chance of that happening? Come on – it was eight months – six months ago sitting in a jail cell, and six months later, I’m out for lunch and this billionaire saying that book is going to be the biggest book of all time. It’s like a long shot. I’ve had an extreme life, not doubt about it, but I figured it would take a bit longer than that to make a come back. So, whatever – we talked, we met, we kept meeting for lunch every few weeks, and as soon as the manuscript was done, she whipped it out to Leonardo DiCaprio and to Brad Pitt, and they both loved it. A bidding war started between Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Leo had Warner Brothers bidding for him, and Brad Pitt at Paramount, and up and up and up the bidding went, and it eventually, Leo called up today, “I’ve got Marty Scorsese who wants to direct the movie now.” He read it and loved it too. I was like, “Shit, how could I give up a Leo Marty combination,” and that was it. I sold it to Random House to Warner Brothers for Leo and Marty.
Michael: Who is the movie producer?
Michael: So, Warner Brothers bought the rights.
Jordan: With Leonardo DiCaprio and Marty Scorsese attached to it.
Michael: So, they had to commit that he was going to act in the movie, and he’d be the director.
Jordan: Yes, and then what happened was we got – we were supposed to have Terry Winter who is an amazing, brilliant. (inaudible) he’s a writer of Boardwalk. He is a great writer, and Terry wrote the script. The script is amazing, and they were going to green light the movie then, and the writer’s strike came in, and we got screwed with that. Now, it’s supposed to go into production in about sixty days in November.
Michael: So, it’s going to go actually into production sixty days.
Michael: So, what’s the ETA for it hitting the theaters and stuff?
Jordan: By the end of 2011.
Michael: That’s exciting. That’s going to be a big. Hey, so let’s do some story. Let me ask you. What do you think – so your story, you talked a lot of people and you get a lot of feedback. What do you think makes your story so compelling?
Jordan: Well, I think that what makes my story so compelling-
Michael: What do you think people think? What’s the market? Why are they so attracted to this story?
Jordan: Part of this thing is I happen to be with – I’m not saying this to brag even more, but I happen to be a good writer. I write well, and I write in a certain voice that hooks people in. People like my writing voice, so that’s part of it that I write well. So, if you write, and this is important for your people who you’re trying that will listen to this is that so much of what you do is how you say it. So much of what you say it is how you say it. If I told my story, if you told my story, and I don’t know you that well to say you’re a good speaker or a bad speaker, but I can assure you that if you told my story and I told my story, people would connect a lot more with me telling my story than you telling my story.
Jordan: The thing is I didn’t hire a ghostwriter. I wrote my own words in my own voice. So, that’s one thing that people really, really connected with, and I had a flare for the writing. So, that helped then. One of the things I teach people in seminars is that again, it always – the biggest misconception, and really why the straight line system is so powerful for people is that it’s the communication side of it. It shows you how to become an ultra-effective communicator. You can have the best story in the world. If you don’t know how to tell it to people, it’s worthless. You can have the best product in the world. If you don’t know how to write sales letter or sell it or train people to sell it, no one’s going to find out about it. So, it’s that part of the equation that so many people, internet marketers, especially – in fact, this seminar I have coming up in LA, it’s almost all internet marketers from Frank Kern. I didn’t do any promotion. It’s just people from Frank’s event, who upsold into this one seminar. That was really almost the exclusive way of what this event is made up of here. They connected with the fact that you know, Frank said it to, the biggest thing that holds his people back, all the internet marketers is a lot of them they can’t sell their way out of a paper bag. They’re not closers. So, they have this great idea, this great product. They can’t write a sales letter to save their life, and they have to get an affiliate to mail it for them. They can’t create it or speak in a way that moves people. So, it’s that skill that really – that I do have and I mastered and modeled from people and then come up with some of my own stuff, and it’s harder with the straight line system. That’s really why I think people look into my story because I tell it well, and that’s one part. The other aspect is like I clearly earned my stripes and not in a good way. I’ve consumed enough drugs to sedate a family of grizzly bears on a daily basis. I was taking those massive of drugs. I was incredibly affected at earning money in the eighties and nineties. So, people will look at that. My business was ninety percent legit, ninety-five percent legit. There was only a few little things I was doing wrong. So, I have this knack for building businesses. So, have this little pedigree that most people who get up on stage to speak have never really done anything in their life. They’ll talk about making money. They’ll talk about this system and that, but they’ve never actually made money in the real world off stage. They’re talking about how to get rich without having been rich. So, I think people connect with my story that I actually went out and was the real deal. I did it on Wall Street. I did it in the shoe business with Steve Madden. That was company as well, Steve Madden shoes. We took that company from zero to $700 million. So, when I go out on the stage and speak to people about entrepreneurship and sales and marketing offline and online, I have a different take. Every strategy that I share with people, I’ve actually used in the real world. I don’t just – I don’t read books and then give people the stuff I read in books. So, that’s really the difference, and then of course, there’s just the Wow Factor in terms of just, “Oh my god, I just want to listen.” I’m going out there and getting paid. I’m Switzerland this afternoon and get paid fifty thousand bucks to play golf, and give a one hour keynote speech. Now, that’s of course because that’s the celebrity factor of it all, and learning how to celebritize yourself – if that’s really a word – but learning how to celebritize yourself at least on some level is a very, very powerful adjunct who is speaking this. At least, there’s fifty percent or more to you if you’re a celebrity. So, like I teach people how to do that without having to make the mistakes. To celebritize someone is not that hard to do. It requires work.
Michael: I think in the book it talked about, or maybe I heard it in an interview – tell me about your first car when you made $600,000. What did you go out and buy?
Jordan: My first major score in the stock market, I made $600,000 in one day, and-
Michael: How was the score? What kind of deal was it?
Jordan: It was a new issue I took public and I had thirteen guys working for me at the time, and the straight line system had just been invented, and it was just unprecedented. I took a bonus of $600,000, but I made seven million that day. Seven million in one day but I took a bonus, my first big cash bonus out of my company of $650,000. The first thing I did is went out and bought a white Ferrari Testarosa, not bought a house, I bought a white Ferrari Testarosa. Why? Because I seen Don Johnson drive one in Miami Vice, and I thought, “I have to have that car.” So, I started living out my adolescent fantasies.
Michael: It’s an incredible car.
Jordan: It was incredible.
Michael: How fast did you ever get it going?
Jordan: 180 or something like that. So, yeah, cool car, and the next thing I did is I went out to the west coast and checked into the Regent Beverly Wilshire Presidential Suite. Why? Because I saw Richard Gere do it in Pretty Woman.
Michael: How was it? Was it as incredible as it looked in the movie?
Jordan: Nah, not quite as incredible, but it was still nice. The point is that people, not just me, and I just admit it because it’s kind of funny and people laugh at it, but we model what we see. Our beliefs get inserted by what we see – the movies, news, TV – is very powerful, and you start to see success, here’s what you do when you’re successful. On some levels, Gordon Gecco corrupted me tremendous. Greed is good.
Michael: How many times did you see the movie, honestly?
Jordan: Enough to quote all the dialogue.
Michael: Ten? Do you go to the movie multiple times?
Michael: No, the old one.
Jordan: I’ve seen it probably twenty or thirty times.
Michael: Have you seen the new one?
Michael: A new one is out.
Jordan: It’s not that good.
Jordan: I already got the emails asking me, “Have you seen the movie yet?”
Michael: I haven’t. I’m going to though. I heard it was pretty good, but we’ll see. There’s a great story when you match your dad. First of all, how in the hell do you get your dad working with you in the business? What was that whole relationship kind of like?
Michael: Yes, how is it that your dad was working with you in the brokerage firm? Was he into it?
Jordan: He loved it. He loved the action. He wasn’t in the brokerage side of things. He was in more of the operational side of things. It was a trip. You work with your dad. There’s plusses and minuses through the whole thing.
Michael: Oh yeah, I can imagine. Now, do you have sisters and brothers?
Jordan: I have a brother. He’s an attorney.
Michael: You have a brother, okay. I know in one of your interviews, either you’re not really into doing the stories, and I do want to definitely – we want to sell the straight line system, but I think people would love that helicopter crash story because it’s romantic. People want to hear that kind of stuff.
Jordan: The one in my backyard?
Michael: Yes, the one in your backyard. Do you want to do it or no?
Jordan: Well, I basically was flying home at night and was stoned out of my mind which was typically my state of being when I was flying, and the Captain was beside me, but he wasn’t allowed to touch the controls. I actually passed out, and after basically passing out, I recovered and I was about three in the morning. I went in my backyard and I tried to land in my backyard and I had little crash landing, and that was that. But, that was typical for my life.
Michael: So, when did you take flying lessons?
Jordan: I had helicopters on my yacht, so I just wanted to fly it, and just have a little fun.
Michael: Did it take a long time to learn how to fly one?
Jordan: Not that long. It’s pretty easy once you have fifty hours, you can become pretty damn good at it.
Michael: Now, how long did it take to get up to – did you have up to a thousand brokers working with you? Were all one thousand in the same room?
Michael: That must have been insane, and there were no dividers in there?
Michael: So, when a broker is talking to a potential client, they could hear the roar in the room?
Jordan: Yes, it was crazy. It totally was.
Michael: So, you said you started – you give an example on your first big bonus check that you took. You had about thirteen brokers. How long did it take to get up to a thousand?
Jordan: Pretty quickly. Once we started, once the word got out, people started trickling. They started pouring in from all over the country because there was a rumor to go to this one place in Long Island and show up and they’ll train you to get rich.
Jordan: That’s what it basically was.
Michael: Were you freaking out when all these people kept coming to – were they coming right to the office?
Jordan: Yeah, they’d line up right outside the door. It was just complete insanity. That’s what happens. Any business that hits, and then the greatest misconception – I have to get going to jump on a plane – the greatest misconception about becoming really wealthy is that it takes a long time, or that wealth is built slowly, one foot in front of the other. That’s not how it happens at all. Everytime, and of course there’s exceptions, but virtually every time someone makes a real lot of money, what typically happens is they struggle, they struggle, they struggle, and then all of a sudden, bam, they come up with that final distinction, that one wealth piece of the puzzle falls into place, and they literally kill it. The wealth comes pouring in, an avalanche of abundance. You can just grow it as fast as you can and make obscene amount of money overnight. It’s not – that’s how it happens. What takes time is to line up all the elements itself on the entrepreneurship side, sales, marketing, the inner game stuff, your beliefs, your ability to manage your emotional stages – all these different elements, about eight to ten of them that really you must master. So, what I do in my seminars, I go through these eight in intimate detail so when people leave a seminar, they have every tool, every prop, every strategy they need to go out there and kill it. Now, does that mean they’ll go out day one and make tens of millions? No, sometimes they do. I’ve got people who leave my seminars. They go out and the next day they make five million deals. It happens all the time. Last seminar in Sydney, three people closed million dollar deals within a few days, but that’s not typically the case. Typically what happens is then you have to work and you have to line – you have things you need to work on. You have to line up the elements of success. It takes a bit of time, but then once that spark hits, bam, ignites the flame, you blow it out. You grow really fast and you can go from making virtually nothing to making ten million a year overnight. That’s the way it works for a lot of people, at least a million a year overnight. I don’t know anybody who would argue and say that when you hit on it, you’ll go from zero to a million like boom. That’s just the way it is.
Michael: Since you’ve got to go, I thought we were going to have ninety minutes. Let me do a couple of questions on the straight line because that’s what I’m going to try and promote. So, when someone orders your home study system, it was a previously taped seminar that you did live?
Jordan: The study course, yes.
Michael: Yes, the home study course.
Jordan: That was a seminar that I gave specifically for to get to cut the home study course. It was specific. It wasn’t some random seminar. It was for the home study course.
Michael: Do people pay to attend that seminar?
Jordan: Yes, people paid, but what happened was it was a friend of mine did me a favor, and what happened was I didn’t – the reason I did it that way was because I believe that I speak much better in front of crowds. I don’t think I can be as congruent when I’m alone with a video camera.
Michael: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Jordan: So, my idea was let’s get some bodies in a room here. I don’t think I’m going to make a dime on it. I just wanted to have high quality footage that I could use to make my home study course. So, that was the purpose of the outcome of that, and some people pay, some people came in for free. They had nothing to do – we didn’t market the event, really. Probably, it wasn’t like that.
Michael: You were creating your system in a state that you operate at your best.
Michael: Just like when you had this hour meetings with these brokers in the morning and two hours after the day, like during the broker years. For two hours at the end of the day?
Jordan: That’s the point is like as I said earlier which is Virginia Seteer paid she’d speak for six months or so to cut to the chase in five minutes. Now, again that’s the drawback of not having an unconscious strategy. In other words, we don’t have a strategy that you can actually pick apart step by step move by move, you end up spending a lot of time going around in circles just because you’re not deliberate. So, the reason I spend so much time at the brokers is I probably could have – knowing what I know now, I could have probably done it in one- tenth time, but also became part of the culture. Everyone loved the meetings. They were funny, and they kept everybody – the morale really, really high. Motivation to itself is worthless. Motivation – people say motivation doesn’t last, right? That’s true, which is why you have to do it every single day. That’s why you do it every day because it doesn’t last. It’s like a bath. It feels good, doesn’t last, but you still take them everyday because you should. Well, the same thing with motivation. I motivate guys again and again and again, every single day.
Michael: All right, I know you’ve got to go. We can talk for hours, as you know, but look, I appreciate your time, and have a good tour, a good trip. I’ll edit this thing. I’ll get it up on my site. I already have some good SEO on the name, and see if we can sell some courses for you.
