David Meltzer - Game-Time Decision Making

Hey everybody, Richard Blissbrook here with another Global Influencer Podcast, and today I have my most famous guest ever, I think, David Meltzer. David, how are you? Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I will tell you, that introduction really hits home because all the years I worked for Leigh Steinberg, the big sports agency, I never fathomed as your life angles and pivots and grows, that I would ever be introduced as the most famous of all your guests. So thank you so much. You've just given me a great gift.

Well, let me tell my audience about who I'm talking about here so they have a little bit of context. So, uh, David, my guest today, is a lawyer, but he left that behind and he is a business guru, and with a lot of credits to him. And I'm, I'm just gonna read a few of these so I get them right, David. Um, you're a number 1 ranked podcaster in the Entrepreneur Channel. You're a Forbes top 10, uh, speaker. You're ranked top 100 coach, 3-time bestselling international author. I think you're the hardest working guy in the business of business. Variety Magazine Sports Humanitarian of the Year and the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, which I wish I had another half hour to ask I'm gonna ask you about those. You're the executive producer of Entrepreneur's number one digital show, The Elevator Pitch, and your entrepreneurial podcast, The Playbook. We're gonna talk today about your new number one released book, Game Time Decision Making, and we're gonna talk about your life and your career, and we're gonna do it all in 30 minutes. And I gotta tell you, we have a, we have a mutual friend, as you probably know, Cynthia Kersey. And first time I ever met you was at the Unstoppable Foundation Gala, which is, um, pretty special event. Uh, but first, tell people, David, um, just, we're gonna build up to, you know, some of the key things, but where did you grow up and where do you live now?

Sure. I grew up in Akron, Ohio, and I'm blessed to live in Southern California. I have a home in Orange County by San Juan Capistrano, as well as we have a beach house in San Diego, California.

Beautiful. So, uh, would you give people just a little bit of history? Like, I know you started to go to med school and then you went to law school, and then if we could just fast forward, because, um, then all of a sudden you end up running the most important sports agency company I imagine, in the history of sports. And I think everybody wants to know what it would be like to work with Tom Cruise.

That's right. Well, let me just give you a quick 3-minute rundown. I'll try to put this together in some semblance. I grew up with a single mom and 6 kids, and the philosophy that she had was so important because the fetus wasn't fully developed till after graduate school. Only way I could ever distinguish myself in my family was the one area that my family sucked at, which was athletics. I could graduate summa cum laude at Harvard and be one of 10 people in my family that have done that. And so for me, I decided to distinguish myself regardless of what my mom thought. I was going to be a professional football player. I actually got a scholarship to play football in college. I got ran over my freshman year, first play by Christian Okoye, the Nigerian Nightmare. And I lied on my back and I literally said to myself, doctor, lawyer, or failure, because that was my mom's motto. So yes, I pursued a profession of my older brother to be a doctor, but he quickly gave me the best lesson of my life and told me to be more interested than interesting because I told him I hated hospitals. And at 18, I had no idea that doctors had to be in hospitals. I thought sports doctors were just in, you know, training facilities and sidelines. So I went to law school with one thing in mind. I wanted to be rich. The only reason I wanted to be rich was that the only time I wasn't happy in my entire childhood, whether we had food stamps or a packed dinner in a station wagon with my mom working 2 jobs, was when there's financial stress. If that car broke down or dishwasher or the rent was due, I'd catch my mom crying and it'd break my heart. I still— I got mommy issues. I'm getting choked up thinking about how hard she worked and sacrificed with 5 boys and a girl, all who went to Harvard, Penn, Columbia, all who graduated summa cum laude, extraordinary academics, and live extraordinary lives. But for me, I wanted to buy my mom a house and a car. I wanted to solve that problem. And so I went to the law school where I thought I could make the most money to be an oil and gas litigator, which is what I found out was the highest paying job out of law school was to litigate oil and gas. And then I also looked for other opportunities that would even pay more than that. So when I graduated law school, I chose between selling in 1992 legal research on the internet, which was DOS, monochrome screens, and XT computers, or being an oil and gas litigator. I chose, despite my mom's advice that the internet was a fad, I chose to sell and go against the grain of my entire family take the risk and vote for myself, realizing that just because someone loves you doesn't mean they give you good advice. My mom was a 2nd grade teacher. She knew nothing about the internet. And I went for it. 9 months out of law school, I was a millionaire. 1995, we sold West Group, uh, for West Publishing at the time for $3.4 billion. I was smart enough to leverage that into Silicon Valley, learned to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. At 30, I ended up the CEO of the world's first smartphone. And then, lo and behold, as I started— and I tell people this all the time— I didn't start where I wanted to be, but I found the light, the love, and the lessons in what I did. And I kept angling towards what I wanted to be. And soon enough, paying attention and giving intention to the coincidence, I met Leigh Steinberg, the most notable sports agent in the world. They made the movie Jerry Maguire after him. And in 48 hours, he hired me originally to be his cheap operating officer, and then 6 months later, his CEO. So I ran the most notable sports agency in the world. And the bigger blessing than that was I met Warren Moon, the Hall of Fame quarterback. And over a decade, we've run Sports One Marketing. And in the last 3 and a half years, I built my own media company, as you mentioned, built my own brand using all the skills, the knowledge, and desire that I learned from agency work and marketing work. to take a middle-aged mutant turtle like myself and build, like you said, a really big world influencer brand where I empower over a billion people to be happy.

Yeah, and I've watched you do it, David, in the last, uh, 3 or 4 years. It's really been remarkable. You and Warren do beautiful, really profound, uh, work in, you know, helping causes all around the world, and that's very inspirational. And your mission, which is a bold mission, is to bring happiness to a billion people, right?

Over, don't limit me, over a billion.

I won't limit you, no cap. The launching pad is a billion people, right? 'Cause if you can make a billion people happy, they can influence the other 6.5 billion, right?

Collective consciousness, you know it.

Just a smile on their face. So I was reading, About some of the things that, the principles that you use to foster your culture of happiness. Can you touch on those for people just for a minute? I mean, first one I think was gratitude and those are profound. Can you hit those for people?

And they saved my life. 2 years before I lost everything in 2006, my wife told me to take stock in who I was. And ever since that day, I've taken inventory of my values, personal experiential giving and receiving based on these 4. Number 1, gratitude. Gratitude is just the greatest power of all time. You want to change your life? Say thank you before you go to bed. Thank you when you wake up. I joke around, but they wrote that book, Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. No, everything you needed to know, you learned right off the bat from your grandmother or your mother because they told you, number 1, ask for what you want, and 2, say thank you. If you're going to take anything away from this interview, ask. You can't out-ask the universe. I'm not out-asking with over a billion people to be happy, and say thank you. So, gratitude finds in every situation the light, the love, and the lessons. I've represented the greatest celebrities, athletes, entertainers, billionaires, entrepreneurs of the world, politicians, and guess what? The exact same amount of their life sucks.

Right.

And so, what gratitude is— The same percentage of my life that sucks. So, what I learned to do through gratitude was to find the light, the love, and the lessons, to use pain as an indicator that I have a better direction to go, just like a turn signal on the car. Pain, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, financial pain, just an indicator I got a better place to be. Turn directions, a better situation, a better direction. And so, gratitude is super huge. 2, forgiveness. Forgiveness gave me peace, and there's only one person to forgive, yourself. I love the little Buddha cartoon that I always see that says, don't forgive somebody because they deserve it. Forgive them because you deserve it. Absolutely. You can't give what you don't have. Forgiveness will give you peace. It'll clear the interference corrosion from you and what you're connected to at all times. 3, accountability. I have 2 simple questions. What did I do to attract this to myself? And what am I supposed to learn from it? And 4 is the ability to allow things to come through you through effective communication, meaning most people think communicating to others is what inspires or motivates them. I think first you need to connect to the source and communicate with all of that power. We are connected to the greatest source of love, light, and lessons and power that has ever existed. I have more power in my pinky, so Bob Proctor says, to light up all of Manhattan with just my pinky, and I'm just denying the fact of how powerful I am, so I take that power— Allow it to come through me with these values that appreciate what I have, meaning it gains value from who I am with these values, and then I give it away. I give my life away. It comes through me. So, I grew up in a world of not enough. I was a victim. Everything happened to me. Then I moved to the world of just enough. Everything was for me. I was buying things I didn't need to impress people I didn't even like. Even giving, I was a huge giver, but I gave to negotiate, trade. I always had conditions and judgments tied to my giving, down payments for houses, cars, and everything was a trade. Now, everything in life, I no longer give to receive. I receive so I can give. And it's a whole different philosophy that has led me on this journey to provide one thing, value, value to make people happy.

Yeah. What a beautiful philosophy, profound. And I love, I just love the way you articulate it, David. Now you touched on something there that people might be curious about, which I think is a pivotal part of your story, that in your early 30s, you lost it all. And so I'm curious, what did it feel like? You know, people that have something, that's a paranoia they have, right? Losing it all.

Mm-hmm.

And they imagine What it's going to feel like, and it really influences their strategies and how they move in the world. What did it feel like to lose it all? And what or who inspired you to, like, pivot out of that and come back, which is so hard to do, I think? 2-part question.

Yeah. So, it was the most terrifying thing is what it felt like, which led me to learn the practice of ending fear. I started canceling, clearing, connecting the things that I want. My biggest fear was to lose everything. I grew up with nothing. I defined myself by what I had. I was so proud of it. And it reinforced, it says behind me here, money doesn't buy happiness. Right? And I learned that, but money's important because it allows me to shop. And if I shop for the right things, it It'll make me happy. But I learned through that fear, that terrible feeling of fear, that I was doing it wrong. And it was a motivator. Fear is a motivator, but not an inspirer, right? Motivation is short-term. It'll get you up, it'll get you back up, it'll get you started, it'll get you back started, restarted. And that's what that fear did for me. It got me started, and that was the emotion that I felt. I was defined by what I made, and now I'm defined by what I can do. I was terrified to tell my mom and Lee and Warren and all these people and my wife, to disappoint her. And the person that changed my life the most was my wife, not only because she's the one that set me on a more faithful journey, a journey that blends both currencies in my world, money and faith, and the objects of energy that get what I want, money and faith, how to blend that. But I came home, you can imagine this, we had everything. There's nothing we could not buy, huge home, cars, motorhome, boats, ski resort, golf courses. I mean, real money, right? And I came from food stamp money. So, my wife as well, we grew up together. And so, she grew up the same way as I. And I feel sorry for people that don't. I tell my kids, they're like, what's the one thing that you can't give me, Dad? I'm like, I can't give you what I learned from being broke and I don't want to either. I wish I could figure out a way to teach you what I learned without making you suffer.

Right.

But as a father, you just can't make them suffer like I did. But moreover, imagine this, we go now and we lose everything, right? I mean, sheriffs and trucks picking up stuff.

Oh my God.

There's so much stuff. It took me 2 years to go bankrupt because I had to unwind so much stuff, right? So, as I'm progressing through 2008, it took me 2 full years to unwind what we had. Anyway, we are finally settled. I'm still working for Lee Steinberg. I come home with my first paycheck. I'm living in a rented home with rented furniture, one car, 3 daughters under 10 years old, and a pregnant wife with my son.

Wow.

And I bring home this check and I told my wife, I said, because I, I've been on this journey learning, right? I said, honey, I said, would it be okay if I give money to our high school where we went to give a scholarship to a kid to go to college because I wouldn't have been able to go to college. My siblings, none of us could have gone to college. This is going to mean more to them than to us.

Yeah.

She looked at me crying. She said, oh my gosh, you finally get it. After all these years, you finally trust the universe, Dave. I've always trusted you, but you've never trusted and had faith in the universe, which is faith in yourself as well. I do. I said, are you okay with it? She says, double it. I looked at her, I said, I don't have that much faith. I started the blend, but that changed my life because that was the first time that I allowed things to come through me, that I was receiving to help others, and realized that I had everything I needed. If I didn't have everything I needed, I wouldn't be here. And I have a great power, a great source of light, love, and lessons that I can share to help other people. I no longer worry about paying my bills. No, I focus on paying other people's bills. I'm the chairman of Unstoppable Foundation. The greatest thing I've ever bought was building 2 community centers in Africa. Greatest thing I— and it was the hardest, hardest activity I've ever gone through, the most challenging. Let me tell you, I dedicated my 50th birthday. I did 50 birthday parties around the world to raise money for those. And if that might sound fun, Right. But trust me, you know, a birthday party every week turns into a serious job.

Yeah, that's work.

Especially with that many people, and especially having to be on and ask and, and, you know, share emotionally yourself to allow people to know how important this is to you.

Uh, um, so maybe a tough question, but I think feels like an important one. How have you honored— I'm sure that whole process was a wake-up call for the relationship with your wife and who she was for you. How do you honor her?

I get choked up. So let me tell people about honoring things. Honor your parents doesn't mean you listen to them, doesn't mean you get along with them all the time. You honor them. You don't do what they say. You listen and absorb it and make up your own mind and vote for what you want. You honor people by doing things for them, by being of service and of value for them. And also you honor them by asking them for help. It's a great honor to ask people for help, right? It elevates it. Yeah, for sure. And so I think it's really important for people to know that. So for me, I honor my wife by showing her gratitude, forgiveness, and accountability, by asking her what she and I can do for her, what value I can provide for her and what she can do for me. And it's interesting though, when you honor something, you will receive the promotion. You will perceive and will receive promotion. So I tell everyone, when you pay attention to and give intention to, you get the coincidences. When you honor somebody, you will elevate yourself and promote yourself. It's one of the greatest things to understand. And so, I am of service and value to my wife unconditionally, and I ask her for her help to honor her as well, as well as be grateful for giving and accountable to her to live an inspired life. Now, I want to make this clear. I'm still one of the biggest hypocrites in the world. Everything that I teach, I'm at practice at. I am a normal married man, 23 years, who the only difference in my relationship is I have learned to get back to center. To get out of ego-based consciousness, the need to be right, offended, separate, inferior, superior, anxious, frustrated, angry, worried, resentful, guilty, all the feelings you have in marriage or any relationship. The only difference today is it sometimes used to take me years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes to go back to center. I'm pretty good now between minutes and moments. I don't waste much time, energy, resources between me and my wife. I don't— accelerate in the wrong direction. I don't create interference and corrosion between— I look for the superpowers in my wife and that's what I get.

It sounds like you have the same thing going on in your household that I do when I'm like doing my podcast, which my inspiration is always things I need to learn, right? And so I'm coaching people and I'm saying, yeah, she's over there laughing. Why don't you bring some of that to the kitchen?

It's so good. Wait, have you— you know, I, I do a lot of coaching and interviews as well, and I love— I, I'll answer a question, literally, I'm such a hypocrite, and I'll say to myself, man, that's a good idea, Dave. Yeah, you should really listen to yourself. That's a— you're a really smart dude. You should really listen to yourself. Especially on my coaching calls, right? The guys are like, oh, that's an amazing idea. I'm like, yeah, I should really do that myself.

Well, speaking of that, uh, another thing you're famous for is codifying success. Uh, that's a little deep, uh, but maybe you can touch on some of the— I think you got 6 principles there. Touch on maybe 2 or 3 of the ones that are the most important for you. Like, if you were coaching me and we're talking about codifying success, yeah, what do I need to pay attention to?

Well, number one, you gotta have the best habit of asking. I've already mentioned you cannot out-ask the universe. We limit ourselves so much. We cannot ask. So you gotta get into practice of in person, on the phone, via email and media, radio, print, TV, and social media, asking how you can be of service and value. But more importantly, if you're gonna write down one question to ask, it's, do you know anyone that can help me? Too many people think the world's full of gatekeepers. Trying to stop you from what you want. No, the world is full of sponsors and power sponsors. Everybody's connected. A tree has no branches. One branch should not go to war against another branch. And if you ask, if you are more interested than interesting and you ask for help, do you know anyone that can help me? Most people on average know 1,000 people today. When we were young, we were lucky to get the golf game, the card game, or the church group. No, these kids and families, everybody knows 1,000 people. You can build hundreds of thousands of people within the context of your network to search for what you need and how you could be of service. Second thing is student in your calendar. I talked about paying attention to giving intention to the coincidences you want. It's the mathematical formula of luck. So here's what you got to do. You got to study what you have planned, what you don't have planned in your sleep. Study it every day with the lens of gratitude, accessibility, and productivity. I promise you success will be on your way. And then finally, easiest one, which will make a quick difference in your life. I believe that all statistics, 99% of all statistics are made up. That's the one statistic I know to be true. 100% of all short putts don't go in. I learned that later in life. Even more importantly, even more importantly, 100% of the things you do now get done. And the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is successful people get stuff done. So, ask yourself, can I do it now? If you do it now, you'll save twice as much time and be exponentially more successful. And if not, put it into your calendar, study it for the next day, and prioritize it by what's most important. Now you'll be more efficient, effective, and statistically successful as well.

Yeah, huge. So, your latest book, um, Game Time Decision Making, can you tell us about that and If we were to go buy it, which we will, where would you send us?

Yeah, sure. So go to Amazon to buy it. That's the easiest place. And audiobook, print, whatever. But most importantly, what I've done is I've taken 10 lessons of happiness with— and what I've done is I've started off with and told you, here's the lesson I'm going to teach you. Then I tell sports and entertainment-related stories to teach the lesson because people like Stories, and then I do a post-game analysis. So pregame, game, post-game analysis of 10 key lessons in order to effectuate good decisions to be happy. Our decisions formulate our future. And so I help people by empowering them with the toolkit to make great decisions aligned with their values, and not only the why, but the what, how, who, and when that they need in order to effectuate it.

Yeah, well, I don't have— I haven't read that yet, but I'll get it and read it and give you a 5-star review, I'm sure. What's David Meltzer up to in the next 2 or 3 or 4 years? What's the close-range vision and impact?

For me, you know, building a lot of content, and I give this branding advice to everyone. including you. And I've learned this lesson. I've been blessed to have a mentor named Gary Vaynerchuk who's built a huge brand for himself and knows how to build a community. But what I've learned about this frequency of, of good content is that you need to put a lot of it out.

Yeah.

You need to create a lot of content. And I'll tell you, here's what stops. This is the barrier why I know my brand will keep exponentially growing is I was able to make it through the hard part. Meaning what happens is if you start creating enough content where you can really build an audience, the people who already love and like you and the people who don't like you, they're going to be annoyed by you and they're going to let you know it. And so you have to be able to withstand people laughing at you, scoffing at you, making fun of you, being mean to you, people who are closest to you or that don't like you in order to reach the 4.4 billion available That are at your frequency that you can inspire. And so if you can get through that threshold where, you know, the majority of the feedback is, dude, you are giving way too much, please, I got enough Dave Meltzer at dinner, I don't need any Dave Meltzer on my Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn, please stop, stop, you know, where are you speaking this week, the bathroom? I've heard it all throughout the last 4 years. But if you can withstand— another piece of advice, just Unsubscribe the people who love and like you. Keep the people who don't like you. They're really good for your brand because your community will come to your defense. But if, you know, if people that you love, unsubscribe them for a couple years, let them come back after you've built your brand because you don't want to annoy them in order to get there. Uh, and so that, that's really important. So what I'm doing is building as much content as I can aligned with my values, and it starts with doing free training. Over 20 years I've been doing free trainings on Friday. They started as sales trainings, then they moved to community trainings with free lunch in my office. Now we're over 15,000 registrations for today at 11 AM.

Wow.

Only been— the virtual trainings have only been during COVID so not bad for 12 weeks. And then it's the number one downloaded podcast on the replay. So, you know, we're getting 250,000 a month downloads. So my mission is to get people in line and empower them to be happy so that they can empower other people. The only way I get over a billion is to find 1,000 people like you who empower 1,000 people to empower 1,000. 1,000 times 1,000 is a million. A million times 1,000 is a billion. I found a really great way in my lifetime, not just the next 3 or 4 years, the next 30 or 40 years, to empower others to empower others to be happy. And the reason is happiness, by the way, everyone, is the greatest virus of all time. Spread by witnessing it. It's free. It's wonderful. It'll strengthen you mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, and financially. It actually will strengthen your immune system, so it'll literally protect you against other viruses. So, happiness to me is the pursuit. It isn't the pursuit of happiness.

You got it. Wow. That's a good exclamation point. Thank you. And you're so right, David. Seen you so many places in the last 3 and a half years, and I'm not one of those people that thought it was too many. I was inspired. I thought, oh my gosh, he's the hardest working guy in the business of business, which is really creating content. Oh my gosh, such an inspiration. I want to thank you before I let you go for the very generous time you gave a young man that I have been mentoring. You gave him an interview about a year ago, which maybe you remember, maybe you don't, but I sent him on the task of— he didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. And I said, well, you know, college is great, but here's something greater. Go interview 50 or 100 great men and women and you'll figure it out. And he has. And you gave him that time. And I— Greatly appreciate it. And, uh, last thing I want to ask you, because I want everybody that listens to this podcast live and on replay to go find you, is dmelzer.com the best place to find you?

It's a great place. I also have a text community if you like that phone, 949-298-2905, david@dmelzer.com, dmelzer.com. Please reach out.

Yeah, and we'll drop that in the comments. David, thank you so much. I appreciate you from my heart. See you down the road.

Thank you, Richard. It's been a pleasure. I'll talk to you soon.