REAL Mentors Podcast

Nate DeTracy was 23 years old when he lost both of his parents in a car accident. No safety net, no roadmap and no one coming to save him. He fell into drugs and alcohol until the day he walked into a gym and watched a man completely transform his body on stage. That single moment redirected everything. What followed was a career built on discipline, identity and an obsession with pulling other pe...

Brent Gove has three rules for life. Life isn't fair, you are entitled to nothing and no one is coming to save you. Not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not your mentor and not your coach. You have to get on the struggle bus yourself and ride it all the way through. Brent sold over 5,000 homes, ran one of the largest Keller Williams franchises in the country, reached the top 11 agents worldwide...

Jason Shipley started his first business with ten thousand dollars split across two credit cards, a triple net lease on an old pizza building in Hutchinson Kansas and no idea what he was doing. What he did have was an absolute will to win and a promise he made to his first employer — that in five years he would know more about the business than anyone. He kept that promise. Today Jason is the CEO...

Vanessa Baird-Streeter grew up in one of the most segregated areas of the country where her family could afford a better neighborhood but was never shown those houses. That experience became the lens she has carried into every room she has entered since. She started her career as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, spent a decade in finance and then made history as the first woman of color to se...

Alexis Morgan founded her first real estate investment fund at twenty years old. By twenty one she was managing over forty million dollars. No Wall Street connections. No family money. Just a young woman who figured out how private lending works and built her own version of it from scratch. Today she's the founder of Peach State Capital Group, a private lending and real estate investing platform w...

Esther Acosta didn't see herself as a comedian. Then one open mic she flourished and found her calling. Three years later she's sold out over thirty shows, performed at the Laugh Factory in Chicago and built one of New York's most authentic comedy platforms from scratch. But before any of that, there was a family secret she didn't find out about until she was twenty one and a pattern she kept repe...

Kelly Siegel grew up with alcoholic parents who beat him when they came home drunk. He learned early that showing fear meant weakness and that survival required toughness. By college he was shipping weed on planes and slinging hundred dollar bags of dope to pay tuition. Then he got arrested, everybody testified against him, the college threw him out and the system threw the book at him. He looked...

Jonnie Parsons had the $70,000 truck, the four bedroom house and the white picket fence. He gave it all away chasing a void he couldn't fill. What followed was meth, opiates, fentanyl, eighteen months in county jail inside a two year stretch and getting arrested in front of his son and his girlfriend who barely spoke English and didn't have a license. He was a firefighter risking his career to get...

Kereen Evans migrated to the United States at eleven years old. She went on to become a Manhattan prosecutor, a legal advisor, a podcast host in the top ten percent of all podcasts worldwide and a passion to purpose coach. She didn't plan all of it. She just kept moving. In this episode, Kereen gets into what drew her to the prosecutor's office in the first place which was not to lock people up, b...

Jarred Elmar bought his first properties on courthouse steps right out of high school with no college, no capital, no connections and no safety net. Just a scrappy kid from South Florida who refused to let his circumstances write his ending. Today he's the Managing Partner of The Geneva Group with over 1.8 million square feet of commercial real estate and a goal of 5 million. But the real story is...

Ryan Zofay started using drugs at 11. By his late teens he was incarcerated, facing a potential life sentence. Most people don't come back from that but Ryan built a 9-figure business from it. The turning point wasn't a strategy. It was his mother, newly sober herself, walking into that detention center with the 12-step program and a decision to stop abandoning her son. That moment cracked open so...

Franjez grew up in Yonkers with nothing and says that's exactly why he appreciates everything. Raised in a Dominican household where daily drinking was just part of life, he spent years as a New York State corrections officer feeling lost, chasing control and going through the motions. Then a doctor's visit and the right roommate at the right time cracked something open. Now he's the host of Talk...

Men's mental health is in crisis. The statistics prove it. The disconnection proves it. And nobody wants to sit with that long enough to actually fix it. Vinny Brusco decided to build the fix. He's a certified life coach, Purple Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, host of The Council of Dudes podcast, and founder of Agora Social Club — a physical space in Westchester, NY built specifically to give men a...

High-pressure leaders don't fail because they lack strategy. They fail because their nervous system is running a program their ambition can't override. Ian Garfinkel is a Neural Performance and Executive Function Specialist and founder of Evolution Mindset. He works with high-pressure leaders and teams on the things most coaches won't touch. He focuses on identity reconstruction, nervous system re...

Traci Mitchell spent years in newsrooms covering the White House, Capitol Hill and anchoring in San Francisco. But the real story isn't the Emmy. It's what she discovered underneath the achievement. In this episode, Traci breaks down why most people are living a story they never chose and how to change it. She gets into the scarcity mindset that runs through high-achievement spaces, the power of s...

From streets and needles to $700K business turnarounds, Trevor Cowley shares his brutal path: extreme poverty, 4 years of IV heroin addiction, homeless rock bottom, and cold-turkey mountain detox. Now co-owner of Easier Accounting and host of Real Business Owners Podcast (2M+ downloads), he reveals how stacking cash, extreme discipline, and facing demons built his empire. Expect unfiltered truths...

From managing a $25M P&L in male-dominated HVAC to building a thriving restaurant franchise (and recently exiting amid "financial debris"), Angela Goodman reveals how core wounds—like over-helping others—sabotage entrepreneurs' wealth and growth. She shares her raw journey: grateful for her parents' divorce at age 8, twice-divorced herself, and now coaching high-performers to prioritize self-l...

From Princeton/Stanford engineer and ex-NASA scientist to culture pioneer, Rajiv unveils why elite teams win through simple pencil-and-paper maps—not tech or offsites. He shares the SEAL captain's wake-up call ("That's not icing, that's the CAKE"), house cleaner Betty's transformation from overwhelm to piña coladas, and why "I'm not a scientist" is "bloody nonsense" anyone can fix. Discover how le...

She had the corner office, the MBA, two kids, a husband, and the suburban dream. Then a stranger punched her in the face, threw her to the asphalt, and strangled her until she blacked out in a parking lot at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. Most people would've stayed a victim. Erika Rothenberger decided to change the law instead. In this episode of The REAL Mentors Podcast, host Sean Martin sits down with Er...

Your voice is your ultimate superpower and Matt Berthot proves it. Former choir director Matt Berthot joins Sean Martin on the REAL Mentors Podcast to reveal how vocal power unlocked Sean's prison story, sparked life-changing breakthroughs, and fueled Matt's own radical reinvention. From small-town Kansas wrestler and state champ to getting fired as a "toxic male" after 19 years teaching, Matt now...

In this episode of the REAL Mentors Podcast, serial entrepreneur and Gathering The Kings founder Chaz Wolfe sits down with Sean Martin to unpack how self‑belief, faith, and intentionality can completely rewrite your story. From being raised by a single mom and watching her walk away from the welfare system, to building and selling multiple seven‑figure businesses, Chaz shows what happens when you...

Andelina Storm brings a raw, faith-filled Gen Z perspective to mental health on the REAL Mentors Podcast with Sean Martin. A 20-year-old psych student and author of Sanity in the Storm, Andelina opens up about OCD, anxiety, PMDD, depression, and the friend’s suicide that pushed her to write a book she calls a “toolkit” for people in the dark. She shares how Christian faith, vulnerability, and smal...

David Perlleshi, Albanian-American broker (Bronx-born to '89 Kosovo immigrants) reveals how he ditched corporate paychecks for uncapped potential, scaling mom-and-pop storage facilities into institutional goldmines. From seeing "down units as gold" to closing 200+ deals with his 7-person team, David breaks down why self-storage crushes multifamily (35% expense ratios, month-to-month flexibility),...

In this episode of The REAL Mentors Podcast, Belinda Ramos, now Executive Director of Community Connections for Youth in the South Bronx, reveals why the most effective way to prevent youth incarceration is hiring people who've lived through it. Her organization staffs 80% formerly incarcerated adults as mentors—"credible messengers" who understand the streets, the system, and the trauma—cutting r...

At 29, Sean Martin was making six figures... then he went to prison. Most people would call that career suicide. But he calls it the best thing that ever happened to him. In this raw, no-BS episode, Sean sits down to get interviewed about his journey from the Bronx projects to building a multi-million dollar ventures and the uncomfortable truths about mindset, sobriety, and identity that he's neve...