REAL Mentors Podcast

The best time to buy real estate was yesterday. That is the one rule Steven Padernacht has built his entire career on and after closing over $75 million in sales in one of the most overlooked real estate markets in America he has the receipts to prove it. Steven is a third generation real estate professional, host of his own show on BronxNet TV and the voice of the Bronx real estate market. His gr...

Gerardo Santana served in Afghanistan, taught high school in the Bronx for seven years and was good at doing what a lot of men are good at pushing everything down and keeping it moving. Then his daughter was born and the emotional breakdowns started happening in the middle of the city and he could not explain them and could not make them stop. That was the beginning of the real work. Gerardo is th...

Anthony Lolli was driving a Rolls Royce and living in a mini mansion in Brooklyn when he was slowly eating himself to death. He knew it. His wife Tereza knew it. His kids knew it. Nobody could make him stop until the right combination of accountability, ego and a two and a half year old daughter who did not know the word fat but found one that hurt just as much finally cracked him open. What follo...

Don Donneruno grew up in New York City during the graffiti movement of the early 80s. Every year in school when they asked what he wanted to be he wrote artist. Every adult around him told him that was not a real career. So he spent decades doing everything but that until his early 40s when a friend called and asked him to help make a King Kong cake. He had never made a cake in his life. Ninety se...

Steven Edisis grew up in Edison New Jersey watching his family scrape by through the entire decade of the 1970s. By college he was throwing black paint parties on tennis courts for five dollars a head, promoting nightclubs in Miami and eventually moving into a house the Real World cast just vacated and charging a hundred dollars a head at the door. He figured out how to monetize fun before he ever...

Shawn French earned an athletic scholarship to LSU, became a top 1% performer in medical device sales and built one of the top 0.5 percent ranked podcasts in the world. By every external measure he was winning. He was still empty inside and it took him until his mid forties to understand why. It started in the third inning of a baseball game when he let a ball go between his legs and his father cr...

Sam Tejada spent 12 years as a firefighter paramedic watching the same people call 911 over and over. Not because the system was failing them. Because the system was working exactly the way it was designed to, which is treating sickness, not preventing it. He watched people show up in the back of his ambulance with grocery bags full of medications that contradicted each other, prescribed by doctor...

Max Mayes built a construction company to $1.6 million a month in under six months then walked away from it. He has raised over $30 million across venture, real estate and alternative investments and figured out early that once money stopped being hard to get the relationship with it changed completely. He hit $50,000 a month take home and realized it did not feel the way he thought it would. Toda...

Kelly Siegel already wrote the book on grinding through pain. Harder Than Life was the story of weaponizing poverty, abuse and addiction to build a successful company. Then he got to the top of that mountain, made the money and realized he still was not fulfilled. That is when the real work began. In this episode Kelly comes back to the REAL Mentors Podcast for a second time and goes deeper than h...

Madeline Martinez was a teenage mother living in the New York City shelter system before she was old enough to graduate high school. She got her GED the same year she would have walked across that stage, enrolled in college and kept moving. Then life pulled her back under. What followed was fourteen years of addiction, an $800 a day habit, sex work, evictions, shelter system violations and a morni...

Adam Roth was smoking weed stolen from his mother at nine years old. His father taught him how to smoke crack. Anger was the only emotion he knew because at twelve years old he made the decision to stop feeling anything else. From sixteen to twenty he cycled in and out of institutions. Every single day he did not know if he was going to live or die. He got clean at 26 and never looked back. Today...

Adam Jablin was standing in a room full of people who loved him, listening to them read letters about who he was and begging him to get help. His only thought in that moment was what everyone else was going to think. That is how deep the addiction had taken him. He went to treatment on a ten day trial basis because he could not imagine being gone for twenty eight. He never left. What came out the...

Kevin McShan was born three months premature with cerebral palsy. At nine years old a doctor told him he would never walk without assistance. What happened next is what this episode is about. Kevin built a career in sports broadcasting, professional speaking and disability advocacy by refusing to let anyone else write the story of what he was capable of. He launched a podcast called Let's Have Thi...

Justin Prince moved thirteen times before he was a teenager. No college degree, no professional background, making pizzas and doing construction work before he found his way into sales at a mall and realized he was actually good at it. He built his first business at 25 in the wellness space, watched it collapse overnight when the parent company pulled the plug and had to go back to the job he had...

Most people will grind for hours in the gym but refuse to sit still with their own thoughts for five minutes. Jennifer Clearwater and Cindy O'Connell have spent a combined four decades figuring out why that is and what it actually costs people in their health, their relationships and their results. Jennifer is a licensed professional counselor with a background spanning clinical practice, educatio...

Jeff Fieldstad built a successful financial services business from the ground up starting at 22 years old. He got comfortable, recognized the danger in that and moved his entire family to Las Vegas deliberately to surround himself with people operating at a higher level. He had another great run, sold the business in 2020 at 35 years old and thought he was finally done. He was not done. Three year...

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...