Randy Gage: From Jail Cell to Millionaire Mindset

Randy Gage is a Speaker Hall of Famer, bestselling author, and globally recognized thought leader known as “The Entrepreneur Whisperer.” From spending time in a jail cell as a teenager to becoming a multi-millionaire entrepreneur, he has dedicated more than three decades to helping people rewrite the mental programming that limits their prosperity.

He is the author of 15 books translated into over 25 languages, including Risky Is the New Safe, Mad Genius, and Radical Rebirth. His work has been featured in major outlets such as Forbes, Fortune, Fox News, and SUCCESS Magazine, and he has shared the stage with many of the world’s most influential business minds.

Event hosts value Randy for his direct, no-nonsense approach—delivering bold ideas, provocative stories, and practical strategies that inspire audiences to think bigger and act smarter about money, success, and mindset.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I always get asked what tools my guests use to build their businesses. What CRM is that? What camera are they using? How do they track their sales? So I did the work for you. I compiled a list of the top 20 tools and resources mentioned by my guests into a free PDF guide. It's the exact tech stack building seven figure businesses use right now. You can grab it for free. Download the guest black book at go.tronpodcast.com. Stop guessing and start building. Link in the show notes. Ladies and gentlemen, listeners of the Tron Podcast, The Randomness of Nothing. I've always been inspired by stories of hope, prosperity, as well as success. And this man is the epitome of it. I've been honored to be blessed with a numerous number of guests who have compelling stories and backgrounds, and this is at the top of my list, to be quite honest with you. You've read his books, you've seen his speeches. Mr. Randy Gage, thank you very much for your time.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Hey Rashad, great to be on, and thanks for bringing me in.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Absolutely. You have an absolutely stellar background, and it's the testament of sheer will, prosperity, breakthrough, and resiliency. Can you please tell your story, sir?

SPEAKER_01 1:02

Well, it's funny, you say a absolute stellar background.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

And that is certainly a prosperous perspective. And I love that you said that.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

But I think what everyone watching and listening want to be mindful of is that background includes being in jail for armed robbery at 15 years old, fighting addiction, losing a business at 30, have several business that didn't work, uh, a pattern of negative dysfunctional relationships. So yeah, I would if you ask me today, how would you classify your life? Or how would I say stellar? I love it. I'm healthy, I'm happy, I'm wealthy, I'm everything is cooking on all cylinders. Uh, but the course, the reason my life is stellar now is because I went through challenges and learned some lessons along the way and applied those and became stronger from them.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

You know, I I I think that people really resonate when it comes to how to get through that breakthrough because it really does take there's there's this mentality and approach that you know, you see somebody with the six-pack or you see somebody with the nice car or the nice home, all that you know, somehow they lucked into that, right? But nobody sees them when they're working out at four in the morning or when they're by themselves and they're trying to figure it out and they failed and they fell on their face and they've lost everything. You know, they're and they have to kind of go that lonely road and so to quote unquote pick themselves up off the canvas. And yours gets as about as I say this respectfully, as low as it can get before it can finally turn the corner. So what was that what was that journey like, sir?

SPEAKER_01 2:48

It is those lows and how you respond to them. Like being in jail at 15, I was so blessed that somebody there was a girl I went to school with, and that when I got arrested, they sent a note to my mother and just said, you know, he's expelled. Just don't bother coming back. We're done with him. There's nothing we can do more with him. Yeah. And this girl I had gone to school with, her father was a teacher, and she was like, You gotta go save Randy. He's in jail. And he came in and told me, You don't belong here. You're capable of great things. And I told him, You're so full of, you know what? And he should have slapped me into the next week, but he was really generous, and he just said, No, I spoke to your teachers. They tell me you skip school for three weeks straight, and you show up one day and there's a test and you ace it. Do you know your reading comprehension level is above college? And I'm like, No, I didn't know that. Nobody ever told me anything like that. Yeah, you know, all I heard was, how can someone so smart be so stupid? If I heard that once, Rashad, I heard it 10,000 times. Yeah, and that was the view I had of myself. But when he came in, his name was Baxter. And when Baxter came in, he presented a different way to look at myself than I had ever considered. And I so desperately wanted to believe him, I believed him. Beautiful. And here's the million-dollar truth bomb. Because I believed him, it was true.

SPEAKER_00 4:25

Wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Yeah, if I wouldn't have believed him, it wouldn't have been true. Right, right. It's the same thing. I, you know, I lost a business and sold my furniture sleeping on the floor when I was 30 years old. And at 30, that's not romantic. No, no. 19-year-old kid, it's like romantic.

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yeah, you know, couch surfing, you know what I mean? Like kind of just like this bohemian kind of style, right? Oh, yeah, man. You know, I I don't really have a care in the world and no really responsibilities, right? All of a sudden, you know, 30 years old, people start looking at you kind of funny, like, yo, um, this is not gonna get you into the social circles or anywhere close to where you want to be in life. You know, I understand. I do understand, you know, and that's tough.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah, and so your friends have cars and homes and the kids and starting families and have real jobs, and you know, yeah. The end tables, okay, it's not a big deal. Right. The lamps, now it starts to be an issue, like there's certain rooms you can no longer read in. Right. When the bed goes, it's really a big deal. Now you're sleeping on the floor. But of course, the last thing to go is the TV. Because you you hang on to that TV just to the because you desperately need that thing to vegetate out to and forget about your miserable life. Without you know, laying on the floor, watching those infomercials at 3 a.m., how to write real estate with no money down, and you know, all that stuff. And then finally the TV has to go. And then you're just, I mean, you're just alone in the nothingness, the loneliness of you think you are the most forgotten person on earth living in abject poverty and misery. And uh it could be so easy to go down that rabbit hole. And I was fortunate uh that I had got exposed to self-development in my like when I was 20, I joined a network marketing company and they had the book of the month, tape of the week's program. Right. So I had been exposed to it, hadn't been totally bought into it, but I knew it was there. And then when I was sleeping on the floor, I had a friend who said, Hey, come to the there's a church service on Sunday at the Science of Mind Church in South Miami. And um, they had Reverend Ernest uh Holmes, his book, The Science of Mind. That's what that church is based on. So I was exposed to that. I was like, amazing. And I have nothing else to do. I'm just looking at jobs every day, right? So I'm spending hours on self-development. And then somebody said, Hey, go to the Unity Church in Miami. And that was another church founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore. And he wrote a book called Prosperity, which is still one of my go-to books to this day. Right. Uh, and so fortunately I got reignited with the personal development or self-development movement, and just kind of, you know, working on myself. And that's what allowed me to work my way out of that.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

I think what I think has happened is that people, especially in the social media digital airspace, have thought that there's sort of what I would like to say, fast food ways to be successful, right? So they think that they can somehow TV dinner it, I'll just be it'll be ready in five or six minutes, and everything's gonna take care of itself. That's really not the case. Even like when I've started this podcast, right? It's taken hundreds of episodes and hundreds of guests to build any sort of level of momentum. And it's not easy. So anybody who's listening, who's trying to build something that's lasting, that's that has some measure of success, do two things that I've learned. Don't compare yourself to somebody else who's extremely successful. And number two, it is going to take a lot of work when you don't want to do it, right? When it's tiring, when you would like to have something else to do, when you deserve a break, so to speak. Right? No, not if you want, not if it's all on you and you want to get something made and done. 100%.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

I have a uh prosperity mentoring mastermind kind of program. It's called Breakthrough You. And it kind of lasers in more on entrepreneurs because I believe entrepreneurship is a better path to prosperity than being an employee, which isn't to say you can't create prosperity as an employee. You can. I just do think it's a little easier as uh an entrepreneur. But the thing I'm teaching there and the thing I'm trying to get across in my latest books are your operating system. That if you because, like you say, they're they're looking for the hack, you know, five hacks to be a millionaire in 30 days. I'm sorry, they that doesn't exist. Or they're looking for the one quick silver bullet technique. So, okay, I was watching Joe Rogan and he says you have to do a cold plunge every day. So I'm gonna do a cold plunge every day. Okay, great. Or I was watching Tim Ferris, and you know, he says you got to go to the sauna five times a week after your work out, and okay, great. But if you just take a new habit and you bolt it onto the old you, exactly it won't have lasting effects. We have to, I literally term it, term did label it, describe it, build it as an operating system. So when somebody joins my Breakthrough You program, I'm working with them to rewire their brain, to rewire new neural pathways, to look at themselves and look at the world in a different way. Because you've got to create that new functional operating system, the new you. Absolutely. Everything comes down to transformation. Yes. That whole program, transformation. When I'm writing a book, every book I write is about some kind of transformation that we want to make.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

It's amazing too because at the end of the day, you know, you'll start to. I've always I've said this on other shows. You know, if you say to if you tell 10 people that you're working on something, or they say, Hey man, I saw that, you know, if you get in that conversation, nine of them will pat you on the back and like, man, good for you. That one person who really actually does something will say, okay, well, I want details on what you're doing because what you sound like is interesting. And if you start hemming and haw and umming and start saying, Well, I am working on it, but I don't have anything, man, they're gonna find out real quick. And you'll learn that there are people out there that will tell you in 10 seconds, show me what you're doing. Pull it up on your phone, show me the device, the product you're creating. Not everybody's just gonna say, Oh, that's really great, Rashad. You have a show. Congratulations for you. They're gonna say, pull it up on YouTube and you know, put up or shut up for so to speak. You know, and you better be ready to have those tough conversations because if you're not doing that, you're food, you're lying to yourself. And it's easy to lie to yourself.

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Yeah, because unfortunately, what happens a lot of time is their reaction is, oh, what a jerk Jimmy is. You know, he's that you know, those other nine people, they love me. Those are my true friends. Yes. No, those are the nine people who pandered to you and told you what you wanted to hear. Those are your true friends. Your true friend was Jimmy, who said, Hey, let now keep in mind we also have to deal with the reality of the world today. It's filled with trolls and haters and people with low self-esteem, and they need to tear you down to make themselves feel okay. So you got to factor that in, and then you have to say, okay, who do I allow to speak into my life? Exactly. And do they have my highest good in mind? Or are they letting their petty jealousy impact the feedback they're giving me? And so we've got to be really discerning. Discernment is a superpower, right? Yes. Discernment is where the nuance is. So when we have the discernment, like when I write a book, I just sent book number 16 to my publisher, right? I have a circle of like eight people that I send a book to before it goes to my editor. Hey, here's the book, rough draft. Will you look it through? Will you give me some feedback? Because they're all authors, they're all critical thinkers, they're and they're all people who want my highest good. They're not jealous of me. We mastermind together. I revel in their success. They revel in my success. So when I get feedback from them, so when Alan Weiss, you know, Alan Weiss will send me back, Randy, I think you're being a tad self-indulgent here. Or, you know, Bob Bird tells me, hey, uh, you know, you know I love you, Gage, but I I don't I don't understand what you're trying to say here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you clean this up a little so I know better? That's real feedback, and that's what makes a book or whatever you take to them so much better. Because you're getting uh you're getting input from people who actually have domain expertise in the area. They're critical thinkers, and they want the highest good for you.

SPEAKER_00 13:54

Right. I think and it uh you know, I do I do martial arts, right? And I think I'll just say this, you know, kind of explicitly on the show. Don't run away from a pure, unadulterated beatdown. Because once that happens, then you sit back and you can do two things. You know, a lot of people say they like to start martial arts. They go to the tr they go to the first session, they got the crispy new little uh, you know, form on, and then a week later, after they got dusted, they're gone. Right? It's a testament and it's in a to somebody's character that they keep coming back, that they've gotten better. You see they've lost weight, right? And then next thing you know, the person that was getting manheld two, three years later, even six months later, they're doing that to the other person, you know, that was doing it, or they're hanging with them, or it's not as easy to defeat them. I I've been choked out, I've been blasted in the face. I will not train with anybody who says that neither has happened to them. It's it's it's not even in the stratosphere that it can't happen to you. So that's my you know, that's my little nugget of truth in that particular realm of space.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

I had some friends who were like mega, mega foster parents. They would foster the kids that this the system just couldn't handle. They've been incested by their parents. Oh my gosh. They had seen one parent kill another one. Oh my gosh. Their parents were, you know, drug addicts and they had been homeless on the street. And they'd do like 10 at a time. And so I kind of adopted their adopted kids, you know, like that, you know, how could I help? Because I met them, they came to one of my seminars originally, and we became friends. And then that was one of the ways that I supported them was I gave them scholarships to martial arts training in your area. Because I I'm a big believer in martial arts. I studied kung fu. And just the mental discipline that you learn in martial arts is so helpful for life.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

It really is. And you know, in any style, I tell anybody, just have something, right? Because it it's you can leave all your troubles at the door once you're training. So I certainly want to get into your motivational speaking background. You're an author of 15 books, and you know, you have your own prosperity university as well as your own YouTube channel. Can we can you talk specifically about those endeavors?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

I found my mission. My mission is to make the world more prosperous. And I know that sounds grandiose. I don't care. Yeah. That's my mission. And I believe that the way we do that is we make people more prosperous. Right. We're not going to do it with United Nations proclamations. We're not going to do it with entitlement programs. We're going to do it by changing the consciousness of people in impoverished places. We have to blow up uh poverty consciousness, and we have to replace it with prosperity consciousness. So my books, my blog, my podcast, my entrepreneur, you know, my breakthrough you accelerator program, they're all geared with that in mind. And I came to the decision like, I'm just going to make the world more prosperous, and I'm not going to look at the business model per se. Right. I don't take advertising on my podcast. I don't charge people to be on it. I, you know what I mean? I just I do it. I put out a blog for free. I write at least a couple a week. There's no business model of that. But I know that I I felt like if I just do this mission, it will attract the people and circumstances to me, and I won't have to worry about the money thing. And that's what's happened.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

You know, I think that's a wonderful thing because it looks almost like I'm giving you all this access, you know, for this information. And and then it ultimately it will pay off for me. Because, you know, you're not trying to you're not a pauper, right? You're not living under, you know, the Bodhi tree, you know. And and I mean, let's be honest with you. You know, there by giving this access to people, you're genuinely helping people from a pure place. It's like, listen, this happened to me. I went through these circumstances, and I come from a similar place. The difference is my mental state changed, and I was able to get through those situations because, you know, there are so many people who don't make that pivot.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah, and the what it works out to is people have they paid for access. The like my coaching program, I have three levels. There's a$77 a month one for people who really they're just they're in debt, credit card debt, they're upside down in their car, things aren't working. It's okay, start with that. You're gonna get an email every Monday, and we're gonna do a master class in prosperity every month. We're gonna change the operating system. The middle level's$477 a month. That's for they're getting after it, they're going for it, they're entrepreneurs, they got a side gig, they're doing something, but they can't break that million-dollar barrier. So that level's for them. Top levels$10,000 a month. So at$10K a month, I'm not getting any tourists there, okay? They are there because they are serious players. Without question.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Without question.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

And there's and they're saying, okay, I know this guy. He knows his shit. All right. This isn't some guy giving a book report. This isn't some abstract theory. This guy builds. He builds shit, he gets shit done. I want to work with this guy. So I'm willing to pay. And by the way, some of those people that pay me that money, that's nothing to them, right? Because they have businesses valued at a couple hundred million dollars there or they make 20 million a year. They're coming to me because they need the other side of prosperity, which is, hey, okay, I got the house, the bling bling, the toys. I got all that, but my marriage is falling apart, or my kids don't want to spend time with me. Or I'm two cheeseburgers away from a heart attack, right? So I because I'm teaching, and by the way, here's a good here's a free uh resource for everybody listening or watching. This is my whole philosophy, it's based on this. It's a PDF. If you go to randygage.com, right on the homepage, you'll see uh the seven elements of an abundant life. Just download that and read it. I saw that. I saw that. The whole the holistic part of prosperity, because money and material things are part of the equation, but they're just part. So I think there's seven elements really. And so I'm offering that another. Again, that's just a free resource that I believe if we get that consciousness out to the world, the world will be a better place.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah, I think that sometimes people need to stop, you know, demonizing, you know, success, you know, when it comes to it's okay to be a little greedy to get you know to that place. Um, you know, and and more importantly, is that when you start talking to the people that have made it, you your mind shifts, right? Because, you know, I've been fortunate enough to be on this podcast to talk to hundreds of entrepreneurs. And I say this, I never until I made this show, you know, I never would have had an opportunity to have my mind change about am I don't confuse a habit for hard work, right? So there's a difference between the two. So you can you can certainly have a habit, but you may not be working hard. And so now your mind shifts is that what's the next thing? How do I be more prepared for the next interview? Like with this show, it's like, okay, now you start looking at how to get evolution for it. Like, I've been fortunate enough for my guests have scaled, right? Because I'm like, something's working. I'll never say I'm great, but you understand how serious it is when I get a guest like you. And I'm like, okay, well, Randy Gage obviously saw something about this that I'm doing something correct. So that means I better be on my A game because what could happen next could be better for me. And it's always chasing the next thing. You should never be satisfied. And that's how the Bill Gates of the world. That's how the Jeff Bezos is of the world. They don't get satisfied.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

There's a concept I write about in a couple of my books called divine discontent. And what I mean by that is we're able to live in gratitude. We can appreciate what I appreciate. I live in a beautiful penthouse. I'm on an island between Miami and Miami Beach. I got waterfront view all around me. I work from home. I drive my dream cars. I travel around the world. I can be very appreciative. In total gratitude for that. And still know I can do, have, and become more. Absolutely. And I believe that's the, if you want to call it God, universe, whatever label you want to use, the labels don't matter to me, but I believe that's a power greater than ourselves, just kind of knocking on the door saying, hey, Rashad, you're doing good. But you could be doing higher. You could become more. And that's really it has to be, life has to be about transformation. Because if not, stasis equals death. We always want to be transforming to the highest possible version of ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 23:19

And I'll just leave it with this because I obviously know your time is valuable. If that and if that if people think that doesn't apply, that's Blockbuster or Radio Shack, what it was like when you didn't evolve, right? That's that's just the honest to goodness truth. So if you think that, you know, being happy with, you know, being the market leader or being happy and content, that's a very small time because like all the look at what Netflix did to disrupt the movie industry, right? You have to keep evolving because people's tastes change, something's coming along. There's that hungry guy or team right now in a in a in a garage or a basement that is bringing in that rest new product to market and is going to take your lunch if you have if you keep thinking exactly the same way. Amen to that. Oh my gosh. So I always certainly you don't need me to end, you know, to find out where you are, but I always like to ask guests this for the purpose of the show. Where can people find Randy Gage?

SPEAKER_01 24:15

Yeah, so randygage.com is the that's my Starfleet Command website. Podcast is there, blog is there, coaching program is there, uh, all the stuff. Uh so that's the best place because I'm really not on social media. The team will post like when I have a sh a new seminar or whatever, but I'm really I've cleansed my mind of that detoxing. I've detoxed from that negative programming. So the website, blog, newsletter, that's the best place to find me.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

Well, the tips for success are certainly at people's fingertips if they want to find out information from you. And you're a living testament of resiliency, personal growth, success, and continued evolution. And I look forward to always seeing the next chapter of that from you. So thank you for your time, Randy Gage.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Thank you, everybody.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

Peace. Peace out. That was fun, sir. Thank you.