Shaping the NYC Skyline

David: Welcome to Shaping the NYC Skyline, a podcast that explores the stories behind the buildings that shape our city. I'm your host, David Shamshovich, and I'm here with my co host,
Brenda: Brenda Slochowsky.
Hey guys, welcome back!
David: Another episode, and I think this is going to be our season finale.
Brenda: I think it will be.
David: We had the Ryan Serhant, number one broker in the universe. He could sell the moon to Martians, or at least that's what he told us when he came on.
Camila: And if you don't believe us, go watch Owning Manhattan.
Speaker 2: I binge watched it twice and it was so good.
David: You watched it twice?
Brenda: Yeah, I watched it when it originally came out and then I was like, oh, let's prep for the podcast, rewatch it and I look for the Ryan of it all. He's very engaging. He's such a personality, as a person and as a TV personality, it's very interesting to see how he meshes the two together, both here and then on TV.
David: He's accomplished so much in this industry. And he was very good with his time. He's a very busy person. I think he sticks very much to his schedule. So the fact that he was able to sit down with us for a good 45 minutes and just have a chat. He's been interviewed on so many different podcasts. He has three books. He has his own podcast.
Brenda: We brought out a different side of him this time though.
David: We try to shake things up. I don't think this is a typical episode. Ryan's reputation precedes him. So I would suspect that many people have some understanding of who he is given his celebrity broker status. So we didn't really go through all his upbringing.
Brenda: It wasn't our typical therapy session, you know?
David: I think we had a little bit of therapy. We had a little game of Either/Or where Ryan discusses whether he prefers one thing or another. And he had some interesting answers and I think it was a really fun and interesting way to get to know him a little bit better. Ryan is gonna continue to shape the NYC skyline in addition to the skylines of Florida, Connecticut, Georgia, a bunch of other places. He's expanding. He's a CEO and founder of Serhant period. And that's a branding thing.
Brenda: And it rolls into the same theme branding wise to be not just here for now, but here for the future and continue growing and evolving in the market.
Camila: Staying relevant.
David: Camilla, Brenda and I are attorneys. We practice in transactional inclusionary housing, soon to be UAP and MIH, as well as other HPD programs. And so we're very familiar with brokers and I was a little starstruck. He's got a swagger to him. He has a je ne sais quoi about him.
Brenda: He is in fact, six, three, if anybody was wondering,
David: One thing that I didn't get to ask him was how much does he concentrate on the substance of real estate, listings, the neighborhoods and things like that versus social media, TV and branding. The two kind of mesh within one another right? It's about the real estate, but not really.
Brenda: It's about the branding in order to facilitate the real estate.
David: We're branding by doing this podcast, branding our firm, branding ourselves. And I think it's important because ultimately people will choose an attorney, a broker, a title company based on those relationships, based on how people feel about you, whether they think you'll do a good job.
Brenda: If everybody can do the same transaction, you're going to pick the person whose personality meshes well with yours to make sure that the job gets done right, because you know that everybody can do it right, but the job gets done in the way that you're looking for it to get done as well.
David: Those are all good points. And empathy, energy, and enthusiasm, we talk about those things and what they mean and what you have to bring to the table to work at his firm. He's an entrepreneur. He educates. So Skyliners get ready for Ryan Serhant today, we're welcoming Ryan Serhant., a man who has redefined what it means to hustle. From struggling as an actor to becoming a leading figure in luxury real estate. Ryan's journey is one of relentless drive, creativity, and unique flair for turning everyday interactions into blockbuster deals. He's a real estate mogul, media personality, and now the CEO of a ground breaking real estate firm that fuses content, commerce, and innovation. Let's dive into his stories, lessons, and his vision for the future of real estate. I'd like to welcome everyone, Mr. Ryan Serhant.
Ryan: Oh, hi guys.
David: The excitementt of having you here.
Ryan: I've never seen a more excited law office before.
David: The bar is very low to start with lawyers in the first place. We're not your typical lawyers. And I think you're going to find that out during the course of this.
Brenda: I was particularly excited because podcast prep for this included binge watching your shows.
Ryan: You guys prep like lawyers. I've done a lot of podcasts in my time. I roll up and the person has like a one sheet. You kind of talk about the same stuff. I had a prep call for this. You guys have been preparing for months. Don't let me down.
David: People know who you are. We're not starting from ground one. I am going to get into stuff that will hopefully be a little different than what you've experienced given how much you've done in the media.
Brenda: David likes to keep everybody on their toes.
David: First I want to start with a game called Either/OR. I'm gonna say two things and you tell me which one. Whatever one pops in your head. Brooklyn or Manhattan.
Speaker 2: Wow, he's hesitating on the first one.
Speaker 5: Well, I live in Brooklyn. We sell out in Brooklyn. My office is in Manhattan and our TV show is called Owning Manhattan. So it might be off brand for me to pick. I guess I'll, I started in Manhattan and I feel like I ended Manhattan. So probably I would say Manhattan.
David: New York or Florida?
Ryan: New York.
David: Commercial or residential?
Ryan: Residential.
David: Podcasting or reality TV?
Reality TV.
Cardio or weights?
Ryan: Weights.
David: Whiskey or beer?
Ryan: Water.
[Laughter]
David: I felt that was going to be the answer. For me it's both, whiskey and beer. Fruit Loops or Corn Flakes?
Ryan: I haven't had either in 25 years.
David: My goodness. Were you fat as a child?
Ryan: As a little kid I was, yeah.
David: I was fat too. You ever see that movie with Ryan Reynolds where he like falls in love with Amy Smart as a kid and he's like really fat and then he comes back? Yep. Yep. Yep. That's what I always think of myself.
Camila: Yeah, compare yourself to Ryan Reynolds.
Ryan: Just friends. I think it's what it was. And I swear it's great song. Fruit loops. If I had to pick one.
David: Shower or bath.
Ryan: Shower.
David: Beach or pool?
Ryan: Beach.
David: Losing a listing or losing your wife?
Ryan: Losing a listing.
Brenda: For sure.
David: Good answer. And we've never played that game before. And the reason I wanted to play that game is I think it's a really great way of loosening us up. I already feel like I know you a little bit, which I think is your strategy. And I love that strategy. When you started off as a broker at Nest Seekers, you were a newbie, you came to New York, you wanted to be an actor, by the way, our similarities don't end at how handsome both of us are.
Ryan: You wanted to do standup comedy, right?
David: I did want to do standup comedy and I did a little bit of it and I was pretty bad.
Speaker 5: You were like, law is next.
Speaker: I mean, I'm Jewish and I'm in New York. So
Ryan: it's either comedy or law, right? Yeah.
David: Or a doctor.
Brenda: And now he created a podcast, so he can let out his comedy side.
David: It's one of my outlets, that's for sure. So I know that opportunity came up with Million Dollar Listing, but was that always the plan to brand yourself? You're always talking about visualizing, right? And my mom had always taught me if you think about what want to accomplish, that's half the battle. Because you need to know what the goal is in order to take the steps towards that goal. So in the beginnings, what were you visualizing? And then what were the steps that you took to get there?
Ryan: In the beginning of my career, which was the end of 2008. I was visualizing paying rent. That was my goal. I had no intention of getting into real estate. I think I hated everyone in real estate. Last thing I ever wanted to do was become a real estate agent. That just sounded like such a failure to me. Life is too short to be a realtor. That's the way I felt going into it, because I think I saw the archetype of what a realtor was, from the movies and TV shows and the few people I knew who were realtors. I'm 23 or 24 at that time. I'm not a 55 year old, a second career kind of person who's getting into real estate the way most people did back then. And so I just got into it because it was better than bartending, waiting tables or temp work. And I didn't want to go back to school. And I wanted to stay in New York. And a friend told me real estate is just like theater. You memorize information and you do improv all day long. And if you're type A, and you can follow up with people and you can wake up every day and be a get up and go type person, you can be successful, even if you're not from here and I'm not from New York. And so my plan was not to build a brand at all. My plan was just to pay the bills until I figured out a couple of years later, what the secret was.
David: How did you figure it out?
Ryan: The first thing I figured out was, okay, so there is no rules here. I can make of this career, whatever I want it to be. I don't have to be a real estate agent like everyone else. I don't have to be the boring realtor like everyone else. And I think innovation, disruption and evolution in all businesses don't necessarily ever kill businesses. I think they just kill boring ones. I don't think the internet actually killed retail. I think it killed boring retail. Like LVMH, one of the biggest companies in the world. They have tons of stores. They have more stores now than they did pre internet. They're just not boring. Same way I don't think AI kills work. I think it kills boring work. And so I didn't want to be a boring broker. And I wanted to do this in my own way. I didn't have business to promote. Had I had business, had I been from New York, had I gone to these schools had I had family helping me like most of my competition, I would not be where I am today because I would have immediately gone into, Oh, I just promote the business I have. Which is what you do. Like, Hey, I just did a deal. I'm going to go talk about the deal. So I didn't have any of that. So I had to just promote myself because I didn't have listings. I didn't have deals at all. It's like, Oh, I got to promote something to get business. So I'm just gonna go promote myself and just say, I'm good at this. And then I'll see what happens. I'll figure it out. So the attention to my personal brand is what I would call it today. But back then the attention, to me, is what helped me get that business. And the unlock for me was realizing that pre 2008, the product that you would sell as a salesperson is your skillset. Post 2008, the product you'd sell as a salesperson was your attention. And so I went heavy into, okay, this is the unlock. Everyone else is going to focus on their skillset and talking about their success. I'm going to build an attention media plan from 2009 and beyond that will then drive more product that will then drive more skillset. And I'll build that flywheel, which is what I did.
Brenda: Everybody can come to the table with the same skillset. It's what you do with that skillset. That's going to really set you apart.
Ryan: With the internet, with artificial intelligence, if everyone's an expert, how do you differentiate between levels of expertise? Duke announced the other day, they're no longer looking at college essays. They just don't want to go through the headache of having to try to decipher, did you write this or not? So how do you now discern who to work with and who not to work with? And a lot of that comes down to things that you can't automate, which is the attention to personal brands that know, like, and trust factor.
David: When was that light bulb moment that you knew that this was really the way forward?
Ryan: They auditioned for Million Dollar Listing in New York 2010. So I had been in the business for a year and a half just doing rentals in Koreatown. And I went to that open casting call and I just brought the attention for Ryan. I didn't have business the way all the other agents did. My dad wasn't Howard Lorber the way Michael was, and he was on that first season. And I just had to show up and just tell him, Hey, you're not actually looking for real estate on a reality TV show. You're looking for the people. You want interesting people and I'm that person. And it worked and they bought it. And then I had to go figure out all the real estate afterwards, which was work. So that was an early unlock for me. And then when Instagram was created, like 2012. Getting on Instagram in those early days and immediately seeing that visual medium and saying, I can just put our real estate content and my personal brand content here in 2012, 2013, and I could save all the money from New York Times and Craigslist and everywhere else.
David: Something that I found interesting. The first episode of your hit Netflix show, Owning Manhattan, basically the first scene, you're shirtless, crossing the boundaries, not just showing your business, not just showing your ownership of it, but showing your personal life, your family. I was just watching the Vince McMahon documentary. Now I was a huge WWE fan WWF back in the day. Vince McMahon plays a character on TV, Mr. McMahon. So who is Vince McMahon? Is he the character he plays on TV? Where does Ryan Serhant, the brand end, and the real Ryan begin?
Ryan: I do sometimes look at the mirror and I'm like, who are you? Who, who is me?
David: And then you're like, you're beautiful.
Brenda: We're getting very existential right now.
Ryan: Going back to your first question about the personal, I tell this to agents all the time too. No, one's coming to you to buy real estate. They're coming to buy real estate from you. So you've got to understand all you do is promote real estate all day long? So does Zillow. So does everybody else. Everyone has real estate now. It's not interesting. Coming to you to buy the real estate or to sell their real estate. And they're choosing you. We young agents today who really understand that they beat out the veterans all day, every day now. Because they can sit there and yes, they've got the hustle and the lack of responsibility and all that fun stuff, but they come and they really understand what the you is that you're selling and the business of you versus the business of the real estate, which is hard to differentiate, especially if you don't have the sales, if you don't have that success in that track record. You have to mix the personal, or you don't have to, I would just do less business. If I want to sell less, I could just promote real estate. If I want to sell a lot less, I could not promote real estate and just do the deals that I do. And there's people who have amazing careers that way. That just wasn't in the cards for me.
I'm not from New York. I didn't have the sales success. I didn't have the pedigree. I started at a tiny, no name firm. I did everything by myself. I had no coach. I had no mentorship. All the cards were stacked against me. And so what else did I have? I had personality, I had the business of attention, and I had a relentless work ethic to outpace everybody because all the people that have all those things that have those check boxes, whether they're from New York or had the family or had the money or whatever they had, they would stop eventually. They would take Saturdays off, they would be in the Hamptons on the weekend. I couldn't afford to go to the Hamptons. They weren't relentless because they came from money. When you grow up that way, why do the extra call? Life is okay. And it's Malcolm McDowell's bell curve. I didn't have that. So I looked around at all these other agents who are way better and way more successful than me and just really knew their stuff. I was like, they're going to do a lot better than me between the hours of 11 to 3, when they're working. I will outpace them at all other times. And that's what I did.
David: Your philosophy and what you've transcended from not just real estate, but you're a coach, an entrepreneur. You're telling people about how to build that brand, how to do what you did. One of the things that we talked about when we prepped, is these three E's. The things that you look for empathy, enthusiasm and energy. And for empathy purposes, you gotta be with your client in the good and bad times. You're almost like a psychiatrist or a therapist. Sometimes how lawyers are. So the questions that you generally pose is what's the greatest day of your life and what's the worst day of your life?
Ryan: The greatest day of my life, was the day we found out my wife was pregnant because it took us a long time to get pregnant.
David: You guys went through IVF, right?
Ryan: Went through IVF. She wrote a book about it afterwards. So we went through that whole thing. It took three years. It was a long time. We found out she was pregnant in our bathroom. And that was like a life box to check. So I think that was probably the greatest day. Second greatest was starting the company because I had escaped the place I was at previously.
David: Escaped the nest.
Ryan: Yes. And so I'd finally gotten out of a terrible situation, and I was free, and we started our company and we went loud during COVID. And I thank COVID, not for who it killed, but for allowing the marketplace to enable me to go and start our business.
David: Why go with your last name?
Ryan: Yolanda Mui, who had been operations with me for a long time, Jen Alese, who would run new development for me for a long time, who's now our CBO, it was really the three of us together trying to figure out what we were going to do here. And I did not want it to be Serhant, because what if I do something stupid, then the whole company is known forever based on what that guy did. That's a lot of pressure to be, a good human. Like, what if I have a weird night one night? So we had a bunch of different names and things, just dumb stuff. And eventually it came down to, what drives the business? The business is the name. There's like 11 Serhants on planet earth. So we just started filing trademarks, whether it was Serhant New Development, Serhant Real Estate Incorporated, all the LLCs, all that stuff, it was just going to be easier and it's an easier SEO. We do a lot of e commerce on the sell it side. So it came down to Serhant and then David Williams, he runs a big marketing firm called Williams in New York City for buildings. We use him a lot on new construction on buildings all the time. He is like, just add a period to it. Have it be all caps. And then a period, and we're going to go with a cobalt blue because blue is the color of trust and people trust blue. And, and it's going to basically mean, when you're looking for a firm to work with, you just choose Serhant period.
David: What was the all caps about?
Ryan: To stand out because it's bold and it creates that big kind of bold S period. And I credit him a lot for helping us figure out, even though it seems so simple. It was not. The simplest answer sometimes it takes the most complex roundabout way to get to it.
David: Definitely.
Ryan: And the period did a lot for us, and it's in all of our branding now. That little circle turns into like everything.
David: I think it's great. You want to differentiate yourself a little bit, right?
Brenda: Even the smallest attention to detail is really setting you apart in the market.
Ryan: We spent a significant amount of time. I am maniacally in the weeds on everything. Working for us can be incredibly fulfilling for the right type of person, both agents and employees. We have a lot of employees now, but we just crossed 800 agents yesterday. We also let go of a lot of agents. This is not a free for all and it's not a charity. So, for the right type of agent, I think there's literally no better place than working for us. But for the wrong type of agent, you must hate your life working for us. We're not Keller Williams, we're not like a Compass. You don't just hang your license with us and see how it goes. We're very in your business.
Brenda: You're holding your employees accountable and expecting good work product. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Ryan: We hold all of our employees accountable.
David: So the other two E's that I wanted to get back to is enthusiasm and energy.
Ryan: Yes.
David: What is the difference between the two?
Ryan: Enthusiasm is an action. Energy is a state of being. So, I can have high energy and not be enthusiastic.
David: Now I see what you're saying.
Ryan: I'm high energy right now, but I'm talking to you in a lower voice. Yeah, but I'm not like, come on, man, let's go. Like people confuse energy and enthusiasm all the time, which is why I separate it for our people. No matter what. You have energy, you could be super tired, you could be talking to someone about a dead deal. You have a painful conversation, all those eat the frog conversations, but you got to bring energy to it. The empathy helps you lower your voice. You can meet your customer where your customer is, but the enthusiasm is then what you're selling. Sales is a transfer of enthusiasm. We have coaches in the sellit.com part of the business, and we onboarded 12 new coaches this week. And so right before this in the car, I'm on the Zoom going through what sellit coaching really means, and I've always end it with above all else, because you might have a coaching session with someone where you're just a therapist that day. They're going through a rough day. So you're showing up with the empathy, but you're bookending that conversation with enthusiasm. If you do not show up to that call with a smile on your face, you are fired. If you don't end that call, no matter what, with a smile on your face, because that's the last impression, you cannot be here.
Camila: How was the transition from being an employee to owning your own business?
Ryan: It's terrible. In hindsight, I probably wouldn't do it. A lot of my life, I would say the same thing. If I could go back in time in the Summer of 2006, would I still move to New York with no money? I don't think so. knowing how hard it was and how stressful it was. I forced it to work out. I don't think I could confidently go and tell myself at 21, yeah, do it, go to New York with no job. It's going to be totally fine. Same way, like, I don't think I'd tell myself to get into real estate the way that I did it in 2008. It was so hard. And the same way, I don't know if I would start a business again. It's bad most of the time. You end up putting out fires as a career. No one comes to me with the good as a CEO now. I'm the CEO of the brokerage of sellit.com, which is massive, of studios, which is a full fledged production company, and now of simple. So I run this AI business, which I've had to educate myself on. No one comes to me with any of the good, I get the good in a weekly update every Friday across all businesses. I look for my dailies. People only come to me all day long with everything that is so difficult they can't solve it so they got to bring it to Ryan. So. I just wake up and go to bed every day trying to solve problems. And it doesn't get any better, if I try to tell people, don't bring me problems, just bring me solutions, no matter what business book I read. All the good is a given. I know what's going to happen because I'm an optimist by nature and I lead enthusiastically. But it's just so hard to answer your question. If you look at the guy I was on Million Dollar Listing, I was in costumes with cupcakes, doing dances, shutting down Times Square. I was the life of the party on that show as an agent. Owning Manhattan filmed for a full year of 2023. I thought I was the same guy. I thought I'm just showing up as Ryan, and then in the edit, it was far more serious. And I was like, what about all the fun stuff? And they're like, remind us what fun stuff, remind us when we had cameras in front of fun Ryan. There's a lot of frustrated Ryan these days on camera, even though I'm enthusiastic about it all. I'm working on trying to not let that seep into my entire life.
David: Before you were just a cast member. You probably didn't have a lot of creative control. You can do a lot of fun stuff with editing where you can make it seem like somebody saying something different. How much control do you have over that? Given how controlling you are over your brand?
Ryan: Million Dollar Listing, I had control over the listings and what I would do on camera. That was all me. It's a reality TV show. You're producing your own segments as much as anybody. This show is way different. I'm a full fledged producer, season two we're doing now, I'm a full fledged executive producer. Studios is a part of the whole team. So we're in, Netflix calls and meetings. And I think a lot about the creative direction of the show and the story and the arcs, and then we kind of see what happens. Like cameras went up on September 20th for season two, we'll shoot into the beginning of next year. I always think I know the way the season's going to go. And then like it explodes in front of you. I thought. That season one was just going to be like rose petals and gumdrops and its going to be fun. And we were expanding across all the states at the same time, and we filmed a lot of it. All of that got cut. And the focus ended up being on the people that I was letting go of and how we were on the attack the entire season. And so this whole theme of season one became being an entrepreneur, building a company in New York City and being on the defense. Season two as a producer, and I can feel it already, the theme for us very much as being on the offense and what that means. So the audience will feel this is different. This now feels totally different than what I watched last season.
David: I think that's what you want.
Ryan: Yeah. You got to keep it different. You got to shake it up. The same way Owning Manhattan, I don't know what people expected, but I knew that I was very excited to show them something very different. And have people be so surprised and present something that the audience could look up from their phone from that's the goal. How do I get someone to look up from their phone?
David: Yeah. Long form is difficult nowadays.
Ryan: And runtimes are getting shorter. Even for us, the show, it's 8 one hour episodes. And there's so much you leave on the cutting room floor. Even with us on the social side, there's so much stuff that never makes it even to instagram or TikTok.
David: We know. We have lots of on the cutting room floor too, mostly offensive material that will never see the light of day
Brenda: or me singing.
David: Speaking of offensive material that nobody should be seeing, you've done some crazy things, out of the box, to get listings, including wanting to tattoo 99 John street on your chest, which I would have personally liked to see.
Ryan: Seiden & Schein building.
David: Would you do Seiden & Schein for us?
Ryan: I would not,
[Laughter]
but the law firm for TF Cornerstone at the time was Seiden & Schein. It was my first offering plan experience. I've done so many things. More importantly for the audience listening to this right now, I never treat a listing appointment or a first anything as a first, anything. I go into every pitch and every introduction as if it's my second. We're pitching a big new development tomorrow, for example, and the team already knows, we bring a standard presentation in our back pocket just to have it in case people really want to say okay, this is a department, this is our staff, this is how we operate, but I go into first meetings as if it's our kickoff meeting. You've already hired us. I'm playing like I already have the money in my pocket. Coming in now, I've got my marketing, we come in full fledged, ready to go, and I dare you not to hire us. When you go and you meet with everybody else who's coming in and saying, Hi, this is who we are. Let me explain our backstory. They might even be better than we are but it'll be unmemorable. It'll be so unmemorable and unremarkable that our presentation, whether it's with a developer or any seller or on a date, like you're showing up as if it's your second appointment.
David: Being in social media, having your own studio, doing podcasting, I feel like I know you because I've read so much about you. I've seen you on TV. Isn't that why you can come to a meeting and feel like it's a second because they knew you probably better than you know them at that point.
Ryan: Yeah, it's been very calculated. There's a family flywheel. When it was Bravo, Million Dollar Listing was for the wife or one spouse. I'd then do CNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, for the other spouse. And then I would do social for the kids, the lawyers, the mortgage bankers, or the vendors. So when the decision came down to who to hire, all three of those customers, who are making one family decision or one group decision would have an awareness as to who I am because I can't just go do one thing. I got to hit them in three different ways.
David: You don't want to pigeonhole yourself into one group. You want to hit them all.
Ryan: Exactly. And the choice to go with Netflix for the new show, we had a wild offer from Amazon. And I was super excited about maybe one day we could sell apartments on amazon.com. That would be huge. But it just came down to, why am I doing this? Why spend the next two years of my life, which is what it was, because I was early 22, the next two years of my life creating a television show and taking all that time and all the risk. And what if it's terrible? What if something awful happens? I should just go with the largest media distribution network on planet Earth. And it's just Netflix, like in a global instant with one click, like that thing changed my life, and I'm very thankful that I chose them and that they chose me too.
David: It's a great opportunity. Some of the concepts that you introduce in terms of negotiation are the principle of least interest, which is the method you would use if you're dating somebody, pretending like you're not interested, and also making people feel like they need something versus just wanting it, which is a great negotiation tactic. A lot of what you did on that show is, I can negotiate with feelings all day.
Ryan: Yeah. It's hard to negotiate with a wallet. It's easier to negotiate with the heart. We have a method for selling that's a closing method called CODA, which is close on day one, that kind of leads into what you just talked about, the pulling of a deal, the pulling of an opportunity, that we call our three P's. Push, pull, persist, pretty standard. So you have to determine am I pushing this message on them? Because they need to be pushed. Sometimes people just need to be pushed. You are buying this. I'm not showing anything else. You need to buy this or you're an idiot. And sometimes then you pull and just say, listen, you are not buying this. You should not buy this or you just lost the deal. You didn't move fast enough. And then there's persist, which is you just have to be there and be constant. And then those are those follow up stories. Like I've followed up with people for seven years before they ever respond. And then one day they respond and it's just pure persistence, and just staying on top of them so that when they wake up and think real estate, they think you, it's not their job to remember you. It's your job to be memorable.
Brenda: Fact checking something. Were you, or were you not in a Taylor Swift music video.
Ryan: No.
Brenda: See, I knew it. There's some online chatter that says you were in the Blank Space music video. I knew it wasn't you.
Ryan: Mythbusters over here.
David: Were you hand number two?
Ryan: My hands might've been. I was a Nespresso hand model for a while. I could hold a lot. I have long fingers. And so, I can hold a lot without stressing the metatarsals. I have low veins in my hands, and so I would sit upside down and drain the blood out of my hands. And then I could go and hold anything really nice.
David: There was an episode of Seinfeld where George Costanza burns his hands when he was going to be a hand model. Did you insure them?
Ryan: No, I didn't. I never got that far.
David: I just wanted to ask one more question. What is it that inspired you to want to become an actor in the first place?
Ryan: My parents made me do everything. I have three sisters and two brothers, and I had to try everything. They made me play every single sport known to man. It was awful. They made me take every single course. They were like, you'd rather regret the things that you did than the things you never tried. In hindsight, I'm very thankful at the time I was very resentful. Theater was one of the things I did and I actually just liked it. I enjoyed being on stage. I enjoyed performing. I then got really into film and TV and I got really into Shakespeare and it just became one of those things that I trended towards and I was much better at it. I was never great, but I was much better at it than I was at baseball and at soccer and at math. It just became one of those things, which is interesting now, like having kids of your own, I'm going to be so excited when my daughter trends towards anything. I don't know what it's going to be, whatever it might be. And just say there's the flicker of light there. And then to really feed that. My parents didn't feed the theater bug. They did the pull on me because I think they knew how hard of a career that was going to be. And even when I was a kid, they were like, all right, well, if you're not good enough at football to play professionally as long as you try it right. And see if you like it to really go for it. They were very career oriented with me from a young age. We moved a lot when I was a kid too. So I always had to make new friends in every school. And I think because I also sucked at sports and I was overweight and I had rash, acne, the theater thing enabled me to pretend to be somebody else, which was much easier than being myself.
Speaker: I completely understand that you were so generous with your time. Thank you so much. I wanted to congratulate you on an amazing career and doing something that people can aspire to. And not only that, but then sharing those things in both an educational aspect with YouTube, your podcast, your online course.
Ryan: Thanks.
David: The things that you're doing are so spectacular and I'm sure you know this already, but I'm not sure how much people actually just do that in person.
Speaker 5: I thank you for the kind statements. Listen, for all things real estate, Serhant.com and go watch Owning Manhattan if you haven't seen it yet. A lot of the world's seen it.
David: Are you living under a rock? Go watch it. It's great. Ryan, thank you so much. We really appreciate you taking the time.
Ryan: Thank you guys. Shaping the New York City Skyline at Seiden & Schein.
Brenda: Well, everyone, that's our show. Thanks so much for listening.
David: And of course, don't forget to subscribe. Also, don't forget to leave comments. Could we love to hear from our audience, right, Brenda?
Brenda: Yeah. Feel free to reach out at [email protected] or visit our website at seidenschein.com. We really look forward to hearing from you.
David: You could also reach out to David and Brenda at [email protected] and [email protected].
Brenda: Those are lengthy last names. You can just find us on our website.