Tom Moore bought a six-plex overrun with drug deals and prostitution. He says if he'd seen it for what it actually was, he'd have run.

Instead he'd already built something else in his head. He calls it spiritually designing — deciding what a thing could be before you look at what it is, then chasing that. That restoration became the catalyst for a whole neighborhood turning over.

Tom was born in downtown Ogden and went to Ogden High. His father, an East LA transplant teaching at Weber High, thought his students were sheltered and started taking them on summer trips through Europe — and was among the first Americans allowed to bring a group into China. Somewhere in there he did the math on hotel bills and started buying property in London instead. He was an Anglophile with family portraits of the royals on the wall.

Tom served an LDS mission in Scotland, which gave him UK residency, which meant he could invest in London without being treated as a foreigner. He spent 25 years doing it. The portfolio crossed $100 million, built one property a year to start.

He also sat on Ogden's Historic Landmarks Commission for fifteen years, and he has a useful answer for investors scared off by historic designation: it depends entirely on the attitude you bring. Strip the character out and you'll be scrutinized. Work with what's there and the commission becomes wind at your back.

These days his focus is Plot AV, six years old, doing AV integration and home networks. His diagnosis: technology in our homes has become noisy. Not audibly — we just spend too much time troubleshooting things that should already work. His argument is that Wi-Fi is now closer to heat and electricity than to a gadget, and that we'd never build a house without plumbing but routinely ignore what he calls the nervous system of the home until it's too late. Three goals, and only three: invisible, reliable, intuitive.

Also in this one: why his oldest properties date to the 1890s, the block where he and his father restored five houses alongside Ogden City, and the Rick Rubin idea that if you don't make the thing, it goes and finds someone else to make it.

Ben Peterson was at a family Christmas party, newly married, knowing nobody. So he turned to the guy next to him and asked what he did for a living. That conversation put him in the pocket knife business.

He was studying broadcast and film at the time and couldn't see where the degree was going. Video was just starting to move onto the internet — this is back when Zappos was putting shoe videos on product pages — so he asked the guy whether his knife site had any video on it. It didn't. Ben started making YouTube videos about knives instead.

What happened next is what he calls two degrees of learning. You learn YouTube, then realize YouTube is a piece of marketing, so you learn marketing. Then you wonder what's beyond that. Own the marketing department, then finance and accounting, then ops — and eventually you're looking at a business you own outright.

He and his wife started Knafs in 2018 as a side hustle, ran it that way for four years while having kids, and took it full time in 2022. Today it's ten employees, roughly half direct-to-consumer, most product launches happening on Kickstarter, and seventy dealers worldwide with the biggest in the Netherlands. He's not a knife maker, and he'll correct you if you call him one. He's a marketing guy and a storyteller who happens to own a CNC shop with three mills.

The name came from a hashtag nobody had claimed — "knifes" the way it sounds in the American South. Five letters, twelve dollars, 2018. That doesn't happen anymore.

Ben's answer for what he credits his success to is two words: failures and networking. His superpower, by his own account, is connecting ideas — knowing a guy in Boise who knows how to do one thing and a guy with the right machine, and seeing how they fit together. It's the same skill that builds a newscast rundown, which is what he studied.

Also in this one: why there's a glut of pocket knives and what actually makes one matter, five guys from North Carolina who called ahead for a short tour and stayed two hours, live-selling on Whatnot where he signs knives on camera, the roll of toilet paper that sold for a hundred and eight dollars, why he puts space cats on his products when the rest of the industry goes tactical, and the rising-tide mentality he brings to introductions: invite me to your pool when you're all billionaires.

Kevin Ward was voted Realtor of the Year for the number one Century 21 office in the world. He was having an affair at the time. Within a year he was sleeping in that office.

He spent fifteen years as a Christian pastor in small-town Texas before moving to Dallas Fort Worth — a town of twelve thousand to a metro of five million, knowing nobody. He learned real estate the hard way, did 108 transactions in a single year before mega teams existed, and buried himself in the work to avoid a marriage he'd never admitted was broken.

Then it burned down. And he did it again. And again. Three divorces.

After the third, he journaled over two thousand pages in about fifteen months and arrived somewhere most people never get to: it's gotta be me. There's a commonality, and the commonality is him. That admission is what everything he teaches now is built on.

Out of it came the seven domains — faith, feelings, focus, fitness, fun, finances, family — and his argument that feelings is the most powerful one and the one nobody talks about, because your emotions drive more of your behavior and decisions than anything else does. It only takes one domain in trouble to take the rest down with it. His analogy: you can't win at pickleball with a great serve alone.

Also in this one: Vortex Kings, his men's mastermind, and why he believes you're the king of your own life. The daily guided journaling practice that isn't about writing down feelings at all. The book that reframed how he understood being a husband. Two bestselling books for real estate agents built on getting yes without the BS. And the superpower he'll tell you plainly: he gives a shit, and he'd rather have his heart broken and let it heal than stop caring.

Carpe victoriam. Seize the victory. It's the phrase on his hat and the battle cry of his coaching, and it exists because championships are planned events. Nobody hands them to you.