Who is Dan Peña?

Dan Peña has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage — Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out the sky, hellfire on the horizon and, the final layer, a red and murderous photograph of the man himself superimposed on to the right-hand side.

‘Allegedly I used to hit my students in the 1990s. I will neither confirm nor deny that’

The collage hangs almost dead center on Peña’s “wall of influencers,” a gallery of ninety-one men and women who inspired him to become the high-performance individual he is today: a businessman worth $500 million and an online celebrity with millions of followers. To the right of Hitler is Joseph Stalin and to the left is Jesus. To Jesus’s left is Vlad the Impaler, and above Vlad is Peña’s father Manny. “They’re not all good people,” says Katherine, Peña’s personal assistant. “Look, there’s Donald Trump.”

Katherine is showing me around Guthrie Castle, Peña’s fifteenth-century estate on the east coast of Scotland near Arbroath. We had seen Peña’s walled garden, his orchard, his nine-hole golf course and his corridor of newspaper clippings and certificates. We’d marveled at his enormous collection of baseball caps and at a stuffed bear whose throat he’d slit hunting in America — and which for some reason now wore a Native American feathered headdress. Our tour ended in the “Pavilion,” observing the wall.

For thirty years Peña has delivered seminars to young men (and a small number of young women) about becoming “high performance:” not just obtaining wealth, but being an alpha male. Then fifteen years ago the Trillion Dollar Man (that’s his nickname for himself, I’m afraid) started uploading clips of his seminars to YouTube, and they proved very popular.

“Hello young man,” Peña says when we meet in his drawing room in front of a giant painting of him. Painted Peña wears hunting breeches and boots and stands tall next to a Great Dane. The real one has rectangular glasses and is built like the Michelin Man.

“I used to be fortunate enough to run some of the money for the du Ponts,” Peña says a few minutes into our meeting. “Their kid was a spoiled brat.” Du Ponts are born rich, but Peña comes from a strict family in the barrios of Los Angeles. “My dad ran me over,” Peña says. “I used to have a propensity for running my tricycle into the street. My dad told my mom: ‘I’m going to hit him with the car, so he knows what it feels like.’ And so my dad’s in the car and he went to nudge me and the chrome went through my knee and it dragged me on to the street. My mother is screaming: ‘Manny, Manny, Manny, you’re going to kill him!’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to kill him, but he’s never going on to the street again.’”

Peña, seventy-nine, says that his “superhero father” gave him the values and character to turn savings of $820 into a multi-million-dollar oil business. In 1993, after making his fortune, Peña began his seminars, the unique selling point being his own “tough dad” act. “Back in the 1990s, allegedly I used to hit the students,” he says. “I will neither confirm nor deny that. But the kids were tougher in the 1990s.” Nowadays he just gets in students’ faces and yells things such as: “Is every man in Britain a mealy-mouthed weenie?” “Do you realize that Russians think we’re all faggots?” “You oughta go home to your mother… BOOM! BOOM! KILL YOUR PARENTS. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

Clips of these attacks do particularly well on YouTube and fans have made compilations of his most “savage advice.” Like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro, Peña batters “PC culture,” “millennials,” “snowflakes” and “the current generation.”

Peña says that at his seminars, for which he charges $34,000, he teaches the “QLA method,” a formula for success invented by nineteenth-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie (QLA stands for “Quantum Leap Advantage”). The QLA seminars run in week-long blocks from Guthrie Castle, and students receive lectures from Peña, eat food from his cordon bleu chef, sleep in his castle and get a private one-to-one.

In these mano-a-mano sessions, many students break down and confess their saddest secrets. “Forty percent of the women that come here have been raped or violated,” Peña says. “Twenty percent of the men that come here have been raped or violated… I mean, it’s like a soap opera.”

I have spent a while trying to understand QLA, but still have no real idea what it is. Peña says the method is explained on his website, but the closest thing I can find to an explanation is a thirty-nine-page document called “the QLA e-book.” In it, Peña offers “three major QLA precepts: 1) Don’t waste time on things (people) you can’t change; 2) High-performance people focus on the few — not the many; 3) High-performance people have limited aims.” It’s banal stuff. So what does Peña teach all week?

“I believe in tough love,” Peña tells me. “We have kids that show up to talk to me that have never been reprimanded verbally. I mean screamed at. OK? We have kids that show up to me that have never been spanked. OK? We have kids that have never been in a physical altercation, in other words, a fight. OK? We have people that come to me that wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if it was in their mouth. OK? To say they’re inhibited is an understatement of biblical proportions.”

Peña gives his seminars in the Pavilion with his father, Hitler, Trump et al watching over. Katherine shows me a back room, hidden behind a black curtain, with a boxing ring. “If the students have something they want to sort out between each other, it’s recommended that they do it in the ring,” she explains. Peña used to referee the matches, but now he hires a qualified local. It keeps the beatings professional.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.