The Ty Brady Way

thetybradyway

Learn Ty Brady’s tried and true formula for success in sales and in life each week on his new podcast.

  1. 3D AGO

    Crime, Poverty, and 15,000 Abandoned Buildings: What Happens When a School System Fails a City with Chris Papst

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Chris Papst, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter for Fox 45 News and author of the explosive new book Failure Factory: How Baltimore City Public Schools Deprive Taxpayers and Students of a Future. Chris found Ty through a previous podcast interview with a candidate running for superintendent in Georgia, and it quickly becomes clear why the two were destined to have this conversation. What starts as a deep dive into one city’s school system turns into a wake-up call for parents, voters, and taxpayers all across America. Chris walks Ty through his journey from small-town Pennsylvania to the halls of Washington DC journalism, and ultimately to Baltimore in January of 2017, where he launched Project Baltimore, a five-person investigative team at Fox 45 dedicated entirely to covering public education. What he expected to find and what he actually found over the next nine years are two very different things, and that gap is exactly what Failure Factory is built on. Over eight years, Baltimore City Schools received a 38% funding increase, an additional $500 million per year in taxpayer dollars. In that same window, math proficiency rose by just one percentage point and graduation rates climbed by just one point as well, still the lowest in the state of Maryland. Of the 1,700 additional employees hired with that money, only 200 were teachers. The data, Chris makes clear, tells the story all on its own. One of the most eye-opening moments of the episode comes when Chris breaks down what he calls the 50% rule, a policy where no student can receive below a 50% for a marking period grade, regardless of attendance, homework, or test performance. Since the lowest passing grade is a 60, students effectively only need to earn 10 points to pass a class. Chris explains that this policy exists not to help students learn, but to help schools pass students, boosting pass rates and making the system appear more successful than it actually is. And the higher performing school systems in Maryland, he notes, do not have this rule. Ty and Chris also get into the very human cost of all of this, and that is where the episode hits hardest. Chris shares the story of Michelle Bradley, a woman who made it all the way to ninth grade in Baltimore City schools without ever learning to read, her dyslexia going undiagnosed until her late thirties. She now has two daughters in the same system, living in Section 8 housing with no educational or financial means to seek alternatives. These are not statistics. These are people caught in a cycle of generational poverty that a broken school system keeps spinning. The conversation also covers teacher burnout and retaliation, the discipline crisis inside classrooms, grade changing scandals, and why so many school system employees speak to Chris only under the condition of anonymity. Chris is clear that solutions exist and that we already know how to educate kids well. The difference, he argues, comes down to accountability, and accountability starts at the ballot box. Local school board elections, he tells Ty, may matter more to the average American than any presidential race when it comes to daily quality of life, from home values and local economies to crime rates and unemployment. Failure Factory is available now wherever books are sold, including Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Chris’s social media handles are simply his name, Chris Papst, C-H-R-I-S-P-A-P-S-T. 🔗 linktr.ee/ChrisPapst 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @hiddenlimitsoutdoors   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    36 min
  2. APR 10

    From Special Forces to Sales Floor: The Mental Toughness Secrets Elite Warriors Use Every Day with Chris Harris

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Chris Harris, a former U.S. military veteran, private contractor, martial arts system creator, and now executive coach and keynote speaker whose life journey reads like a masterclass in mental toughness from the ground up. Chris found Ty through another episode of the show, and what follows is one of those conversations that hits you in ways you did not expect walking in. Chris’s background alone sets the tone for everything that follows. He grew up in a tumultuous environment, began training in martial arts at age 10, and enlisted in the military at 18 as his own graduation gift to himself. After four years of service he spent the next 25 years as a private contractor teaching elite military operators and Special Forces his own proprietary system of close quarters combat called Roku Jitsu, built not on muscle memory but on reflex arc, rewiring the body’s involuntary responses to the only 12 ways a person can be hurt with bare hands. When his body could no longer keep up with that work, he pivoted into B2B tech sales, climbed to the top of the leaderboard fast, and realized that everything he had been teaching warriors applied directly to the boardroom. The conversation goes deep on why people quit, and Chris breaks it down into two forces: focus and friction. Focus means knowing exactly why you started and having a clear daily process to work, because a goal without a process is just a wish. Friction means identifying on the front end exactly what is going to stand between you and where you want to go, because if you cannot name your saboteur, you cannot stop it. He and Ty draw a sharp parallel between reflex arc training and objection handling in sales, landing on the idea that there are really only eight to ten objections just as there are only twelve ways to be hurt, and mastery in both comes from making your response automatic. One of the episode’s most thought-provoking moments comes when Chris introduces the concept of metacognition, which he describes as awareness on steroids. It is not just noticing what you are doing, it is asking why you are doing it and what it is costing you. He connects this directly to overcoming the fear of rejection, which he calls the single biggest barrier between a salesperson and elite performance. And he grounds all of it in a simple but powerful idea: the Kingdom of God lives within you, which to Chris means that everything you need to achieve your biggest goals is already inside you. Your job is simply to develop it, become conscious of it, and stop looking for it somewhere else. Ty and Chris also get into the critical difference between coaching and consulting, and why Chris charges double for the latter. A coach leads you to your own conclusions. A consultant tells you exactly what to do and gets you there in half the time. Neither is better, but knowing which one a person actually wants before the conversation starts is everything. The same principle applies to knowing whether someone wants to be heard, helped, or hugged, and Chris is direct about the fact that if ego has moved out of its lane into blame, excuses, and finger pointing, he simply will not engage. There are too many people who genuinely want to do the work to spend time on those who do not. Chris closes with the piece of advice he would leave anyone with above all else: never withhold love if it is within your power to give it. In a world where divorce, obesity, and suicide are all at record highs despite unprecedented access to information, he brings it back to the simplest principle of all. Applied knowledge is power, and the golden rule is the most powerful application of all. 🔗 www.chrisharrisllc.com 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @thewarriormaker   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    27 min
  3. APR 3

    You're Not Running Out, You're Running Up: The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything with Tim Shurr

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Tim Shurr, a leading expert in anxiety, mindset transformation, and what he calls the “One Belief Away” method, and the conversation gets refreshingly real, fast. After 37 years of studying everything from hypnotherapy to neurolinguistic programming to EMDR, Tim has conducted over 16,000 individual sessions and developed a framework that gets to the root of anxiety, self-doubt, and emotional suffering in ways traditional therapy simply doesn’t. Ty opens up about his own experience with anxiety, sharing how growing up in a house with eight sisters and two brothers shaped a deep-seated belief that there would never be enough, enough money, enough security, enough breathing room. Tim meets him right there, offering one of the episode’s most powerful moments: the simple but transformative reframe that you’re not running out, you’re running up. Watch Ty’s energy shift in real time as that one phrase lands. Tim breaks down the difference between big T and little T traumas, and explains how the brain quietly builds unconscious beliefs, things like “I’m not safe,” “I’m not worthy,” or “I’m not enough,” without your knowledge or consent. He walks through his three-step process: pulling the mental weed at the root by revisiting the original feeling, upgrading the belief with new emotional resources, and then locking in that shift with better tools and questions that actually move the needle. He also tackles forgiveness in a way that will stick with you, borrowing from Wayne Dyer’s snake bite analogy to explain that it’s not the bite that kills you, it’s the venom you refuse to let go of. The episode also digs into what Tim calls “achiever syndrome,” the relentless drive that keeps high performers grinding out of adrenaline and fear rather than peace and purpose. Ty and Tim explore why leaders so often feel alone at the top, why trust issues run deep in the entrepreneurial world, and why the most successful people in the room are sometimes the ones most desperate for a safe place to put their burdens down. Tim shares the story of a client making three million dollars a year who still woke up every morning feeling like he was going to run out of money, a powerful reminder that the number in your bank account will never outrun the beliefs in your head. One of the episode’s standout moments comes when Tim reframes the way we think about procrastination, explaining that whenever someone avoids a goal, they are associating pain with it, not laziness. He and Ty talk about what it really means to be your own best friend, why that is a learnable skill and not something you are born with, and how upgrading your mindset tools is just as important as upgrading your phone. Most of us, Tim says, are still walking around running the same outdated program we were handed in childhood, and there are simply better tools available now. Tim’s closing message is one worth writing down: you are already more than enough, your biggest breakthroughs are hiding in the places you most want to avoid, and you are literally just one belief away. He also leaves listeners with a free resource, the High Performance Switch, a four-minute audio and video program designed to get you back into a flow state fast. Links will be in the show notes. 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @realtimshurr 🔗 https://timshurr.com/ IndyHypnosis.com   As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    32 min
  4. MAR 27

    The 5 Keys to Success (That Are Also the 5 Keys to Failure) with Serial Entrepreneur with Brian Will

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Brian Will, a man who grew up in a small farm town in Ohio, failed out of high school at 16, served eight years across the Air Force and Army, and went on to launch ten companies over 35 years, sell two into venture capital and one into private equity, write four books including two Wall Street Journal bestsellers, and is currently building an AI startup in Atlanta. Brian’s story is not a straight line to the top. It is a masterclass in getting knocked down, learning the lesson, and getting back up every single time. Brian shares his Five Keys to Success, which he is quick to point out are the exact same five keys to failure if you ignore them. It starts with your why, because if it is not strong enough, the first wave of adversity will knock you out. From there he breaks down why you need to understand who you are in your business, why most founders are technicians pretending to be CEOs, why ego is the silent killer of growing companies, and why not knowing your numbers is the fastest way to bleed a business dry without ever realizing it. The conversation goes deep on delegation and scaling, and Brian does not sugarcoat it. He explains why the founder is almost always the bottleneck when a company gets stuck, and why going from two million to ten million requires the willingness to temporarily take less money home so you can build the infrastructure underneath you that actually gets you there. He also walks through how he approaches broken sales organizations, building profit and loss statements by individual salesperson, cutting the channels and the people that are quietly losing money, and reallocating those resources to the performers who are starving for more leads. Ty and Brian also get into the future of business and agree on one thing without hesitation: if you are not using AI right now, you are already behind. Brian shares how he rebuilt seven financial documents totaling 20,000 lines of code in a single afternoon by himself, work that would have previously required a team of three for two weeks. His message is simple: AI is not going away, so stop debating it and start learning it. Brian closes with one of the most powerful points of the whole conversation. Tim Cook, the man running a three trillion dollar company, still meets quarterly with a board of directors and works with a personal coach. If the CEO of Apple needs ten to twelve people helping him lead, what makes any entrepreneur think they can figure it all out alone? Find someone who has been there, check your ego, take the advice, and go build something worth building. As always, we would like to hear from you! 🔗 linktr.ee/brianwillmedia 🎙️ @thetybradyway with @thedropoutmm   Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    28 min
  5. MAR 20

    The System Is Rigged: What Your Insurance Broker Isn't Telling You with Dan Dearden

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Dan Dearden, a 25-year veteran of the group health insurance industry who has spent his career helping small and mid-sized businesses navigate one of their biggest frustrations: the relentless, compounding cost of group health coverage. Dan lays out the landscape employers are dealing with right now. Hyperinflation in healthcare is running in the double digits with no slowdown projected for at least three to five years. Employers are capping employee hours to stay under the 50-employee mandate threshold, offering plans with $6,000 to $8,000 deductibles while still paying enormous premiums, and in some cases simply paying the government penalty because it costs less than the insurance itself. Trent Staggs, traveling the country talking to business owners, heard the same answer almost unanimously: the cost of health insurance is the number one problem in business today. Dan explains why so many employers stay stuck, and why the traditional brokerage model is part of the problem rather than the solution. Then he walks through the alternative his firm Spica Employee Benefits is most committed to: Pareto Health, the largest employer captive in the country with nearly 4,500 member companies. The model pools smaller employers together to create the same buying power as a Fortune 500 company, driving down the cost of medical procedures, surgeries, and prescription drugs while actually improving the quality of care. Dan shares that a top-ranked orthopedic surgeon in Bountiful, Utah performing robotic knee surgery can cost half of what a lesser surgeon down the street charges, and that steering employees toward the best providers in every category means better outcomes and lower total cost. His firm’s goal is to get employers from 100% of their current fully insured cost down to around 80%, and often better, with one local Utah company saving $109,000 in their first year on 65 employees. Dan closes with the wellness piece, sharing his own story of dropping his A1C from 5.9 to 4.1 through coaching, dietary changes, and targeted supplements, going from nearly being put on diabetes medication to his doctor calling him in disbelief. His message is that a culture of proactive health is just as important as the financial structure of the plan, and that a lot of expensive medical interventions are avoidable with the right support. For any employer with 50 or more employees who thinks they are already getting the best deal possible, Dan’s ask is simple: give his team 30 minutes. His parting wisdom for anyone building a career mirrors that same straightforward approach: work hard, become the subject matter expert in your field, and never stop investing in the people around you.   🎙️ @thetybradyway with @dan_dearden   As always, we would like to hear from you! 📧 Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com 📱 DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    33 min
  6. MAR 13

    The Golden Handcuffs: Why Leaving Your Day Job Is Harder Than It Looks with Brett Blackham

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Brett Blackham, a Medicare and life insurance agent who built his business the slow, steady way while juggling his family’s retail pharmacy on the side. Brett came into the industry through his brother Bryce and spent years growing his book of business nights and weekends before finally going all in. If you’ve ever wondered what it really looks like to build something part-time before making the leap, this episode is your roadmap. Brett opens up about what those first few years looked like: slow growth, leaning on a personal network built through years of pharmacy relationships, and using The Parable of the Pipeline as his guiding philosophy for building renewable income. The book’s core idea is simple but powerful. One person hauls buckets every day to make money while another spends time building a pipeline. The bucket hauler earns faster at first, but once the pipeline is built, there is no competition. Brett’s Medicare renewals were his pipeline, and he trusted the process even when the early returns were modest. The conversation gets practical fast. Brett breaks down how he approached lead generation, starting with word of mouth and referrals, then buying leads strategically, and even working discarded leads other agents had written off. His philosophy is simple: a lead isn’t dead until they’re buying or dying. He shares the story of closing a life insurance policy on a lead card belonging to a grandmother who had passed away eight months earlier, proof that the right conversation at the right time beats a shiny new lead every time. Ty and Brett also tackle the biggest misconceptions in the Medicare space, including the widespread belief that working with an agent costs money. It doesn’t. Brett explains how the same products available online or over the phone are available through an agent at no extra cost to the consumer, with the agent paid by the carrier. He also addresses something that hits close to home for both of them: clients who don’t think to call their agent when problems come up. Brett walks through a powerful real-life example involving a $3,500 ambulance bill that nearly got paid unnecessarily, resolved in minutes because a client finally picked up the phone. Near the end of the episode, Brett reflects on what he would tell his younger self: you could have gotten here faster. Not because he was lazy, but because he didn’t yet believe how quickly it could happen. That insight leads to a broader conversation about the emotional weight of leaving guaranteed income behind and why the rule of thumb to wait until you’re earning double before cutting the cord exists for a reason, even if the math eventually makes the decision for you. Brett’s definition of success is one of the most grounded you’ll hear: balance. Enough financial resource, enough time, and enough freedom to follow what actually brings you joy. He doesn’t need a scoreboard. He needs to be at the game.   As always, we would like to hear from you! 📧 Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com 📱 DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    30 min
  7. MAR 6

    1500 Days of Running: The “Get Out the Door” Rule That Works With Chris Avery

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Chris Avery for a long awaited return appearance, and the reason is simple: the people demanded it. After Chris’s first appearance where he shared how he ran a marathon with zero training, listeners flooded the comments with amazement and curiosity. So Ty brings him back to answer the question everyone was asking: what happened after that first marathon, and how did it lead to 1,500 straight days of running? Chris breaks down why the streak is far harder and far more meaningful than the single marathon that started it all, and why showing up every day, even sick, even broken, even at 11 PM, is what actually builds the person you want to become. Chris opens up about the moment the streak was born. He made the decision on January 8th, 2022, and was running by January 9th. No lag time, no overthinking, no room for doubt to creep in. He explains that most people kill their biggest dreams in the space between deciding and doing, and that acting fast is what turns a good idea into a real identity. Right now he is running 18 miles a day, burning through a pair of shoes every month, and waking up sore nearly every morning. But as he puts it, the soreness is worse lying in bed than once he gets moving, and the hardest part of every single day is simply getting out the door. Chris also pulls back the curtain on his ultimate goal: starting January 1st, 2027, he will run the perimeter of America, covering 50K (31.1 miles) every single day for 365 straight days, finishing December 31st, 2027. One man, one family, one RV. If completed, he will become the first person ever to run an ultra marathon distance consecutively around the country, surpassing the current record of roughly 200 days. He talks about the role his wife, his brotherhood, and his faith have played in keeping him going through shin splints, hernias, blown shoulders, and one brutal night with the flu where finishing felt impossible but quitting felt worse. He shares how a single question from a brother in his community, asking what it would take just to get started, was enough to reset his mind and get him out the door at 11 PM, finishing as the sun came up the next morning. His message is direct and personal: everybody has something calling them. Stop suppressing it. Stop delaying it. Breathe life into it and go do it, because as Les Brown says, the richest place in the world is the graveyard, full of symphonies never composed, books never written, and ideas that never got the chance to change the world. Chris refuses to add to that count, and after this episode, you just might too. As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    28 min
  8. FEB 27

    From Detective to Full-Time Artist: How He Rebuilt His Dream at 40 with Tim Packer

    On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Tim Packer, a celebrated Canadian artist, former police detective, and creative business mentor whose story is as unlikely as it is inspiring. From the time Tim was 12 years old, he knew he wanted to be an artist. He took commercial art in high school, studied graphic design in college, and was so eager to get started that he was sitting in a college classroom at 17. But after two years of entry-level jobs in the industry that left him feeling like he just didn’t have what it took, Tim did something that would define the next two decades of his life. He joined the Toronto Police Force, where he spent 18 years, eventually working as a fraud detective in the commercial crime unit investigating cases over two million dollars. Ty and Tim dig deep into the moment that changed everything, a single article Tim read featuring Canadian artist Harley Brown, who made a bold claim that talent isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you build. Tim didn’t fully believe it at first, but he made a deal with himself to act as though he did for one year. He committed to painting three times a week, stopped avoiding the things he wasn’t good at, and started attacking his weaknesses like a detective working a case. By the end of that year, the results were undeniable. Within three years, the conversation with his wife had shifted from if he would leave the police force to paint full-time, to when. In 2000, he cashed in his pension and never looked back. But the first five years were anything but a highlight reel. Tim opens up about the struggle of figuring out not just the art, but the business of art, and how every few months he was convinced the conversation about putting the suit back on was right around the corner. It wasn’t until year five that he found his voice and things truly took off, culminating in a gallery opening in Toronto in 2015 that looked like something out of a movie, with people lined up at the door, red dots going up on every painting, and Tim realizing he was on track to make over a quarter million dollars that year from his art alone. And in that moment of success, what hit him wasn’t pride. It was responsibility. That responsibility led Tim to start his YouTube channel, sharing everything he’d learned with artists who were struggling the way he once had. Then in 2020, after a pair of near-death experiences with a thyroid condition left him lying on a gurney with his wife by his side, Tim came away with one nagging regret. He’d been playing it safe with his teaching. He launched the Tim Packer Art Academy, which has since helped over 10,000 artists, and recently released his book, You Can Sell Your Art, with one clear mission: helping artists make a living doing what they love. Ty and Tim also get into the power of the word yet, the danger of comparing your chapter one to someone else’s chapter thirty, the myth that doing what you love means you’ll never work a day in your life, and why being an artist and being an entrepreneur are exactly the same thing. Tim’s message is clear and it hits hard: talent is not a gift you either have or you don’t. It is the sum total of your skills, knowledge, experience, and creativity, and every single one of those things can be developed, earned, and grown without a ceiling. If you’ve ever talked yourself out of a dream because you didn’t think you were good enough, this episode is exactly what you need to hear. As always, we would like to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

    26 min
4.6
out of 5
14 Ratings

About

Learn Ty Brady’s tried and true formula for success in sales and in life each week on his new podcast.