TBS EP 2 MAC

Participant #1:
Hi everybody. So we got somebody went to high school with actually, we went to Ross. For a little bit. Mr. Mac Contrereas here. Nice to be on, man. Yes. Thanks for being on. Happy to have you. Kind of like we're talking about you're giving some pointers here on some things to look out for or even look into for podcasting, like the industry, like marketing and media industry for the last 15 years. So I started with graphic design and stuff like that. And then I had my own business for about five years. And it's too expensive to bring in outside people to learn to do your marketing for you and things like that. So kind of learned it out of necessity. Yeah. It's kind of one of those things I've thought about even because I just bought like some magnets for my car and stuff and some stickers, like small things I can possibly hand out even at work. Like, hey, here's a sticker and has all my stuff on the bomb, like my Spotify, YouTube and all that jazz. Right. That's one way I can start doing it, because I've noticed I think you mentioned on something I'd watch with you before or you posted. It like you're just saying, too. Finding somebody that can help you do that stuff and actually be 100% dedicated as much as you are is always a problem. So it's like one of those things like, okay, and maybe I can find somebody from in College that's happening. Are they really going to care about it? It's not resume builder. Hey, I'm help this guy start up the podcast, right? Yeah. It's so tough, man. I've started three podcasts which have all failed. I think the longest one I had was maybe six months, maybe up to like 1520 podcasts that were made. And it's really tough because it's a commitment. It's a really low ROI, unless it's very relevant. And you have some people that can capture those audiences. But it's so tough. But I love it. I think it's such a great space for getting content out to people and helping people. And so I wish I could find people to do it with, but it's so hard to coordinate the time. And then you have, like I said, all the equipment and stuff. Somebody has to produce it and then market it claps to you because it's not easy keeping this going. And if you do, eventually it'll get easier by stuff. Yeah, that's kind of what I've ran into so far. I've reached out to a number of people like yourself who are like, yeah, I'm down to jump on, but I've had like maybe five other people after John and yourself. And it's like, damn. After that, I'm going to have to really start looking for some people because right now I'm kind of just picking people I know have cool things going on. Sure. And make it a little interesting and be a good start. It's like, damn, after that. So is this a new podcast that you're doing, or is this a continuum of your old one? Yeah, it's a new one. I know the old one. I feel like we actually started off really good. Yeah. We had, I think like 400 something views just off the first two. This isn't bad. Yeah, this is going pretty well. I think we're pretty targeted audience, too. It's like the veteran route, maybe some BS thrown in there as well. Sure. Like you said, keeping it going, finding time, especially when they're in two different States and time differences and stuff like that, makes it a little bit more difficult. Then we both got kids. Yeah. You got the family, you got friends trying to keep your life together. Your wife is like, why are you in front of a camera and microphones all the time? We don't have no money going on. That's why I felt bad last time. I was like, man, talking to John was like, man, it's going like 2 hours. I can hear my son crying a little bit. He'd come in the room. I don't know how this is going to work, but this time around, I'm definitely more. I think I was always dedicated. It's just one of the things I've always wanted to do because like you said, if it doesn't take off and become anything spectacular, it's kind of cool to just catch up with people. Right. Especially from where we grew up in Houston, small towns now, like, you're doing these crazy things. You got like all these degrees, you've had businesses. Your entrepreneurship is huge with you. And like, I just think coming from Houston, a lot of people get out of Houston. It's easy to get trapped. Houston. It's funny because I'm in home loans and real estate now. Right. And so because I grew up there for so long and I still have friends and family there, I still get some business out there. And I had a person who really there only place I want to live in Houston. That's it. That's where I want to live. And they're like, I need to find a house here. Here's my price range, things like that. And the average. Now keep in mind, right. The median and average. It's been a long time since we were in Houston. High learning about averages and means. But the median and the average are different. But the average income there is $94,000 in Houston and it far surpasses the income of any other city that's out there. Right. And when we went there, there were about 2000 people that lived in that town, and now there's about 6000. They have a new development going out there. I believe it's targeted to kind of lower income, but it's a nicer development that's going out there, and it's supposed to be substantial. And so it's funny because you're right, it's a small town. We grew up in a country town. But then it's also like people really want to live there because it's secluded, so it's a little more safe. It still has that very like country home, say Hi to your neighbor feeling to it. And that's all super cool. But it's funny. People pay a premium to be there now, right? Yeah. Which is crazy because growing up there never felt like it was a premium place to live. I guess that's why even my parents have moved out there from Modesto, which isn't a crazy city, but residential to having property.

Participant #1:
Everybody's waving each other when they drive by. There's guys on tractors driving down the street. Right there is kind of like that sense of comfort. Like, oh, I can trust my kids walking to school, right? Yeah, it was nice. I used to walk to and from school and I used to run on the canal and never like any sort of worry at all. And now it's funny. Like living in the age that we live in. My wife is super into murder documentaries. And so we've been watching all of these ones and all of these serial killers that come through California. And I'm just like that sort of like idea of crime and things like that never even occurred to me when we're in Houston, just because that's how it is, right. It's just so kind of friendly out there. There is something to it, too. My parents still live up there in Northern California and I go home for a couple of days, even if it's just a weekend. It is nice. I can't like living in Southern California where it's just constant traffic, like he can't get to where he goes on the freeway. So there's those back roads, those two one Lane roads, the grocery store where my dad knows the freaking cashier, and at the daily shop, everybody's waving like, hey, how are you doing? I have to readjust my life when I go there because you're driving through these country roads and you forget that there's a speed limit, but there's not really a speed limit. And the people that live there do not like, you driving slow in those roads. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I need to speed up. I need to understand what's going on here. But it's so beautiful, right. Right now, probably the Orchard, the almond blossoms are coming through and it's such a nice place to be. But it's just so funny that it's like people are paying a premium to be there instead of somewhere like Sirius or Turlock or Modesto. Yeah. It's crazy because even down here, some of the rural areas that we have in Southern California, like TIMT, they're doing a lot of developments and stuff. And we're just driving up from friends waiting this past weekend. And one side of the freeway or it's like a two Lane freeway or highway, there's new developments on the other side. There's dairy farms. There's the piled up high. I'm like, man, do these people know they're moving here? They're probably from La buying, right. For like 200, $300,000. No, you got to get used to it. It takes time, right? I mean, we have that out there. We have that there. And it does because we drive from Sac. That's where we live in Sac. And we drive down to the Central Valley. And there's a small part typically, I think, when we drive through Lodi where you will start to smell cows, and she's like, what is that bowl? I'm like, that's just nature. That's just life working. That's just how it is up here. Yeah. We got married. My wife and I got married up at her dad's house in Calverus. And, like, the most country thing I think I've ever seen was the morning of Sumi and my buddies are all eating down at some restaurant. I rode up on a horse to the gas station, tied the horse. I even had the little stand like, where the hell are we? I'm like, dude, this is freaking Northern California, bro. That's amazing. Honestly. That's amazing. Indeed. Yeah. It's still a trip when we see, I don't know, in SoCal if you guys have this at all, but there's still a part of the police force here in Sacramento that rides horses around downtown, and it's always so weird to see them. I'm like, why do you guys have this horse? I'm like, this is not effective away to police crime here, but it's always cool to see. Yeah. It's like, how long does it take you to get back to we got to load the horse up. We got to feed them craziness, man. So, dude, what's the format? What do you want to talk about today? I don't know. So I kind of want to talk about things that you're up to. I think we're messaging you about it before, and I was saying, I think there's a lot of I think it was with you. There's a lot of stories about you hear these famous people that have all these different drives and interests. They talk about how they get there. But I think there's a lot of folks like ourselves that have these goals and we're accomplishing these things. There are different levels of success. It doesn't necessarily mean make millions and millions of dollars, but kind of diving into, like, that mindset that it takes. Sure. As I'm starting off as well. In my own podcast, you've said you've launched a few. You've had your own business for a number of years. So trying to get into that mindset because there's the David Goggins of the world that we wake up every door every day and they're just going to run 50 miles that day before lunch. He's such an eccentric. I relate to him so much because that's how I was in high school. Right. Just like with the way that I don't remember how you moved at some point in high school, right? Yeah. I ended up moving end of junior year. End of junior year. Okay. Yeah. You kind of caught like, the beginning of that phase, but I was just like super into bodybuilding. And so I was working out 5 hours a day, eleven times a week. I don't know if, you know, this school gave me special dispensation to work out instead of dupe. One of our classmates was she was an elite acro. It's like gymnastics with people. You do it together. And she got it. And so I was like, if you can get it, I know the things I went I told them and I was like, hey, this is what I'm passionate about. This is what I want to do. And it took a little convincing because I think they were like thought I was just trying to skip school, but I had it signed off by the gym when I would win. I used to wake up at 05:00 a.m. Run there, work out before through first period and then shower and go and then go back after school. Holy cow. So I love David Goggins because that mindset really resonates with me. But after I tore my meniscus my senior year in football, and then I wrestled and did Olympic lifting in College at SoC State, and I messed up my knee every year after that. And so that ability to be like Goggin is just out of my system now. It's just so impossible. I'm like, right now I'm just trying to be able to walk every day and not be crippled. But yeah, and you're right, dude. It's funny because I had a similar idea like this for a podcast. And I was like, I'm Super fascinated by the best. Right. And I think everybody is. But I think a lot of people, when they think of the best, they think of people that are not arriving at the best. And there are so many. And you look at the Gannis Book of Records. Right. And look at how many people and they're like the best for the weirdest things. Right. And that's so interesting to me. But you're right there's all these people in Houston is a good example of this. You have the Houston, as far as I know right now, is the number one almond growing region in the country. They grow all the almonds. And I'm sure that there's somebody out there that owns the majority of that land. Right. So in actually probably the guy that owns Blue Diamond would be my guess. So in actuality, he is probably one of the best or the best almond grower in the nation. Exactly. But I don't know his name. You don't know his name. Right. But I think that's to your point, right. There's all these people that are successful in their own. Right. And it's such an interesting thing to be able to get with them, talk with them and get these different perspectives on what success looks like. Yes, because it's easy to fall in and trap, I think are in love with the glamorous story of a rags to riches type thing. But how relevant is some of that stuff? And like you're saying to the guy that owns Blue Diamond, nobody knows who he is, who owns the majority of things that we purchase, nobody really these individuals. But even like at a micro level, one of the things I've been thinking about is I'm trying to get a little bit more healthier, maybe four or five months or so ever since my daughter was born. So, yeah, around six months, I take vitamins and doing like, little things. And I used to in this mindset where it's like, you know what? I just got workouts and I'd work out for two weeks. I'd feel good and I'd stop. Now, I won't do it for like another three or four months and I'd get back into it. So like, I was I think I was telling my wife, this is a friend of mine. The level of success to me right now is like, I know I'm going to get back in the gym eventually, but instead of just rushing gun Ho with it, I think I've done it so many times. I'm trying to be more strategic. Let's start with the little steps first. Clean up the habit of what I'm eating the diet like beer wise, maybe cut back drinking a beer every day like I was doing right on the weekends. It was getting to a point where it's like having a couple of bombers at night. It's like, man, that's a lot of this is right there in itself. Let's eat a little healthier, get some vitamins in. Once I get back into the habit of working out, it's going to feel like it was a progression to get there instead of just bum rushing it and not cleaning up anything else. So that's one of those levels of success. I think that's out there that a lot of people think it just happens overnight. Also a lot of little leg work. Everybody's different. Some people have it overnight strike goal. But there's also little steps that people, I think, overlook. If it's eating vitamins, eating foods or if it's just today I'm running 5 miles or 50 miles. Like, Goggins, I'll wake up in a quarter mile today and do that for a week and slowly progress and all of a sudden you're freaking ready to take on. Well, I mean, Goggins has a good story, too. I haven't dived into it super deep, but I've heard enough where I know he either failed out or did not pass Seal school a couple of times. He was a bigger dude. So I think a lot of people, they see the end result and they forget that even Goggins is human, right? Even he had a journey to get there. And all of these guys right? I mean, I'm a big fan of Joe Rogan. I'm a big fan of, like, Gary Vee. All of these guys, they tell their origin stories. And most people who make their wealth, it's not inherited, but it's still a very small portion of our population. And so you're 100%. Right. And it's funny, we're at that age now where you're like, you mentally have to think about your health. Right. And that's one of my new mantras, like health as well. Right. When you're in your 20s and you're grinding, you don't sleep for four days, it's not a big deal. Or you're hungover and all of that weightlifting and all the sports, when you start to get into your 30s and your 40s, you're going to start to feel that. Right. And you kind of actively have to start thinking about that. So I'm right there with you, dude. It's just like, and especially when the type of people that I think you're trying to really attract to is these people that are super GungHo, that will put in the work, you sometimes forget to prioritize your health. And I went from one extreme to another. Right. I went from a bunch of sports very deep into bodybuilding to essentially kind of what you were doing. Like, I'm going to work out two months here, a month here, a couple of weeks here, and I'm going to focus on growing a business. And you do that, and that's all great and dandy. But then you get to the end of it and you're like, shit, I might die tomorrow if I don't stop eating and drinking and work out. Right. Exactly. Like a guy like Goggins or Rogan. Especially with Goggins. Like you were saying, I relate to him a lot, too. Maybe not fitness wise, but, like, mentality wise. I think, especially when it comes to work, it's like always had this mindset never stop, always continue to grow. I always seek mentorship. I think that's something a lot of I say a lot of younger people, which is weird to say now, younger people. Yeah. You know what I mean? You see, these kids are like 1819 or early 20s, and I get the mindset of trying to accomplish things on their own. That's important. Also, can you have that self drive? Mentorship is so huge. If it's somebody older, it could be somebody that same age, somebody younger. But so that mindset that he has where continue to grow, never stay put or stagnant. No excuses to my work life. Every day, every day, I want to make sure every email is answered. I'm not going to leave an email unanswered. I want to make sure I return every phone call I miss. So when I go to bed and it's done, like, the work day is done, thinking about, oh, man, I should have it's going to Bogg me down tomorrow because I got to wake up extra early, answer that phone call or call drive. So like, his mindset and as well, like someone like Joe Rogan, who I like a lot, too. There's a lot of different relatable aspects to them Besides their fitness. Obviously, they're grinders and just life in general. I think that's the key. Honestly, if we're going to sum up, I think in any of these podcasts, if you would like to be like, what's the one thing take away from this? If you're going to talk to anybody that's achieved any level of success, they work hard for it. That's probably the truth. They'll be very rare if they're like, oh, I bought this. Nft I had no clue what it is. And now I'm a millionaire. Right. Like, that's such a small part of the population. I accidentally bought some Apple stock one time and now I'm a billionaire. And I think what's his name? David Chow is a good example of that. I might have that wrong audit. But he's an artist and he painted the murals on the Facebook when their original big site, you pay them the murals and they paid him in stock. And then that stock bested. And he's a multi millionaire now. He's an artist by trace what he does. Right. So he's just, dude, you should watch his David. His Joe Rogan podcast is insane. I love the guy. He's such an eccentric. He's all over the place. But he has a very unique perspective on success and happiness. I do want to jump into kind of like my path and stuff. But as we're on it, for me, I'm starting to measure a lot more success on happiness. And I think that's really key because I've read studies and I've been around people, and just the chase of money doesn't bring happiness, both statistically and just really kind of seeing it. And that's not to say money doesn't bring happiness because it solves a lot of problems. But if your only goal in life is to continue to make money and more money, there's a threshold for that. And as it pertains to happiness. Right. And so that's kind of where I'm at right now is I'm reflecting, I'm taking in everything that I've achieved. I'm appreciating it, and I'm looking towards the future. But I'm being realistic and being like, not that I wouldn't want to be as famous as, like, let's say Joe Rogan, but that's not a drive for me. It's not necessarily a desire. Right. That sort of money. I'm very realistic. And I know that the amount of money you actually need to make to survive is far less than a million dollars a year, far less. Right. And people are stuck on that number. A million dollars. But like, you live in San Diego. It's a little more in San Diego. Yeah, a little bit north of it. But yeah, it's still down here. It's expensive. It's expensive in Stoke in California, it's a little different depending on where you live. But there's a threshold. And it's like the first goal I think is make enough money to support your family and yourself and keep your finances in order. Right. The second goal is to be in a position to start to invest that money for retirement and for your family success. That amount is a lot, don't get me wrong, but it's an achievable amount. So that's where I'm at with my goal setting. That's my mindset as well. Going into even this podcast. If it takes off and it ends up making enough to where I'm making right now for work, that'd be the dream. I'm making enough to supplement my work income because then I could stop working it's. Surprisingly, with social media, podcasting, advertising, it's surprisingly not that difficult. Right. But the problem is, like you said, is you have a vision of like, oh, I want this to be with like two people because I want to reperte, but I can forth and I want it to look a certain way and all of this stuff and you start to like, you stop making content because you're not matching what you want. But I guess what you would consider a marketing expert and the number one thing I tell people is content is consistency. Right. But even in myself and you probably found this, it's very tough to be consistent. It's a tough thing to do. Even like on our original podcast I had with my buddy, they're kind of similar the two episodes, but then they're vastly different all the time. Like we're trying to when we originally planned it out, we're like, okay, we're going to have this specific mindset of talking about our stories when we're in the Navy, bringing maybe some awareness to what veterans go through and different programs that might be out there. But it's easy to get sidetracked and have fun just shooting the shore. Yeah, exactly. Because after the one I do with John last week, I was like, man, I just got too excited just talking to John. I was like, I haven't talked to him in like 16 years. Like, man, this is just cool catching up.

Participant #1:
One of the guys that I hope to have on as well, who started his own company just recently he posted something on Instagram talking about we're talking about this becoming wealthy and stuff like that. But he was posted something like for him, having the freedom of time is wealth. He has a family also. So I can't wait to have him on here also, because that mindset is different than like what you're saying. Most people just want to see that million dollars and that's like, man, I got to get that million Bucks. But if making a good amount of money to where you can live a good life, like you say, you don't need a million dollars to live. But having even a good life, right? Even a great life, you could make that amount of money if you're willing to pivot in your life, you can do that, right. And for a lot of people, like owning a boat, owning jet skis, owning, being able to take your family on two vacations a year, like being able to live in California. Right. We are so close to all of these things is an achievable thing. And not I know most of the statistics on the homeless rate and education rates and things like that. So not to say it's easy for everybody, but it is an achievable thing to have a great life. Right. And the number one thing is perspective, to show gratitude for what you do have, recognize your achievements, and then ultimately have perspective and realize that if you have a computer in front of you and you have the time and opportunity and the supportive wife to do a podcast, you're already blessed. You're already winning in life, right? Exactly. This is already a foot in the right direction. Even though my grandparents 60th anniversary, my grandpa told everybody this, I think it rings true. He said he never had a lot of money, but he had a lot of love. And they're in their 80s now. It's like that's a reflective thing even. And it hits you as a young person hearing that. It's like, man, he's right. They never drove super fancy cars. They had a big house, but they're always around. They're always around. Taking us to school, picking us up like they enjoyed, I would imagine, having us, I hope, right next door, living next to us, doing all these, making those memories with us and being such an integral part of our lives and their lives, they got to have those memories and tell their friends about those things. Because not everybody is lucky enough to have that type of freedom of time, right? Yeah, exactly. I think that's ultimately my goal, even with this podcast or just in life in general, to have time where I'm that age and look back and could be like, hey, you know what? I saw my kids grow up. I was at all their games, all their practices, all their dances, wherever it may be. I never really missed anything because so many people do. And having that regret, I think later in life that would be harder to live within saying, hey, I made a million dollars, but I missed everything, right? Yeah. And that's the trade off. And you see that a lot with a lot of entrepreneurs, they can't manage time and family. And some of it might be greed, some of it might just be bad timing in life. Right. You never really know. It's a tough thing to navigate if this is the direction you try to take your life. And I'm lucky to have a supportive wife who is very driven the same way I am. But I in past relationships, the amount of work that I've had to do not even want to have to do just wasn't sustainable for relationships. Right. So there are trade offs for sure. I think it's essential part, too, in the relationship. Like you want to be with somebody, that you lift each other up. So like your wife's driven, you're driven. My wife is the same way. We both have goals. We never stop each other from achieving them. It's that knowing when to be the cheerleader. Right. Go do it. If you're struggling, trying to figure out what you want to do, we'll take some time, figure out what we want to do. We're not holding you back. That's why I do it for my wife. Even like our family is not going to hold you back from achieving what you want to achieve, whether it's doing a podcast, whether it's going to become a fitness guru or whatever it may be. I think that's where a lot of it starts to is having if you are in a relationship, having that person that pushes you also, instead of having the anchor, that kind of crushes your dreams weighs you down a little bit. Yeah, that gets a critical. And that's not just your partner that you have here. I've learned that same thing with business partners. I've done a lot of consulting work. So just all of those partnerships, friendships, mentorships, all of that stuff, you'll start to see the correlation between your love life and what you put into that, because these people start to become family with you. And it can be really tough to navigate that and understand that people don't do business the same way. Right. And I approach business from a very probably like an arrogant level of morality. And it's not the quickest or fastest way or maybe even the best way to make money. But at the end of the day, I'm proud of myself for sticking to a certain level of standards and what I do. Right. And that's a hard thing to do in the real estate home loan industry because that's one of the reasons we had that crash not too long ago. There's just so many people cheating the American public and making a lot of money off of it. And so I knew that when I got into this industry, I was like, I'm going to do it the way that I want to do it. I was very lucky to end up at a brokerage and with a broker who we believe the same way. So that's critical. But should we just jump into my life story now that we're 37 minutes in? Yeah, let's do it. I have a quick question, too, on the real estate part, though, because I'm seeing this pop up a lot. I don't know how it even popped up, but starting to pop up in my feeds on all my social media stuff, selling houses. Is that one of those things where it seems like to me it seems kind of shady, it seems like because they're kind of like the middleman I don't know if you've been selling a house. No, here's the thing, right. Where a broker is a middleman. Right. So you can go directly to a lender, like a bank and get a home loan. Right. Or you can go through a broker like us, who works with all of the major brokers through the country, are the major lenders to the country and can shop rates for you. Right. So there's a lot of in between positions. It's kind of like any corporate there's like these middle management people. So wholesaling is very much like that. What wholesaling does is their skill set is that they know investors. That's their skill set, really. Right. So what they do is they find a property before an investor can find a property and they pick it up and then they sell that contract to an investor and they get to keep the in between money. Right. Because there's just not enough time, especially when you get to that level of investing. There's not enough time to go to every house. There's not enough time to look at every deal. And so they found a niche. Right. It's a tough gig because you have to find properties that have you have to get it such a low rate that you can make money off it and the investor will make money off of it. So it's a nice way to go. And you don't need a real estate license to do it, which is nice. But again, there's a skill set there. There's a networking group you need to have in place. You have to be able to offload it pretty quickly. You're going to be eating it. And so, yeah, that's one of those things where it seems like people jump into it because they know they can make money, but they don't realize how hard it is. Actually, real estate is very much like that. There's this big thing that 20% of Realtors do 80% of the business. And I'm still relatively new. I'm only a couple of years into real estate. So my technical position is vice President of development. And so my background is very heavy in media. So I run our media side, Orbit Media, and then we have a real estate brokerage and a home loan brokerage. And so I am in all three of those. I have my real estate license. I have my home loan license. I mostly do home loans, but I do all of that because I do the business development for us. I help with that business development with my broker. Right now I'm working on our website. So I'm turning our website from, let's say like 20 pages into 180 pages. Right. So that's the SEO development on the back end for the media side. So I have a pretty good knowledge base, and I've been in it long enough. And I have a business sense because I had a business and I've been working since I was 15. There are so many people that are bad at real estate. There's so many people that are going to screw you over or you're going to lose money or whatever because they don't know how to do their job or they're not competent or they're not willing to ask or they don't have resources. Right. That's just the reality. And it's really bad because this is a huge purchase. This is a huge purchase. And you could be leaving a lot of money on the table if you work with the wrong people. And this is what I mean by like we put all of our Realtors in a position to be successful. So the hardest thing and I'm sure you can relate to this is when you have to do a job because you absolutely need money now. Right. That puts you in a really bad position because even if you are an ethical and good person, you might have to do something a little shady because you need money to survive. Right. So at our brokerage, we don't charge any additional fees and we cover a lot of stuff. And then on top of that, we do our media in house. So we will cover all of your media for like properties and all of that stuff. So literally we don't make a dime. We actually lose money on every realtor until they make money. Right. The reason we do that and I don't want to get off on a tangent on this, but the reason we do that and this is kind of part of my ethos of life is that we want people to enter the job and build a career from a position of being okay right now from a pace of panic. Because a lot of these places, they charge up to $$500 to $1,000 a month just to be under their brokerage. You're not making any money. So you might spend 6000, $3,000 in your first six months and have made no money because the average realtor takes nine months to make a deal. Right. By then you might just be have made no money. And so that's the sort of thing that we're attacking. That's the sort of way that I live my life is how can I make everybody else's life better? How can I make things a little more streamlined? How can we do this in a way that's actually best for our customers but still services you? Because you need to put food on your table and support your family. Right. And it's very difficult to do it from that way. It's very costly upfront on our end. But ultimately, if we can create a space for anybody that works under you where they're being treated correctly, I think you're going to get a higher productivity out of everybody. Right? Yeah. Jump into doing because that's kind of a good segue because I've seen some of your podcasts before, I listened to them and I think it was on your hard money. One actually, where I think it was you talking you had talked about kind of investing in a person, essentially, that you hire. Can you come in ten minutes earlier? When you hire somebody, you're basically seeing your family. Yeah. That's such a tough thing to do. Right. So I'll be very quick about this kind of my background. Right. Because a lot of people aren't going to understand why I approach business the way that I do. It's very unorthodox. And I'm by no means like a great success. I would say that I'm still what you would consider like middle class. But from where I started, that's winning. Right. So from the time that you knew me from junior high and high school, I lived in a group home with five other kids. Right. Essentially, I was award of the government. And so the statistics for graduating high school is only like 25% of foster youth graduate from high school. Right. Only like 1% go to College and graduate College, obviously less than that go to a higher degree after that. Right. Granted, getting a degree no longer means we're probably our generation before us was the last generation where that makes sense now. It's very like it's up in the air. I got to be super strategic about it. But while we were in that position, it was very much like if you want to be successful, you probably should still go to school, especially if you grew up in foster care. That's one of the reasons I was so competitive and so driven in high school with sports and academics. And I was class President in our senior year. And I did all of that because I wanted to put myself in a position to learn stuff, to be in the mix and become advantageous. Right. But because I've come from a place that's very like if there's a starting line, I'm like 10ft behind that starting line. And that's the reality of going into out of the system and being on your own. Right. So when I was in College, I was homeless three times while in College. And granted, I was very lucky because I was in a fraternity. A lot of my fraternity brothers took me in, let me crash on the couch. No money, like help feed me. I was very lucky in that sense. And I did have some extended kind of my best friend. I don't know if you remember Jake Pino. He was in our class, but his family is kind of my extended family now. And so I have resources, but it's so amazingly tough to have really no resources, no money reserves, nobody to fall back on. And so that was kind of my experience going through College is I had to work two jobs through my tenure. I went to Sac State. I ran seven clubs, one of them being President of my fraternity and then President of IFC for two years, which looks over all the fraternities, but I use it every aspect of what College is. Right. And I think that's where a lot of people are failing these days is they go, well, I'm just going to go to College, and especially Saturday with a commuter school. And I went there, they go to school, they leave. Right. I didn't do that. I started clubs. I joined clubs. I worked on campus and off campus. I made a lot of friends with athletes, and I took full advantage of every opportunity. But it came out of sacrifice, right. I mean, there was a lot of times where I went a couple of days without being able to eat. And that's tough to do when you have to prioritize working and doing these other things to make you successful instead of prioritizing having food on your table, that's really tough. And that's kind of the role that you take as a foster youth. You just have to do these things that a lot of people don't really understand. And that was kind of it. Right. It was a big sacrifice, but I felt like that was going to pay off. And I graduated at that state. It took me a little bit longer than most, but I did it. And then I went to grad school, and again, that took me a little longer than most, but I did that. And while I was doing that, I was continuing to build my work experience. Right. Like I said, I started working when I was 15. I was a lifeguard. I got my first management job when I was 18, and I kind of just kept doing that any job that I had. My goal was to go from where I was to a manager, from where I was to a manager. Right. And I was pretty relatively successful that. But again, you're always coming from a place of behind, and that's been my journey most of the time. But it's been really fun in the way that I have to engage in so many other things that now I feel like so well versed on a lot of stuff. As I'm finally settling down into a little bit of comfort, it feels really good, right. To know these things, to feel confident and my time is finally worth what I think it is. And I think that's the big struggle for a long time. When you're learning a trade, you're learning a skill set, you're getting an education. It's so hard to place what is my time worth, right? Yeah, I guess, like, when you're hearing your story, I didn't know you were in a group home or anything like that even back then. Like, I think of your story kind of reminds me of my dad's because he grew up in the projects, like, really rough childhood. He's always grinded. He's the hardest working person I've ever met. Thinking about, like, I remember you in junior high school very sociable, outgoing person. And it seems like, yeah, I was lucky, right, too. There's a lot of luck into this because I've always been naturally extroverted. I've always been pretty, like a nice person. I don't really want to have beef with anybody. And the one thing I always like, thank God I was athletic, right? I could pretty much, because in my time of going to school, I went to 21 different schools, and I always was the new kid. And the number one thing that saved me was being athletic, right? So I remember the same thing happened at fucking Ross. I remember this. I went and the first day I wanted to play basketball, and I got picked last, and the next day I got picked, like, probably in the top five because you always got picked first. And then a couple of other guys who were out there who were pretty good. But I became one of the main guys, and that's pretty much what I did at every school. Football, kickball, Tetherball, basketball. I could go out and I can compete. And I worked hard. And that's unfortunately, a lot of kids that grow up in foster care, they're not sociable, and they don't get a lot of interactions to do that. And I think that's part of why they fail in life, unfortunately. But yeah, I was really lucky, and I was lucky that most people were pretty nice in Houston, right? They were very welcoming. And so that was a cool experience. When I think of sports, specifically, my dad, he played every sport you could growing up. His father grown up. He just had his mom and eight other siblings. So kind of the same thing. Like a scrap of food was like, man, I remember growing up, if you're not going to eat your dinner, he like, flip. You don't throw away food. But, like, here in his story and hearing yours, sports was a great outlet because he's also very social. My dad, everybody talks to him. He's very, like a welcoming person. Like, if you're a stranger, you can kind of come up to him and he'll just strike up a conversation, right? All the time. He'll go out to eat. When I'm up there and you'll see the waiter or waitresses name Tags like, hey, how are you doing? Say their name, and they're like, oh, they get excited and they start talking to them. Nobody ever notices them. That's like, one level above me. That's why I would love to be there, because I admire those people so much, because they are the best salespeople, because they can just talk to anybody and people just like them. And I'm a likable person, but I'm not like, how's it going today, Marty? Like, you're killing it and cleaning the tables, you know what I mean? But there are people that are just. They are like that, and they're amazing. Like, to me, they're some of the best people because they're just generally nice people. They just really like to know people. And that's amazing. Yeah. Because you hear like stories like yourselves. And I think of Josh Jacobs on the Raiders who grew up in the car. He was homeless. I mean, I don't know that I didn't really experience, I guess, poverty until I got out of the Navy was really at a tough stretch. I didn't have a job living in cockroaches and everything on our food. That was like the first sense of, Holy crap, I got really something. But you hear stories of like yourself. And I think my dad and Josh Jacobs, that's where I have admiration for him, really pulling yourself out of your situation, because a lot of people, I think, can fall, like, victim to that situation. Looking in, obviously, like I think of my dad. He saw, like, his friend die when he was a kid growing up in the projects. And I think it's really easy for him to say, I'm not going to do schoolwork, I'm not going to play sports. I'm going to hang out with my buddies and get in trouble and blow off school. And that's where I have admiration for folks like yourself, because I'm fortunate enough to have had both my parents and they're still together. That's extremely rare going up. But I think at the same time, luckily, my dad had that path growing up because it feeds that level of hunger. Still, like I was saying, the whole throwing away food. No, I don't throw away food ever. I'm like, no, dude, you got to eat your food. It's good, especially with the rising food prices right now. So it's a good practice to have. But yeah, man, it's really tough. But essentially I did College. I did grad school. I kept working. I went to grad school for medium public relations. And my undergrad was in organizational communication. And so I have developed a really strong sense for business development as a whole. And so I started doing consulting work for that. And funny enough, I actually wanted to join the military. I spent probably the better part of two and a half years training to join the Marines. I wanted to be a scout sniper. I was very passionate about. I know that's why it's such a douchebag thing, because everyone's like, oh, yeah, I want to be a sniper in the Marines. But I was like 100% committed to that cause. And I dedicated all of my free time that I wasn't doing everything else to learning, like reading the Scout sniper manuals, doing weird shit like snail crawls. And I learned, like, weird metrics because when you're in other countries and you know this, they know the average height of a telephone pole, and then they know the average size of a person, and they can calculate the distance based off of that. Right. And so I learned all of this really weird shit that I have no use for right now. And I was training, and at the time, I was doing wrestling, and I messed up my back. And essentially they're like, you have this lower back disc issue. And I was like, well, there goes that dream, right? I also met when I was lifeguarding, I met this Scout sniper who had come to swim at the pool. And I saw he had a Hog's tooth on. And it was like seeing a celebrity for me, dude. I jogged over there, and I was like, hey, are you in the Marines? Like, are you a cyber? And he's like, how do you know that you have the hog coupon? And he's like, he's like, oh, no. I was telling him what I wanted to do. And he's like, you're in College? And he's like, he told me straight out, he's like, if you joined the Marines and you do that, you're a freaking idiot. He's like, you have a College degree, you don't go in and do that. And he's like, you would be stupid to do that. And that didn't ever change my mind because I'm kind of hard headed, but I just remember that conversation. But to your point, right? Like, there's going to be all of these adversities, there's going to be these things that happen in your life, right? Being homeless, I remember countless amount of days where I had to stay up three or four days in a row with no sleep to get work done. I went to College with no computer, no laptop. Nobody fucking told me that I needed one. And so I was like, struggling, dude. For the first couple of months I was there. How do I get this work done? It wasn't as many resources as there are now, but I graduated. I went to grad school. I kept working. And then I moved back to the Central Valley for 18 months where Jake was having a kid, his sister was having a kid, her cousin was having a kid. And so I kind of moved back. I spent time with family. I worked out there and non profit. I kept coaching. I coached for twelve years, so wrestling and swimming. And then I got a job back in Sacramento. And that's around the same time I met my wife. Very lucky because she's from England. And so it was a very kind of weird meet up. And I started a business with one of my fraternity brothers, and we started a renewable energy gym. So I was helping him build that at the same time that I was working for the Boy Scouts. And because I'm so obsessively driven with metrics and being the best, I was working 8100 hours weeks for the Boy Scouts, and I was doing the business on the side, and I was maintaining the relationship with my wife. And it was tough because you're putting everybody's kind of priorities over your own self. Yeah, it was really tough. And this is where, like, your friend who was talking about the value of time. I did not learn the value of time until I got done working there. Right. Because I've always had to be the type of person that would work as much as I possibly could to even get not ahead, just to get where I could survive. Right. And so I finally have, like, a decent salary job. I had some time to where I live, right around the corner from our gym. We're building. We're getting a lot of traction with the gym because we were the first renewable energy gym in the country. And so we were winning awards. We're on the news globally. We had partners in different parts of the world. We had about 20 people that wanted a franchise. We were going to Portugal. We won the National Hispanic Chamber of Commerce award. Just like all this stuff. It was crazy, man. But it just takes a toll, all of this stuff. Right. And I was doing all of that. And while I was doing that, I was in Rotary. I joined ECB, which is kind of like a drinking tribute group to America in California. It's very popular in the Valley. I'm in the Freemasons. I've been in the Freemasons for eight years. And so I do all of these extra things as well because I understand how important it is to stay involved with your community. Right. And then I kind of accidentally laterald into the real estate industry because I had thousands of dollars of equipment. I had developed a skill set over ten years of knowing how to work audio equipment, videography, photography, how to do everything that's a Tempest without including editing. But I wasn't using anything. And so I talk to my broker, and I just asked them, can I have coffee with you and talk to you? And this is where taking advantage of opportunity is extremely important and just putting it out there. And I just asked him, like, is there a market for this or is it over saturated or whatever? And he pretty much told me like, well, you're actually lucky because I'm looking for somebody to bring on because I need to develop this in our company. Right. And I had an opportunity to look and just photos that you see on some of these houses are terrible. The videos are terrible. And that's just how it is sometimes. I was like, okay, it seems like there could be some money made here. And then he's like, you should get your real estate license. And I was like, all right, I'll do that. So I spent six months getting my real estate license. Then he's like, you should get your loan license. And I spent another six months doing that. Right. And I was still kind of doing this, getting my real estate license while I was working for the Scouts. So it's really tough because we're doing that was the gym still going on during the gym, still going on to work for that, and all of it was going on. The interesting thing, me and my buddy, who I worked with where he's like my best friend, we both work for the Scouts, but he's a little further north of me. We'd always talk to us, not to anybody else. We would talk shit about everybody because I locked out. I came into the Boy Scouts is broken up into councils, and those councils are in regions, right? So we're like in the Western region and there's like the northwest region and whatever. Right? So our Council is one of the strongest councils. Sacramento Council is one of the strongest councils in the nation. So I had a really strong team. I had an extremely strong CEO and vice President, all of these guys, really strong volunteer base. So I came into a great situation. And the person who had my job had got promoted in the company, which is very rare. So he was there, too. And my first year, I essentially finished number one in my company in my Council, which means I was in the top percent nationally. Right? And in my second year, I went off, dude. I went like, you never seen somebody so obsessed with their job, right? I went off. And everything in the Boy Scouts is metric. Everything. And so you know exactly how you're doing. You know what your performance is. That's how they decide. And so I got them to promote me six months early, then six months earlier than the minimum that they asked people to stay before the promoter. Right? So I got me and my buddy promoted early, and then I finished in the top ten in the country for what I did. And that's out of probably around 2000 people at the time, somewhere around there. And I was doing that while I was doing the gym. And so once we had time to breathe, we would always laugh, like, look at these idiots can't even do that. I'm doing this, and I'm doing that. Right. But that's the sort of thing I just had to do because of how I grew up, right? I was like, I have to do this. I have to do that. And that's how life is. Sometimes you're in these bad situations, maybe you're not where you want to be. And sometimes you just put your head down and you don't even think about everything you need to do. You say, what do I need to do right now? And you do it. What's the next thing? You do it. And if you do that, you find a way to get into a room with that. You'll be successful, right? You'll just get it done. You'll either get to a point where you realize this is impossible, which I haven't reached that point yet, or you say, I can do better at this and you achieve, right? But yeah, I did all of that. So I was like, all right. But again, I was working 100 hours a week because it was so hard and my body started to break down. Dude. I started to have these really bad chronic feed issues that still continued now that I'm still trying to fix because I prioritize everything except for health. And I owned a gym and I was at the gym. Right. So that's the irony of the whole thing, right. It's like being so physically unhealthy. But owning a gym, that's what's crazy, because that's what it sounds like. You're constantly running around. I mean, if you're working those crazy 80 plus hours at one place and juggling three other things at once, like you're not obviously the sleep where they say 7 hours is the minimum. I think now there's nine, which is I don't know how people sleep their days over by that point. Yeah. Prioritizing everything else. And then you're not getting because I have a mindset, too. If I can get 5 hours of sleep, I think I'm very good. I can function on 5 hours of sleep. Yeah. The healthiest thing to do, I do eight now. I used to do three to five. That was like a standard. But I do eight now because my priority now is working smarter. Right. So I'm forcing myself where if I used to work twelve hour days, I asked myself, realistically, could I turn that 12 hours into an eight hour day? Right. And then I asked myself, can I turn that eight hour day into a six hour day or four hour day? And that's what the new skill set I'm trying to develop for myself is how hard can I work in those hours to actually get work done so I can buy back my own time, right? Yeah. I think that's kind of the goal because I've seen that on I've seen a number of people talk about that. The funny thing is the first time I heard about basically optimizing your day that goes on Coward one day I listened to the show and he's like, I think he said, you sleep for 6 hours, you got 18 hours to say you work eight to 12 hours. We're going to do with the rest of that time. You could do all these other things. He's like, that takes another 34 hours. So you have like 2 hours say to yourself or free time where you're going to do with those 2 hours? Are you going to bullshit it away? Essentially? Are you going to play video games? You're going to do something that's not useful, like you're not investing those 2 hours into yourself. And then kind of like, I think picking up what you're saying, you invest those 2 hours and then eventually at 2 hours now you have 4 hours of free time, because now you're freeing up. You're trying to do certain things in a certain amount of time and you get better at it, too, right? Yeah, right. Eventually, this podcast will take you less time to produce because you have the skill set developed now. Exactly. Well, that's what stops putting the last one together. It's been such a long time since I've done it. I cannot figure out how to edit my videos anymore. What's going on? Yeah, I have to do that sometimes. I have to go back and like YouTube a video on how to do a certain function in Illustrator or whatever. But, yeah, dude. So essentially I did that. He was like, hey, come over, right? And I hung my real estate license with him, and I was helping a couple of people out. I brokered my own house during the peak of the pandemic, got my wife into a house, and then I helped a couple of other people out. And while we were doing that, our home loan side had a ton of business, like, a lot of business. And he's essentially like, would you want to come work for me and do this? Become a loan processor? And I pretty much asked him, like, how much you're going to pay me? I was like, I can't make anything less than what I'm making now because that's how my budget is set up, right? And essentially, he told me, like, this is what the business is going to look like. I'm going to get paid a salary plus Commission. And it was kind of a leap of faith. I called my wife, literally, this is how it went down. I went to his office to meet him for something. He's like, hey, can you do this? And I was like, I had that conversation with him about money. And then I was like, let me call my wife. So I literally right there. I called my wife and I was like, hey, would you be comfortable with me doing this? She said, if that's what you want to do, do it. And I said, all right. And then she knew him as well. So it kind of made it a little easier. And then I literally got off that call. I called my boss and said, hey, I'm putting in my two weeks. And he was like, they were like, so surprised because I was killing it out there, right? Obviously, they thought like, oh, this guy's going to be a career person, right? And I was like, I'm putting in my two weeks notice, and I had this opportunity. I got recruited, and I'm going to take it, right? So I did that. And then in my first year, I got my loan license as well. So I can process or I can originate loans on my own and not just be the processor, right. And it gives me a much deeper understanding of the functionality of all three businesses. So when we do bring on new people, I can coach them, right? So I've been doing that, and my wife and I are building our own online education platform where we're we will start with loan origination. And essentially the hope is that we will be able to branch into other sectors that require certifications to be employed. Right. And the general idea is that most people don't remember how to study. Right. Most people are like out of school for a while. Even if they went to College, probably still for a while, they don't know how to study. So it makes it that much harder. Even though the content is not super hard, they forget how to do that. So we're designing this to make it a little bit easier on them. And I can't get too much into it because it's still in development. But the idea is to essentially give the power back to the consumer so they can enter into a field that can make them more money. That's what I'm trying to do. That's everything we do is how do we help people? How do we solve that problem? Right? That's the problem. And you solve the problem and you make money and you help people. So I do Lo, I do real estate, I do media. And my wife and I are building this business. And then in my free time, I do long range shooting. I was going to say free time, but yeah, I've seen some of your videos. You guys are both of you are shooting how much you're doing? I'm like, God, where do you find even well, that's another one of my skill sets that I'm trying to learn. Right. Is leisure is a privilege, right? Yeah, that's the truth. And I had a shit ton of fun in College, don't get me wrong. But true, leisure, when you're in the workforce is pretty tough to come by where you're not thinking about your work and things like that. And like I said, I wanted to be in the Marines. I wanted to shoot. I was deeply passionate about that. And I thought this was probably the best way to go. Right. So I built a custom rifle. Granted, I didn't actually build the components, but I did put it together myself. I'm learning how to shoot 1000 yards and be tactical about that. And I hope to get into PRS shooting and maybe someday F class shooting. And so my broker, who's extremely hard working, we're very similar. He kind of mentioned that. He's like, you got to have a hobby, man. He's like, if you don't have a hobby, you have no joy in life. You can't just work all the time. You can't focus everything on making money. And I'm trying to learn that right as I get older, because for my entire life, the only thing that mattered was making money, because I didn't have it. Right. And it's easy to say money doesn't matter when you have a lot of it. When you don't have much, it's pretty like this is the most important thing in the world. That's very true. Yeah. So that's where I'm at right now. We're trying to build we feel like the magic number and how we want to live our lives, how we want to retire, and how we want to invest is $300,000 a year. That's what we think of living in California with inflation and living where we live. We feel like that's the magic number. Right. That we need to make between the two of us in our household. So if we can build something kind of the same way you are, if you can build a podcast that brings in an extra $10,000 a year. $5,000. $1,000 a year. Right. That's a huge difference. And a lot of people, they think too big and they don't realize that. Let's say, for instance, your water bill, $1,000 would probably cover most of your water bill for the year. Yeah. That's a significant amount of money towards some smaller bills. Anything, dude. But then that's how I approach a lot of the extra things I do. I don't do it very often anymore because one, it's really expensive for businesses to do it and most businesses just can't afford it. But consulting work, right? So I just got one of my friends back from the Valley was like, hey, there's this guy, he needs help on his business. So I went, I met with them with my wife. We talked for 3 hours. And essentially I was like, look, the things that you want are really expensive. Let me do this for you and I will help you out. Right. So with my education, with my experience, the price range for my skill set is about $200 an hour. Right. So I did this project for him and it took about 30 hours to do. Right. But I didn't charge him that. I charged him about $50 an hour because I liked the guy. Because I understand that with COVID, people are in a situation right now and that's enough money for me. And that's where when I start to talk about the ethical part of how I do business, there's a level of greed. Right. It's like, do I need $1,500? Like an extra $500 is a lot of money, right? Do I need $3,000? And a lot of people will say, well, you're an idiot. If he'll pay you $3,000, take $3,000. Right. But that's just not how I like to do business. I like to go above and beyond for people. I like to build long lasting relationships and I like to look at the actual value of what I'm doing and price it out that way right now to get a marketing consultant to run social media for you. And I was just looking and it's freaking crazy. 20 posts a month, right? 20 posts a month. They're charging $$3,000 to $8,000. Holy. Yeah. To do 20 posts a month. That's crazy. That's crazy. 20 posts a day. Yeah, exactly. Right. And I understand that the skill set of understanding how to do this business is there. And I get there's like this price range, but that's just pure greed. That's what that is, right? Like, that's so much, especially with all of the systems that we have automated all of the program. It's not like you have to go into Adobe now and create all of this stuff from scratch. There's all these platforms that can do that, right? So that's how I approach everything. And that's where I've been for a really long time is I've kind of got out of that phase in my life where I finally have reached that phase in my life where I'm not foster care. Right. A foster care kid. Because it's like in my mind, I always said I have to make enough money, so I'm middle class. I'm where everybody else would be, right? And that's where I wanted to be. And that's a level of comfort. And so I'm finally at that level of comfort in my life. And that's another challenge in itself, right? Because really only success comes out of difficulty. And once you start to feel comfortable, you're kind of like, this is pretty nice, but Luckily I still got a little bit there. But that's where I've been for such a long time. And now that I'm there and now that I've surrounded myself with people who are much more successful than myself and are much more rich than me and much, I don't want to say happier, but they're happy as well. I'm starting to realize these other things that you bring up, right? Time is value, wealth, health is wealth. Doing things that you're passionate about that can actually make you money. That's where I'm at in life now. And I think you hit, like, on a thing. Like, in my industry, I basically work in sales, like Project Manage. I used to work at a competitor, and then the company I work out now basically recruited me kind of the same deal, more money. I got promoted my first four months there. Damn everything I wanted from my previous company that I was looking for. When I get to busting my ass off and it's like, okay, I'm not reaping any sort of benefits from working hard. Literally. They're opposite sides of the freeway in the same exact industry, which is wave at them with your new Apple Watch, you're like, what's up? What's up? What I can afford now, you should have paid me. But the good thing is my previous company was a family owned company, so it was very relationship driven. Especially my mentor over there. He'd been there for like 15 years, number one in sales, like doing $2 million a month in Salesforce. We did underground utility work, like Manholes vaults, stuff like that. There would be like PG and E stuff up in NorCal, underground utility work. And he's very customer driven. He bite the bullet on a PO or on a quote saying, hey, you know what? I can take off shit off $10,000 on this massive job. But guess what? They come back. They're going to keep coming back and keep coming back. So if you're talking about the relationship aspect of it is that you're also investing not only the exact moment, the first gain of money that you're going to get, but the long term relationship. I just literally ran into that this week with my current company. If we sent something out, I had to break it up, this one piece of concrete into multiple pieces because they were holding up their job. And our dispatchers like, hey, our freight is supposed to be $800, but you charge them like 425. I'm like, well, I split it because if I don't do that, we're going to get back. Right. Also investing in them, like they don't have an account with us yet. But now I've been over backwards. I'd rather lose 425 right now for $125 and gain another $20,000 purchase rate. Right, exactly. And I think that's what you're learning right there. Or maybe you've already learned that's what a career salesperson is. Right. That's the problem, too. There's an overwhelming amount of people who are in sales who are not career sales people. Right. People who are career sales. I always think, do you remember King of the Hill? Yeah, Hank's a career sales guy for Propane. Right. That's his whole thing. He's like, I talked to him, I treat them nice, I show them everything. And if they want to go and let them go, because then they come back and they buy. And I have a customer for life. Right. And a lot of people that are in sales don't understand that because they're looking for a quick buck. They're impatient and things like that. But the people that are successful, they build relationships, and that's a lot harder to do now, especially in the last two years with COVID and networking has pretty much gone out the door for a lot of things. But it's getting better. But that's the truth. Right. You're learning that. Anybody who starts to get into sales type starts to learn that. And hopefully you have a business behind you that supports that. Right. And this is where it becomes very difficult. We're having a conversation if we're trying to bring value to your viewers. Right. We're having this conversation of, I think the average person stays at their job right now, like nine months, and then they move to a new job. Right. So it's huge. It's much different than these, like our parents who would have been lifelong people at their company or maybe would have moved once or twice ever. Right. And it's very tough for me to have this conversation because as a previous business owner and then as a person who is an employee that worked for a nonprofit who gave 100 hours a week of his time, I understand and recognize both perspectives. Right. If you're not being paid for what your value is and you understand that you're bringing in more money and they're not helping you at all, then, yeah, you got to kind of go. But from the business standpoint, a lot of small businesses probably like that family run business you have. Right. It's kind of like, well, they're just trying keep in mind, majority of business that's in California a small business. It's not large business. Right. It's like 90% of business in California is small business. So it's tough to see it from both perspectives because you're like, well, if you're a small business, it's like, I built the business. I took on all the liability, all the responsibility. I pay you guys money. I did this because I don't want to be like an employee. I want to have a big house. I want to have a nice whatever. Right. And I understand that. I totally respect that. But then on the other side, you're an employee and you're like, well, I see you drive $100,000 truck and I'm driving this piece of crap that's like I can barely make it to work every week. So it's such a tough place to be. But all I can say is do what's best for you, but try to do it with some Grace. Right? Like try to do what's good for you. That's the world we live in. And if you don't, you're going to be in a tough spot. But if you can help others in the process, then do that. And that's just how I kind of try to live my life, and I try to have that balance. It's not always possible, but that's a good example. Right. And I had this conversation with one of my guys. They might actually be on one of my old podcasts. We talked about our gardener. Right. And this stems very deep into religion, into politics. And I don't want to get into that necessarily. But we have this gardener, we move into our house, right. And he essentially is mowing the lawn. I don't know this guy. And I was like, hey, are you the owner? I hadn't met the owner or anything. And he was like, oh, no, I do a couple of laundry. This old guy, I do a couple of laundry on here. And I was like, oh, well, how much do you charge? He's like, I charge $50 a month, right. And in my head, I was like, all right, let's do that. I don't have to do any of it. Perfect. I tell my wife and I was like, $50 a month. So we're like, okay, cool. And I just assume he's going to come once a month and mow our lawns, right? So he's coming every week. Every week he's mowing our lawn. And then on top of that, he's taking our trash cans out and he's doing our back and mowing our back, and he's blowing and he's blowing and he's weeding and he's like, hey, do you want me to fertilize your lawn and do all this shit, right? More than $50 worth of work. Yeah, more. Way more than $50 worth. So we have this conversation, right. And I think this if any of you take anything away from this podcast, this is a great conversation. What is the ethical thing to do, right? You have this guy coming who's clearly old and retired. He just wants some extra money. And so do you exploit them? Right. So kind of like immigrant workers, do you exploit them? Do you say, well, he decided on $50. He's giving me $200 of value a month. Right. And that's just the way it is. Or do you make a decision and say, I'm going to pay him the value he does or I'm going to pay him more because he does. And that's what every employee would want. Pay me more than what you said. You're going to pay me because I'm doing such a great job, right? Yeah, I've been there. I wanted that too. And so we had that conversation between my wife and I, she's from the UK. So she has a different perspective. And I said, hey, this is a good opportunity to understand what it is to be an American and start to develop this political sense of making a decision. And so we pretty much settled on we're going to pay them more right now. We also had conversations with him and essentially told him like, hey, this doesn't need to be done. This can be done to try to cut some of it back. Right. And then we pay him more. And we've done that since the second month we lived here. We made that decision as a family that if someone works hard, they should be paid fairly for the work that they do. Right. And on top of that, he does such a great job. We've hired him on for four or five other projects on our house because he's super handy. Right. That's great. So this is kind of a mindset into when you're looking to run your own business, how do you run that? Do you exploit people? Do you pay them fairly? Do you pay them above? Right. In and out is a good example of that. They've always paid their employees above what other fast food chains pay them. Right. And look at them now. They're like one of the highest regarded and best service fast food chains. And so these are the skill sets that I'm trying to learn now, right. It's how to condense my time, how to be more cognizant of what I'm doing, putting a lot more priority on health. And I'm doing that. And I can do that because I grind and I have all the skill sets now for the most part to do that. But I still challenge myself to learn. Right. And I think that's the key thing is never stop learning. Never stop growing. Keep educating. I want to learn how to speak Spanish, which I don't learn how to. My wife is Indian and speaks Punjabi. I want to learn how to speak that. I'd like to have a basic understanding of coding. Right. So I have these goals. And keep in mind, until I bought my rifle, almost everything I ever bought was if I couldn't make money off of it, there was no reason to buy it. Right. Outside of a television and Guitar Hero at some point, right. That's how I always functioned, was if I can't make money off the ingredients, I'm trying to make money off the shooting. It's very tough, though. Very tough. But, yeah, that's where I'm at. And I think we could have a five hour conversation about the intricacies of how to frame success, how to be happy mindset. There's all of these things that we're not one dimensional people. We have all of these outside influences that make us determined and make us want to succeed in life. And we tell ourselves, what does that success look like? And so there's no way to do like a podcast that says this is what success is. But I can honestly say if you can feed yourself and your family, you guys can keep the roof on and you can get out of which is the most critical part, not living paycheck to paycheck, right? You have to get out of that. If you're in that, you have to get out of that and you have to get rid of your credit card debt. If you can get out of that, that's where happiness starts for me, all right? If you can get there, that's where happiness starts. Having no debt. That's like one of the biggest things my wife and I ever did. We consolidated loan all of our debt years ago. When we paid it off, it's like, Holy crap, our cars are paid off now. We even paid off the loan. So it's like all we really got is our house and student loans that will never go away. It seems like, dude, I'm right there too. That's another thing about growing up in foster care is you do get a lot of your schooling paid for, but you get none of grad school paid for. Zero. So grad school. I got one year paid for because I was a student assistant, but the other year cost me 70 grand. I'm guessing they assume, oh, you've already went to College. You're probably guessing, yeah. They don't see like higher education as, I don't know, they just don't really give help with that. It's very rare. But either way, yeah, student loans. But you're right, consolidating your debt is so huge and working together to pay that debt off. And my goal is to have my student debt paid off in the next five to ten years, have my mortgage paid off in the next ten years. And so we'll pay it off essentially, like twelve years early, I guess, something like that. And there's a lot of people out there that are going to be like, you're an idiot. That's stupid. You can put that money to better use. There's ways to do that. But if you can have no debt, you come from a place to screw you. That's the thing. Like, I don't care. I don't care. I'm giving a shit. Screw you. It does not matter. You don't have that. And that is such a strong place to be. And peace of mind is so important right there's. These guys, they're like, they're multimillionaires. They're like, that's a dumb way to spend your money. But the majority of people just want to not have the rigor more of stress of living paycheck to paycheck to having this overwhelming debt over their head. Yeah. We joked about my wife and I had our house is paid off just to get, like, health insurance and some of the basic necessities pay like your regular gas and electric bill, like a full time job. I've worked at Home Depot and Lowe's before, but it's like, damn, I just do that again. Just flip around, make $20 an hour or whatever. It is $18 at that point. You're just enjoying it. There's no stress of like, oh, my God, you got to pay this $2,000 mortgage. And we got $1,000 worth of childcare every month. Plus all the now gas is like $7. $6. Yeah. It's crazy. That stress level would dissipate a little bit, I think. But in like ten years, we're going to look back at this podcast when you're super famous and we're going to be like $6. That was Hecky cheap. It's $15 a gallon. Now. My whole theory with gas is like, they always Jack it up. So when it's like $3, they slowly bring it to four and they'll bring it back to three. So you kind of remember, you're like, oh, man, now it's cheap. And then they go into five and then they go down to four and you're like, oh, man, $4 is cheap. So the last high is always the new low. So when they do go back, you're like, oh, I have four books. Like, if we went back to $4 right now in California, I'd be like, oh, $4 ain't bad. Yeah, exactly. You're right there. But life is tough. Everybody has their own obstacles that they're going over. And I like the podcast idea you have because I think no matter who you talk to, you're going to glean something from them. And that's super critical. Right. And maybe like, for me, it's just like put your head down and grind and work. But for somebody, I know that there's a lot of people that they're very happy with the life that they have. They're making right around the amount of money they need. You see this a lot in the Valley, right? They just want to live their lives. They just want to go on one vacation a year. They want to take their kids to baseball and soccer. That's a good life for them. And so finding whatever that means for you, that's what's really important. And I'm not there. I'm 100% happy with my life, but there is still a threshold that I need to be at for me to feel like if I wasn't in foster care, this is where I would be. So once I'm there, then I'll be like, all right, this is where I would have been if I had a clean slate. And now I'm happy with that. Right? So that's good to have that internal drive. But eventually my goal is to I love coaching. So to get back into coaching and be great, to be able to afford to go out to the range every day would be pretty awesome. It's so expensive to shoot right now, man. But that would be pretty sweet. And so for me, that's what happiness looks like. And then obviously, my wife loves to travel. So being able to travel with my wife places and things like that, I mean, that's what success would look like to me. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, the level of success for everybody's, different mindset is the same deal. I will go hiking whenever I want. I'd love to wake up, have some coffee on the middle of the week on a Wednesday, and I have to open up my laptop to work. Well, I'm going to go for a hike today at 10:00 in the morning, right? I'm going to jump in a kayak and go kayaking, whatever. It is. Just no sense of time. Kind of where I want to be eventually. Because so much of what I do every day is just time driven. It's due dates and delivery times. And it's like all I ever deal with is the time and dates. And when is this going? How come this hasn't been done yet? It's like, man, it'd be nice to just wake up and not have to do that stuff. That's my end goal. I guess I'm slowly getting there. I'm finding ways to make time to do things like this podcast and other things. Maybe close the laptop at 03:00. I'm not going to sit around and wait for something to happen necessarily, and play more with my kids and stuff like that. Make those yes. I think you find ways to, like you said, prioritize and be more effective with your time. And especially like, I don't have any kids. I don't intend to have any kids. It's possible, but I don't intend to. But I understand this is one of the reasons I don't have kids. It's a commitment, right? I mean, you have brought a life into this world and you want to make them as successful and prepared for life as possible. Right. So I think that forces you to be better. It forces you either you could crumble and be like a loser dad or leaves. But if you stay and you work it out, I think that forces you to work harder and find ways to bring success into your household. Right. And I think that's really powerful. And I sometimes wonder if I did have a kid, would I maybe do life differently? And can I replicate that without having kids? Can I have that same sort of urgency and whatever. Right. But being a parent is tough, dude. I mean, I coached for twelve years and I love coaching. I love kids. But the way the kids treat their parents is way different than how they treat their coaches. Right. So you guys have it out there. They're running you through the ringers all the time. They don't care what you have going on. That's crazy. Right. But one of the things I wanted to say was when we're talking about the value of time. Right. So I took this position, and the first thing I said to myself is I want to get time back. Right. Like I can't 80 to 100 hours, 60 hours weeks. It's just an overwhelming amount for the little amount of money that I was making. It just didn't make sense. Right. So my first year and keep in mind, people can make a lot of money in real estate and home loans. Right. I'm kind of going at a much slower pace because I'm helping build a business along with doing that. Right. Not my business, the brokerage. And so I take a seat back. I'm a very patient person. But we got our WT's back. Right. Because I started in September. So I only got a couple of months, my first one, and then I got a full year. I just got it two weeks ago. And in my first year of working in this job, I made like 53 grand. So it's not very much, but I made about ten grand more than I was making with scouting. And I worked one fifth of the amount of time. Yeah. So there were times where there were weeks where I was working two, 3 hours. Right now I'm working seven days in a row. Twelve hour days to get our website going. Right. And when we start to get more clients in, I'll work more. But I made more money than I was making. And it's not like I said, 50 grand is nothing. And I recognize that. But I was making more money than I was. I spent all of my earlier time paying off debt and stuff like that. So like the same thing as you. We don't have a car bill. We don't have credit card debt, Ron. And we have a mortgage and our normal liability bills. Right. And so this is a testament to how little money you need to live comfortably. Right. Is like you don't need a million dollars, you don't need whatever. Right. Like my wife and I, we both work. We broke things and money, and we find a way to be where we are. But the most important part of that was that I got instead of working on, let's say, averaging 80 hours a week with scouting and the gym, which I'll talk about that in a second, I went down to probably an average of 25 hours a week. What is that worth? Right. To me, that was everything. And it gave me more time to focus on my health. They gave me more time to pick up a hobby. I was able to go back to the Freemasons and pick up where I left off with my friends. I was President of my Rotary Club. I got to do all of this stuff because I did that. Right. And to me, that was so valuable. And I took a step back because I could have made if I took the 100 hours that I was working and pushed it into real estate, I could have made 100, 200 in my first year. But I took a step back and I was strategic about it. And I said, I want to help build a business. Right. I want to help do that, and I value time more. So I got my time back. I'm making more money. I want and this year I'll make more money. And the next year I'll make more money, and I'm doing it that way. And to me, that's winning, right? That's winning. I get to spend a bunch of time with my dog. I get to spend a bunch of time with my wife. And I like the people that I work with, and I have flexibility. Right. I can work in anywhere in California typically. I mean, I want to be around Sacramento because that's where Matt but I already talked to my broker, and he's like, if you want to go to the UK for five weeks, go ahead. We'll find a way to make it work. Right. My wife is going to go to Chicago pretty soon, and I'll probably go with her and it's 3 hours ahead or whatever. And I'll just work from Chicago. Right. I mean, that's the flexibility. And that's where I feel like I'm winning the most. Right. It's not always just about money. And my wife has the same thing because she gets 32 days of vacation a year because the UK very much values vacation. When we went there, my wife and I went it's like it's the most leisure. Like we went all over Europe. It's the most leisure. Yeah. They value family. They value home time. They value all of that. Right. Like her dad, when he closes his laptop, that's it. Don't talk to him the rest of the day about work because that's it. He worked his hours. Right. But we have this conversation because she's a data scientist. And right now there's this huge push in the Metaverse for data scientists so they're giving huge bonuses, $50,000 bonuses. They're paying people 400 to 400, $500,000 to come over to their teams, right? Like Apple, Facebook, Google, all these places. But I told her, you can never go to a job that won't match your vacation, right. It doesn't matter how much money you make. If you don't get the same amount of vacation, you won't be able to see your family, you won't be able to travel, you won't be able to do any of those things. And this is that trade off that you start to understand when you're older, Especially if you have a family, is how do I start to buy back my own time? And that might be by creating a secondary income source like you're trying to do or becoming a manager and getting somebody working under you that can take those responsibilities or just getting so efficient at your job that you can do an eight hour job in 4 hours, right? Yes, exactly. Even for me currently with my current job, that's essentially where I'm heading towards. The better I get at the longer I'm in my industry, the quicker I'm getting at doing certain things. One of the funny things I'm always told from people, you know, how to talk to customers or just people in general, like in an email, like if they're emailing me or calling me, blasting me or blessing us, how come we don't have this? How can we do that? I can pull them over really easily, right. And when I first started industry, I instantly panic. I don't know how to handle this, right? It's like one of those things will get way more efficient at I know how to handle these situations now because I've dealt with them a lot more than I did previously. Unfortunately, it kind of sucks, but it still happens. And that's where when we do get new people, I tell them there's going to be times where you have such a bad call or an email, one of your jobs just go straight to hell. You're going to want to break down. You're not even thinking about just saying, F this, I'm going to quit. I want to just walk out the door and go home like that. I can't teach you necessarily how to handle that. Everybody handles those differently, but what I can teach you is how to be prepared to kind of anticipate those things Because everybody handles feedback differently than the next person next to them. So anticipating it is different. There have been times now, like, our driver calls us and it's like, oh, this is happening right now. So I'm just sitting there waiting for the customer to call me. Like, I already know it's going to happen, right? I've heard it a million times. So now I know how to handle it. It's not new or before when I first started, I didn't know what this industry was. I'm like, Holy crap. I don't know what I'm talking about. And this guy, this Inspector, is blowing me up, saying, our driver's doing this or doing that product is wrong. That's why I always stress these new people that we get the new kids. You just got to be able to shake it off also, which is hard to do in business in general. Yes, it is. Because you don't ever want anybody upset. Right. And that's like, a lot of people joke that communication degrees are like worthless degrees. Right. But the funny thing is, every single company has training on communication. Every company. Because eventually they realize that learning how to listen and learning how to communicate effectively in different group settings and with different individuals is that's what your business is? If you're in customer service. Right. Or even in your business, if communication is not flowing directly through your organization, you lose money because of that. Right. So I've always been very appreciative that I went that route. It's not originally I was a kinesiology degree originally, but when I transitioned over to communication, I was always very appreciative of that. Is that same way that you're kind of saying is being able to navigate that conversation with people. And I just had to do that. The other day. I pissed off this guy that owns a wholesale printing company. You pay, like, at market prices. And I pissed him off. And he was pretty much like, we're going to cancel your account and blah, blah, blah. And then he threw a question. He's like, how would you respond? And I just was super calm about it. I was like, look, I'm a customer service guy. I believe in doing what's best for our clients. That's how I've always functioned. And then I just kind of went backwards and I kind of broke down what he was saying. And I kind of told him like, hey, look, this is what was communicated to me. I'm not saying that's 100% correct. What I am telling you is that's what I heard. Right. And so I'm not telling you how to do your job, how to run your business or whatever it is, but this is what was communicating to me. And then we kind of worked our way back, and we both laughed it off at the end. Right. But it's like if you don't develop these skill sets makes your life a lot more tough. You lose business and things like that. And you really do have to develop that skill set as an entrepreneur, especially because your business is working with people. Right. That's what entrepreneurs just mostly is. And so you got to learn how to be personable and let things roll off your back. That kind of leads me. I know we're running real long on this. I don't want to take up all your baby time with the gym. I actually cut ties with the gym about five years in. Right. Yeah. That was a valuable business lesson for me is that you're not always going to be compatible with the people that you work with. I lost money on that deal. I lost five years of my time on that deal. But I learned a lot of important skill sets. Right. And I walked out with integrity is really the best way to put that. And that's kind of how life is. Right. Sometimes you're going to invest in certain things and it may not yield for you, but you will get something out of it. Right. I have a lot of really strong business sense from that experience and I'm not a multimillionaire like I thought I would be, which it should have been. But now I'm going to try to develop that into something new. Right. And that's just what you keep doing. You find a way to be successful, to keep trying. And hopefully at some point it would be kind of cool to call myself a millionaire. I wouldn't be upset with that. I guess that'd be alright as much as we joke about it. Yeah. Hey, I wouldn't mind. Yeah. Well for me there's a big part of me that's really like because I worked in nonprofit so long and I do all of these extra clubs is that I really have like a strong I really want to give back. So I will give back now, but not as much as I want. I give time, right. So they typically in nonprofit, they say you either give time, you give money or you give people, you bring other people. And those are like the three things and I've never had the money, so I give my time, but I'd like to be the person that can give the money. Right. That would be ideal. Right. So that's kind of like I want to help out the community. I want to help out people and I want to do my job and keep my family healthy and happy. I'd like to build I guess at some point you're kind of like I want to build some sort of Empire for myself and either pass that on or make it mean something. Right, exactly. I think the end game for myself essentially is my dad's work is both my parents worked so hard to give us like a better life than what they had, especially my dad. So I feel the responsibility. He worked his ass off for so many years. I could have these certain things given to me and opportunities available. So now I got to do the same thing. So now I can have the next level of opportunity that I didn't even have. So now they got more. It's just a continued cycle. Hopefully someday if this does take off and we're like ten years down the road and it's like Holy crap, I signed a hundred million dollar Spotify deal we're set, you know. But I think the ultimate goal too is I want them to see that as well. You got to still work for what you want, but you've got to be grateful for what you've been given to at least get the ball rolling. Like, looking back at it now, you don't really think about growing up. I never did with my parents and the things we had and then getting growing up and having the struggling aspect ourselves. My wife and I, when we were really poor, barely getting by and gained where we are now. I totally respect everything my parents went through. I'm rubbing two pennies together. There's definitely been those times throughout our life. It's a lot harder than parents always lead on conversations parents have that you're oblivious to when you're a kid. So it's like, damn, totally get it. Now, even when I go home, like I tell my dad all the time, you're the hardest working person I ever have met. And in a sense, you're kind of the American dream from Mexico as a baby, growing up in the projects and owning a house and having a family. Yeah, you're not a millionaire, but you've always had from where you started and where you are now, they're two totally different, right? Exactly. Yeah. The numbers were stacked against them to fail, in a sense. So I think being grateful for the journey, I think that's why it's so important not to judge people, because you don't know their journey. Right? Like 50 grand. 50 grand is not a lot of money in California or really in general, but I fucking had to work super hard to get to that place. And now I can charge someone $200 an hour to do a media project. I can easily make 510 grand off of that. And so I choose to do these sort of things to be in a position because I think that will build for me later. But I just think it's so important. I don't worry about what other people are doing. Granted, I'm Super driven to beat people. That's just always in my nature. So I do kind of still do that. But it's in that same mindset of, like, we're not comparing ourselves together because we have no clue where they started, what they've gone through. Same thing for us, right? Nobody knows what your life experiences. And that plays such a huge factor. And that's why I always say, now for me, the measurement is happiness. It's just like, at least if you're happy, then you've done something right. Unless you're watching one of the murder documentaries about these soda killers are happy. Maybe they haven't, but most people. Exactly. I know we watched some of those. Like, man, the 80s was a crazy time. Serial killers left and right. Dude, it's crazy. Every city. Every city had like, four of them. It's like, I have a whole theory on that, too. We can talk about that some other time, but yeah, man. So that's my life condensed into 2 hours, essentially. And hopefully I'm hoping you keep going with the podcast because I do have a huge appreciation for content developers because I've tried it multiple times. It's really tough. But I think this kind of Avenue is really good. And then it would be kind of cool to get maybe a group of us on together at some point after you've done individual people and just rile them all up. Just be like talk about like something ridiculous and get everybody's input on it. It would be funny. That's definitely something I've thought about before. It's like, man, I would love if I can get to like an episode 50. I'm not going to say if I can because I'm going to get to episode 50. That's my mindset to. It like a monumentous freaking episode. I've thought about that already. Like how many people on the Zoom call? I've looked at it. That's why I started looking at other I think you can do. I just followed. I think you do like 70 people or something. Yeah, you can almost get every single person do 50. Number 50. You get all 49 people to come back on. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That would be cool actually. Yeah, that would be super cool because then it's a good way to network too. It's like man, who knows shit, somewhere in that 49 people somebody strikes it up with somebody else and now it's like, okay, you got some business ideas or whatever it may be. It would be cool. That's the plan. Hopefully I'd watch it. You must be on it. That would be cool. Even cooler. I hope I make the cut. Dude, that Mac one really trended downwards. I don't know if we should bring that guy on, but I don't know about episode two, man. Yeah, exactly. No kidding. I really appreciate coming on and taking absolutely. That would be awesome to have you on again, whether it's in a large group or even just like this again in the future. Yes, it would be cool. These are always really interesting because it takes a lot of time to develop like a new person in their life or whatever. So it would be fun to come back on and talk about very specific stuff and just get into the nitty gritty of it would be cool. Yeah, that's kind of how I felt even with the one with John the first episode. We're doing so much BSing and catching up and reminiscing that every reason why I wanted to bring them on to Vincent originally got thrown to the wayside. Yeah, exactly. Oh man, I definitely have you on it again and get into what you're actually doing because it's far more interesting than you're living in high school for 2 hours and a half probably. But high school is amazing. I love high school. I love high school. I loved College. I love what I'm doing now. I think like I said, it's all about perspective, right? I mean, obviously not all of it was great for me, but I can look back and say I took full advantage of everything I possibly could and I enjoyed it. Yeah. I mean, exactly. Going to the military route and going to College for free took advantage of it's. Not why I joined, but it's like, hey, it's there. Yeah. You already take advantage of that VA loan for your home, dude. Oh, yeah, that's the way to go right there, dude. It is. I learned so much about VA home loans, dude, because I'm writing that website and I have like, probably like 15 pages of stuff on the VA home loans. And I'm like, dude, this is sick. That's tight. What they get to do this? Yeah, we got hooked up pretty good. I mean, you guys are putting your life on the line, so you should get significant benefits. But it's been cool to learn more about it. Yeah. It's funny because, like I've been told before from people are like, oh, man, you're lucky you got to go College for free. And it's like, well, I also started later. Also this way, like, most people go 18 to what, 22, 23 is probably when you graduate with the BA. I started College at 23 years old. I'm already like four years behind everybody else because my only job experience, like, actual career was military. So it's like I got some catching up to do. Wasn't like, I came out the gate, just guns ablaze in making 50, 60, 70K a year. It's like, man, it's almost like graduating high school at 23. Yeah. You know what? It'd be a cool business idea to do a resume template series for military because I personally feel that my old business partner is Marine. So I've had a lot of conversation with him about the military, and I personally feel that there's just not enough value put on what you do in the military. Right. Like, as your actual working job, there the skills you learn and all of that. And I think because you're in the military, you don't really learn how to do the business part of life. And so you come out and you don't know how to like, how do you take your work experience from the military and drafted into a successful resume that would get you into a job? Right. I think there's a huge market for helping the military. Our vets, that just innately because they're missing skill sets that they're just not learning in the military because they're fucking saving our lives. You know what I mean? They're like fighting the war. So definitely I would consider something that's like a nice little pivot. Right. And, you know, the lingo, that's the thing. I couldn't do it because I don't want to spend that amount of time learning the lingo. But, you know, it, you know what ranks do, what, you know, what jobs do. For the most part, you can connect people in that industry, and then you're like, okay, perfect. Like, if you were this job and this rank, you learn this skill set, and this is how it translates over to a resume. This is how you use that as practical information to get into the job market. That's a really good idea. I never thought about that. That's such a great idea. You could have that for free. Take it yours. I don't even want it. You have it. You make some millions off it. I want to cut that part out of this box so nobody else takes it. It's funny. We talk about this all the time. We have all these great ideas. But it's like, well, you only have so much freaking time, right? So just double down on what you can do and pass off the ideas that anybody else who has the time. Hell, yeah, I like that. Never thought about it before because literally I woke up the next day and I was out of the Navy. It's like, okay, well, shit. The problem is that people that don't know anything about the military, they have no clue. They just think that you went and fought or you went and did nothing. Right. So they have no way to connect either. So even if you had a pool, if you had a platform, because there's a lot of programs that they hire military vets. Right. So if you can create a platform that educates employers. Right. So one, you get employers to sign on to this program. So now you're going to get some sort of fee for that. Then you use that to build it to bring on vets. They come on, they get linked into jobs, and it bridges the gap of knowledge between an employer and a vet. And on the other side, you can translate what jobs are looking for. Right. This is how you fit into this job because of what you've done in the military. Damn. That's a good idea. Take that. I am. I'm going to hold on to that one. That's really good. Yeah. I don't know how you would do it exactly, but I think that's a fun idea. Yeah. That's something to think about, for sure. It's literally never crossed my mind before you brought it. Well, nobody does it either. That's the thing. What I'm saying is you find a problem and then you learn how to solve it. Right. And it's like, how many people are leaving the military every single day is fed. Right. All the time. And it's like there's services for them. Right. But, I mean, this would be really advantageous to be like, how do these translate over that's true. There's nothing like that that I've come across. Like, I built mine up by myself and trying to bridge that gap between what I did and what makes sense to somebody that has no clue what I did. Right. It's very difficult to do. It's very tough. Right. But that's what you do, you evaluate and that's the thing. It's a lot of work, right? Because you have to evaluate every job, every rank. You have to have a deep understanding of that for every branch. You have to bring on other branch people to do that and then once you have that, then you have to decipher. What are these? Because the people that write job descriptions, I swear to God, they're idiots. And it's like you don't know what you're saying. Stop using these $10 words for a two dollar job. Right. But yeah, I mean that would be like such a gift, I think to vets and shit. You could even sell it to the military and have them use it as a resource for there was a time when we were going to partner with some military people because we were developing renewable energy and that's a resource to military, right? Yeah, so I have a little bit of kind of knowledge base of that and I know that they buy shit, right. So I mean if you can develop a skill set to give our tools to give to, let's say the veterans Department, what is it? I totally forgot on the real estate side. But something like that, like now when you're leaving now you have something that you can give every single person to get into the job market and the good old uncle Sam is going to pay you for it. Oh yeah. Food for thought. Oh yeah. Use it. Don't use it. I don't know. It's a good one. I have to think about it. Not bad. I really do like that. Just develop it before I finish my business. Because if I finish my business and I have nothing else to do, I'd be like, remember that fucking thing? I already made it. Already. Did I have anything else to do? So I did that. That sounds good. Yeah. All right, man. I appreciate you coming on. Nice catching up and then getting a quick rundown of life since high school and a little bit before. Yeah, for sure, man. I appreciate you having me on and yeah, I want to talk to you offline real quick so I'll let you cut the video, alright.