I, I walked in the site and there was a big wall.

There you go.

Perfect.

But.

So you thought it was absolutely insane.

We were gonna buy it, but we.

I just wanted.

I just want a space that was dedicated that we could come to and kind of hang out, have people like you here and then.

And, you know, just make it feel.

I don't want to use the word man cave, like, but I want to say that I wanted to enjoy it, like, and feel comfortable, like just hanging out.

Right, right.

And.

But I also originally was the intention was to, you know, to work here too.

And now I find myself way more relaxed whenever I, whenever I come here.

I'm not doing enough.

So you don't want to work?

Yeah, yeah.

It's not, it's not what I would call hyper conducive to working because it's just super relaxing.

But I'm getting through it.

That green room concept, I like it.

A lot because it's like a place for someone who wants.

If you have a guest or someone who has a guest with them, they can hang out, kind of watch the show unfold.

And that was the idea.

Although it didn't.

It's been kind of interesting the way that that's played out whenever we have people here.

So the first time I had a guest on, in this, in the studio space was Pejmon.

He came with his wife.

Okay.

And she sat back there and watched.

And I realized that I needed quickly to find some way for them to listen with like headphones where they.

Because they're not.

Because we close the glass.

It's too quiet.

It's too quiet.

You can't really hear that well.

So what I've done is I've modified the TV that's in that room.

So if I wanted to.

To play this feed on the main camera to that room.

Speakers out of the.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you can literally hear from, from that.

That's rad.

It's not bad.

So thanks for coming, man.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, yeah.

I was, I was kind of, kind of surprised I didn't get you on earlier, but, you know, all the chatting and I've been a fan of kind of like the off road space for such a long period of time and people listen to the show know that I've built like a jeep and you know, I've always followed your content from that space.

That's awesome.

And I, I've been a fan of the show for quite a while and it's, it's surreal choices.

It's surreal to be here for the show.

I mean, it's like.

It's kind of like playing catch with.

With, you know, a famous baseball player or something.

It's like, that's.

Nah, bro.

I don't know how many shows you've listened to, but, like, when Saeed and I started, it feels like it was yesterday.

It was, like, several years ago, but it was just two dudes in a garage, like, having a good time.

And my.

My wife's Tesla would.

The light would flicker on and off because of motion in the garage from us.

So it would freak us out, but we would.

We're still two guys from a garage, man.

And the production quality certainly looks like a bigger show.

I'll give you.

I'll give you that.

But, I mean, the show is small still.

You know, we're still having fun with it.

Yeah, I was really cool.

It was cool to see that you guys were, you know, developing the podcast and kind of fighting grooves and.

And then now interviewing guests, and it's just.

It's cool to see the diversity.

And obviously, this new space is awesome studio.

The goal is always to talk to people like you.

I would say that the old.

Have I ever told you.

Have you heard the stories about Larry the Cockroach?

No, I don't.

Maybe.

Have you guys talked about it on the show?

Yeah, I probably have.

Older shows.

Yeah.

So in the older studio space, which was really just a separate office in the law firm space, one day, Saeed and I are going to the restroom, which is down the hall.

Same bathroom here, just the other side.

And there's like a cockroach just dead on the floor.

And I'm like, I'm not cleaning that up.

And he looks at me, goes, I'm not cleaning that up.

We're like, all right, well, this is weird.

So we just left it there, right?

And then the next week, we came back to record a show, and Larry the cockroach is still there, right?

And we just.

We named him Larry.

And it was kind of like a joke.

And we're like, yo, we can't.

We can't be in the.

Like, we can't have guests come, you know, with the space.

See Larry on the bathroom, right?

And then we were still on the fence about having guests.

We had some friends come and hang out.

The space is very different over there, so it's not, like, as comfortable.

And then, literally, I'm in the show one day mid show, I'm talking to Saeed in that on the older setup, and I look over, and there's a cockroach, which I called Larry.

I'm like, oh my God.

Say Larry's walking by and you see a cockroach walking by in the space and you're like, oh my God, we never bring guests back here.

Humble beginnings, man.

That's where it all comes from.

I started doing my content a long time ago from wherever.

I could just be in a place where I could shoot it.

It was.

None of it was planned out, you know, it's just.

Is that what you always like, doing the creative side of the stuff?

I would say, yeah.

I've been creative for a long time.

I remember doing videos for school projects when I was too.

So, like when you didn't have to do a video for a school project, but I decided that since my dad had a camera and I was comfortable sitting in front of it, we just do a video about it.

So I.

There's one science project.

I created a circuit.

I think I was like 8 or 9 years old and I had to teach the class how a battery circuit worked with a light bulb.

And I did a video and I made it like a little like instructional video for the whole class.

So very cool.

Have you seen that?

Dude, I was.

I just.

I've been geeking out lately, reading.

I've been sleeping a whole lot and I have a sleeping disorder, so I don't traditionally sleep like as much as most people do.

But there's a battery that just came out that's USBC rechargeable.

Oh, wow.

It's like a AAA battery and it has like a little USBC plug on it.

Oh, I have seen this.

Yeah.

I think MK MKBHD covered it on his channel too.

Size of A US of A.

Double A.

It's a normal double A.

So you plug in like a double A, but you can.

Dude, that is like earth changing to me.

Oh yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah.

Forget buying the 48 packs of Energizers.

You're like, why are we using those anymore?

It seems like completely unnecessary at this point in time.

Yeah.

So you start feeling comfortable recording content.

You.

You get into the working world and then at what point, I mean, was that always the goal?

No, no, not at all.

My.

My journey in, in my career has shifted so many times and I know.

I like the new journey.

We'll.

We'll get there.

Yeah, it's been all over the place.

You know, I started out doing all kinds of odd jobs in high school.

It was even as like a 12 year old.

I was doing data entry for my uncle who owned a mortgage brokerage.

I did that.

Yeah.

And he was digitizing his clientele.

So he was moving all of his clients from literally just stacks of boxes of bankers, boxes of paperwork, to a database to a CRM.

He was ahead of his time.

Wow.

Good.

And this is, like, back in 2002.

Three.

Okay.

And he had a little office over off of.

Off of Gary in Santa Ana.

The 55 right there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was my first law job.

Was.

Was it?

Yeah, it's right over there.

So he would pay me in Disneyland tickets back then, and my mom would have to take us, so it was like, a whole thing for her.

I'd worked there during the summertime and got a little older in high school.

And my dad wanted to build a car in the garage.

It was a 65 Shelby Cobra.

And that whole project took over my life for probably three years.

We worked on it every day.

I basically had no friends.

I would just come home from school, get off the bus, walk home, and I'd be rebuilding a 302 V8 in the garage with my dad, which my dad knew nothing about cars.

Yeah.

The hardest thing he ever put together before that was a barbecue.

And then one day, he's like, I want to build a Cobra.

Do you want to help me?

And we started, and it took three years for us to do that.

During that time, I bought my first car, which is a 99 Mustang GT, and started racing it on the track with my dad before I had a driver's license.

And it was interesting because my mom used to have to drive me to the track.

Did your mom like this?

She reluctantly.

Yeah.

She was.

She.

She was scared, but she wanted to support my hobbies.

Yeah.

You got an interest?

Your mom wants to show interest in your interest.

Totally.

Totally.

I get it.

And so she would drive me to the track.

My dad would be towing his race car behind us.

She'd get out and watch us.

We'd race around the track at Willow Springs out in Palmdale area.

I know it well.

Yeah.

And.

And I'd race all day, hit 120, 130 miles an hour on the straightaway, and then come home.

And the next day, I'd take the bus to school because I didn't have a driver's license.

That is wild.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

In some ways, I'm super envious.

Later on in life, I think.

I was in my early 20s, and my dad was not mechanically inclined either.

He never.

He never bought a car and certainly didn't try to build anything.

I bought a 1968 Datsun 510.

Oh, yeah.

Which I tore down to like, literally the frame.

And then I. I don't know why, but I bought a JDM SR20 DET from Japan, broke it down myself and rebuilt it myself.

Knew I didn't know enough about engines to do that kind of work, so I took it to a shop to do it.

And that's actually up at Igor Shop CA Tune in Sacramento.

He's going to finish it.

There was some bodywork damage that was done to it that needs to be fixed.

But I did, I did something similar, man.

Where you just dive into a project like that.

And it's weird because, you know, for me, YouTube wasn't as prevalent back then.

So it was literally forums and just kind of like reading and trying to figure out things.

But the thrill, the hunt of like, finding parts and all that stuff was so cool.

It was very cool.

Yeah.

Forums were a huge part of the start of all of that.

There was.

I was a part of all the different forums out there for the cars that I owned.

And yeah, There was no YouTube.

There weren't even Facebook groups at that time.

It was just.

You have a specific question, you better make damn sure you hit that search bar first and look through it before you start a new thread.

Because as soon as you do and someone comes like, you don't know how.

To use the search bar, trolls come out.

Yeah, it was good.

And it was unregulated back then.

It was a wild, wild west of the Internet.

You know, you could do whatever.

But yeah.

And you know, in the way, I'm really grateful for all those forums because even today there's there.

There are problems that I'm working on on a car or something, and I'll go searching Google for it.

And those forum posts from 2003 are still showing up.

And there's still some dude back then who wrote out a reply that is the answer to the problem that you.

Have included pictures, gave you a little like DIY breakdown.

Well, people don't realize too, is a lot of the AI search results you get come from a lot of those forums.

And I'm not talking cars, I'm talking like cooking.

I'm talking like, you know, hobbies.

Those forums are like a repository of data that people get.

Keep getting pinged back on on AI.

They don't realize it.

Yeah.

And that could be a good thing or a really bad thing.

It's some of the forums I was on.

Yeah.

Well, some of the misinformation that AI gives You results from is from some of those forms.

Oh, it doesn't really read into sarcasm.

That's why they have the disclaimer at the bottom of Chat GPT is always double check your results for accuracy.

I know and I, I will tell you.

So I use Chat GPT.

We were talking about this before the show, but I, I use ChatGPT pretty much every single day in some way, shape or form.

I use it a lot for the show, the podcast.

It's really cool to have it, like, find certain segments for you, but I will cross reference and check and I will find there's, I would say a good 30, 40% of the time there's an error with what it gives.

It gives you.

Yeah, I don't trust it wholeheartedly for anything, but that stuff didn't exist back then.

And so I was just getting into the minutia of everything about a car and I wanted to know everything.

I was learning all this stuff.

For my 18th birthday, my dad gave me his Nikon DSLR camera, which was brand new back in the early 2000s.

Yeah.

And he was upgrading to a newer one.

So I didn't really know anything about photography.

I didn't know anything about really video making.

I mean, he would like, hold a handycam and like, I do a video for school or something.

But I didn't know anything about editing or, you know, creating a video or a program or something like that.

So I did know that I liked the outdoors and grew up camping.

Your dad sounds like a really cool guy.

He's great.

I get all my sense of adventure from him.

My dad is like the complete opposite of this.

Never been camping his life.

Never touched the camera in his life, never built anything in his life.

Like, very different, very atypical Persian family in my household.

Yeah, we were, we did a lot of things that most of our cousins didn't get to do.

But.

But yeah, we.

We grew up doing all that stuff.

And I.

After high school, I. I went to.

To college for like two years here in Saddleback College.

I went there for about six months and then transferred to ivc.

It felt like it was high school all over again.

All the same people I knew were all there.

Yeah.

And I'm like, damn, bro.

I guess I was hanging out with the wrong crowds too, because all my friends were at Saladback.

But yeah, it was funny because I don't really think I learned anything from college other than the fact that I knew that college wasn't for me.

After I left, I felt the same.

Way to Be honest with you.

Yeah.

Like, I felt like.

I don't know about you, but I felt like this imposter syndrome in college where I felt like I was going through the motions of what I was supposed to do, but I wasn't gaining value from it totally.

And which is.

Here's an interesting paradigm for you.

Later on in life, I went back to Yale and I applied sarcastically to this program and I got in and I was like, this is awkward.

And major, major people were going like, you know, former chief staff, secretary of state during Paulson's era, during the, you know, great financial crisis, was in my classroom as one of the students.

Right.

Yeah.

Jim Wilkinson, who's also been on the show, played by Topher Grace in the Big Short.

Like.

And I'm in this room with these people who are like, notable people.

I'm looking around the room going like, what the hell am I doing here?

It was very, very surreal.

But I will say, once I got over that, I felt like I was getting meaningful education from meaningful people.

But it was such a different learning experience in school where you read these books about these people.

It's hard to really get the emotion and the reality from some of these lessons, and some of these lessons you're just not interested in.

This program was very different in that there were real people like CEOs of GE coming in.

They had a CEO summit where every major company had their CEO there and they were all talking.

And you had.

The former NBA commissioner was there.

Everybody was there.

But you get to hear like, these real life stories from people who really did things that, you know, they did.

Yeah, it was so interesting.

I think the delivery has a lot to do with it.

Yeah.

And it's not a knock on teachers per se, but I will say that, that at a junior college, at that point in my life, I really didn't feel value in it.

Yeah, I almost, almost left college because of it.

That's why I did.

And.

And when I walked away, it wasn't because I thought I was better than the people that went to college.

It wasn't because I thought it was too expensive or any of those other reasons.

It was literally because I felt like I wasn't getting enough out of it.

What was your major back then?

So that's the thing.

I was just taking a bunch of classes and courses to figure out what I liked.

I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up.

And I was 19 years old.

And yeah, it's younger, looking back on a retrospect, than you Thought you were at the time, right?

Oh yeah.

I felt like I was this adult and that I need to have my, my stuff figured out.

And dude, I'm going to be 45 at the end of this month and I still don't have it all figured out.

Yeah.

I'm learning that as I get older that nobody really does.

Nobody does.

They just, they get, they get in motion and they just stay in motion.

Yeah.

That's the only tangible difference.

And if you're lucky enough.

I was having this conversation with my wife the other night.

Like, you know, I've been with the same company for almost 20 years now, you know, and you know, we started it and it went to where it's at today.

That's so unusual now.

It is.

And most people are jumping around from careers if they're working for somebody else in a non self employed perspective, they're working, I think the average life, and I'll use bankers as an example here, the average life of a non executive banker is about three to four years and they switch jobs, switch companies.

If you're an executive in the banking industry, you would think it's much longer.

It's actually just four to five years.

So it's a little bit longer, but not much.

Not much.

Yeah.

And you think about that.

They're jumping jobs every three to four.

Like people are having like internal existential crises every couple of years.

Every couple of years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And when you're a kid, you know, for any of the younger viewers, like if you think that you have to have it figured out by a certain age or even, you know, God forbid before you get out of high school, you know, I get that because you look around at all these adults around you and you go, oh, these people have this figured out.

I don't have it figured out.

Well, here's news for you.

No one has it figured out.

That's true.

And then the worst part about it is, is then you have social media ramping this up totally with this like surreal life of excess.

And you and I play in the realm of social media a little bit so we can probably parse through it better than some.

But even I find myself like, I'll look at other people's social media numbers and growth and I'll be like, damn, how do they have these big account followings?

And I'll even find myself even like having like a little bit of like, oh my God, like maybe I shouldn't be doing this, maybe I'm not good at it.

And then you're like, you know what?

Why are you comparing yourself to somebody who.

And a great example of this.

I had somebody in the show who will remain nameless because I love him to death, but he was in the show and he was showing me his social media account, and I was like, man, this guy's got a ton of followers.

He was in the millions.

Like, plus, right?

Yeah.

And I'm like, man, his content's good, but is it that much better than mine?

Like, I'm sitting there looking at him, I'm like.

And I look back, and he just has a lot of friends who have big followings, and he's in that space, and it really worked out for him.

Would that work out for you?

Is that more opportunity?

That wasn't like, you know, it's.

What does it equate to?

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, I was listening to it to a prior episode when you guys were on Social Blade and.

Oh, Jeff Fargo's episode.

And I got into that, you know, I started looking at some of the people that I follow, and it's so interesting to see how much of it is vanity metrics and how much of it is actually making a difference for whatever it is these people are doing.

What do you think of that show?

That.

I thought it was fantastic.

Really?

Yeah.

I had.

I had mixed emotions about the episode.

Not that I didn't.

I love talking to Jeff.

I know Jeff on a personal level.

It was just.

I didn't know if other people would find that interesting.

Oh.

I mean, I've.

I've probably been exposed to it a little more than most normal people who don't work in social media and content creation.

But the way that he laid it out was such a real way that that's.

That's really how it is when you work in that space.

It's, you know, you work behind the scenes of social media.

Someone who breaks it down like that, you know, it's.

You're kind of getting a peek behind the curtain, you know, of what social media is really all about.

And to your point about earlier, about.

So he was.

He's done a lot of jobs.

Like, if you listen to the episode, he was a title rep.

The spin instructor thing threw me for a curve.

How did that?

Never come up in our conversations.

But yeah, and then now he's doing this, and he's actually doing really well.

That dad pod that he's on is doing pretty.

Pretty good.

Good numbers.

I got a ton of sponsors.

Vegas is also a very different cultural, like, environment too.

So he's got, he's got no constraints where I got a little bit more.

Than he does, but Totally, totally.

So walk me back to the college situation so you decide college isn't for you.

I took a couple classes there in geography and I think the reason I took them was because one of them was a geography field studies course which basically said that all you have to do is you sign up for the class for one week out of that semester, you go camping with like 20 or 30 other students.

What, for like a week?

That's a class?

Yeah.

You go all over California, all over Oregon, Washington.

We went all the way from here to Mount St. Helens, visited every volcano and camp.

I clearly took the wrong classes.

College, you know, it wasn't worth a lot of credits at the time.

It wasn't like transferable, but.

But I took that course because I was like, oh, I can go camping and it's considered a college.

Like, sign me up, you know.

So we go, huh?

And I got so into the landscapes and the cool stuff that you can see out there in the outdoors.

And I really felt at home out there.

And it brought me back to my camping roots as a kid.

And I had my camera with me that my dad gave me for.

For my 18th birthday and I took a bunch of photos on this trip.

It was like, it was like a 14 day trip, I think, and that's pretty long trip.

Yeah.

And I came home and I just started to learn how to edit photos digitally and started posting them.

And I got a lot of really great feedback from people.

And, you know, I think Facebook was brand new back then, but for the 20 friends I had on Facebook were just like, this is so great, you know, and I like that I was able to share some of the experiences that I had with other people out there who may have never seen this or may never see it if somebody else doesn't show them or whatever it was.

Because keep in mind, like, I, you know, I'm only 35, but back then, like the way you showed your friends somewhere, like you were going on a trip just a few years before, that was wildly different from how it is today.

You had to develop photos, send them in the mail, and that's how they would see the places that you went on vacation.

You know, we didn't have like these massive platforms where you could post all this stuff, whatever you were doing, and people didn't know.

And in real time.

Yeah, it used to be you come back from a trip and tell everybody about it because they didn't see it.

Now they see all of it, want to talk to you about the things they saw on your trip.

And it's very weird in the FOMO portion of.

It's crazy, too.

Yeah.

I. I will admit, like, I have.

I have a friend, a family member, actually, who's in Spain right now, and I have another friend who is like family to me who's also in.

In Spain.

And I'm sitting here looking at all these trips in real time, and it's.

It's very different to have somebody go away and come back and tell you about all the things they saw versus to watch them do it in real time.

Yep.

It's.

It's like you're living vicariously through them on some level.

There's like an energy there.

A little bit.

A little bit, Yeah.

A little tiny bit.

Totally.

Yeah.

And you're.

Because you're sitting at a.

Somewhere and you're just like, man, this guy's in Madrid.

That's exactly what happened today.

He sent me a picture of, like, him watching, like, flamenco dancers.

And I'm like, bro, I'm.

It's like two o'.

Clock.

I mean, what are you doing to me?

Why you gotta be a jerk?

I'm in an office tower in Irvine.

Exactly.

So you start posting these photos online.

Your friends like it.

Yeah.

I start getting some feedback from family and stuff, and I just start taking this camera everywhere with me and I start doing photography and then I start dabbling a little bit of video here and there and just shooting clips and put.

Putting little.

Little YouTube mashups together.

Back when YouTube was still in its infancy.

Yeah.

And.

And it didn't.

There was no subject matter that I was, like, just sticking to whatever I was doing.

Yeah.

And all the while being a car enthusiast.

Right.

Working on cars, you know, buying a couple.

I think I had four cars before I was 20, so I was like.

I was just buying and building cars.

And I had a Mustang gt.

I had a Volkswagen Golf.

Okay.

I had a Toyota Tacoma.

Maybe it was just three then before 20 years old.

Yeah.

And then the Cobra, obviously, I was working on with my dad, so you can consider that the fourth one if you want.

But yeah, so I was.

I was.

And my brother was getting into it, so I was helping him with his car.

As my cousins were getting into it, I was helping them.

They didn't.

It's a very eclectic mix, by the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was all over the place.

There was no.

There was no rhyme or reason.

I just.

Every one of them was unique, you know?

And then I was.

At that time, I was working actually at a restaurant.

I was working at Nordstrom Cafe, of all places.

I worked in Nordstrom too.

Did you?

Customer service, brother.

Oh.

See, I'm a third generation Nordy.

My mom and my grandmother both worked at.

Are you kidding?

Really?

At some point in their life.

Yeah.

My grandmother was a seamstress there.

My mom was.

She worked in cosmetics when she moved here.

Oh, that's cool.

So I've got a funny story.

I'll share it.

I don't mean to depart from the story, but.

So I. I had graduated law school and I was working at Impact Multifamily Commercial Capital Corporation.

I was making pretty good money, I think back then.

This is like 20 years ago.

I was making like well into the 200s, right.

And I was making good money.

Great.

But I. I just wasn't sleeping a whole lot.

And I was like, you know what?

I can do more with my day.

So I started working at Nordstrom on nights and weekends.

And I was like, okay, I get a discount on clothes and, you know, blah.

And I was working the customer service, and people just treated me so bad.

Like, the default question people would ask me is like, what do you want to do when you.

When you grow up?

I'd be like, what?

Yeah, it was very weird.

I had people throw phones at me.

It was.

It was a wild experience.

But there was one experience that stood out.

There was a guy named Young park.

And I don't even know if he's still alive.

I haven't heard from him in a long time.

Maybe he's watching.

Yeah.

Korean dude.

Yeah.

And he was the probably the most stylish guy I ever met in my entire life.

He almost were always all black, but he.

He was.

He was like the.

He was the quiet luxury before quiet luxury was a thing.

Okay.

And he.

He would always wear black, but all his brands were luxury, but they were, you know, unbranded.

And he would work in customer service.

And this dude was just fashionable, good looking, Korean dude.

And, you know, he.

But I look at him as wardrobe, and he'd come in with different cars.

He had Harleys.

And I'm like, what in the hell is going on with this dude's life?

So I befriend him after a while because he's very quiet and reserved.

And he finally tells me, he's like, you know, my dad's a pretty successful wealth advisor on the east coast, and he travels internationally for business, and I do pretty well for myself.

So that was conversation one and Then a couple weeks go by, you know, I'm talking to him late at night, we're, you know, closing up shop in Nordstrom, and I'm like, young, I don't get it.

Like, why, why are you here?

Right.

Like, it doesn't make any sense to me.

I said, clearly, you're buying.

He's like, well, number one, I have to buy clothes at a discount, which is kind of nice.

And he goes, but the real reason I'm here is I get to have sex with all the ladies in the makeup counter.

And I was like, wait, what?

And he was dead serious.

Like, he's like, that's just my thing.

And then one day, out of nowhere, he just, like, vanished.

I never saw him again.

Wow.

Like, never heard from.

Never saw him.

His number was disconnected.

Like, gone.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

If you're out there, man.

Yeah, I know.

Hit me up.

I would imagine he's probably in Korea.

Drop us a lot.

Yeah.

But, yeah, anyway, that's great.

Yeah.

Nordstrom was, was a.

It was another one of those stepping stones.

Yeah.

And I think that everybody should work a customer service, restaurant style job at some point.

Very enlightening.

It is.

Yeah.

And I.

The way I.

When I talk to people.

I've never worked a restaurant job.

I wish I did.

That's one of the.

One of the jobs I never, I never worked.

But it changed the way I talk and treat to everybody I work with.

Not that I treated them bad before, but I actually care about the people behind the counter now.

Totally.

Yeah.

It just sets you up for being a really good person.

When you walk into anywhere that has somebody who's working behind the counter, customer service, restaurant waiter, whatever it is.

And you can immediately tell somebody who's never done it because they're the first to.

Like, my mom is the same way.

She's just like, no, no, no, no.

I'm gonna have him send it back.

I'm like, mom just.

It's fine.

Like, you know, like, don't worry.

And she gets all up in their business.

But, you know, it's, It's.

It was a good job to teach me some discipline, you know?

Not that I was the most disciplined kid back then.

I used to run through the main entrance and because I was late running into work and you're working.

Nordstrom is normal.

Yeah.

And I get.

I get yelled at by my boss all the time and whatever, but somewhere along that road, my uncle called me back and said, hey, I need more help here at the mortgage office.

So you.

Are you willing to Come hang out, work with me.

I said, sure.

So I just dropped.

Dropped Nordstrom and I went to go work for him at Charter Pacific Lending Corporation.

And it's right here across the street, actually, is where his office was.

And there's a couple of them right here.

Yeah.

And so I. I was there for a couple of years and mainly just setting up files and.

And I didn't know anything really about mortgage.

My mom was a realtor from when I was about six years old.

There's a lot of people in.

In our area that are of our same ethnicity that are in the mortgage space because self employment was a big, big part of that for them.

And I think in a lot of ways, I think the Iranian community naturally found itself wanting the bigger commissions from the deals.

Sure, yeah.

And they're good at it, naturally.

Salespeople and able to talk about, you know, a home or, you know, talk people about their finances and stuff.

I think that it's a very different lifestyle too, though.

I think that the traditional W2 corporate American jobs for a lot of people, not just them culturally, but just a lot of people in general.

I think especially when you're probably your first and second generation here, it's not the American dream for them.

No.

Yeah, it's not.

My.

Neither of my parents were like that.

I mean, my dad did have a W2 job growing up, but it was a pretty cool job.

He was a lead vehicle designer at Rockstar games for about 12 years.

That's a pretty cool job, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have so many questions he has.

We could go down a whole tangent, but he.

That's no wonder why he built a car.

Oh, yeah.

But he.

He built it in real life for the first time.

Yeah.

Computer modeling it.

I like your dad.

Yeah, he was that guy.

He used to fly to Detroit and take 2,000 photos of one car and then come back to San Diego and start modeling.

Because you got a model.

Yeah, dude.

Yeah.

Midnight Club.

You know, all those games.

You know, gta like.

Yeah, modeling those.

And that's a cool gig.

Yeah.

And he was managing a team of guys there.

Wow.

All right, so now it makes sense.

All right, so he was doing that until he.

Until, oh, wait, when they, you know, the whole world crashed and burned and they let him go for a bunch of guys in Indonesia and.

But then he became an entrepreneur after that.

My mom has always been a realtor since I was a kid before, you know, she worked briefly at Nordstrom, but after that she became a realtor.

And she has not looked back since she's still working.

So my uncle's been a mortgage broker forever.

He was a banker for a little while and then he moved on and started his own wholesale broker shop.

Very common trend I see is that people get in the banking space.

They usually start as a teller or they start like in a bank, actually selling loans at a bank context.

But the economics are so different.

Being out on your own and independent, but you have to get your own business.

You know, the name behind you.

But I've seen that transition a lot of people.

Yeah, yeah.

And he was very successful at it.

And even through the financial crisis in 08, he.

He actually had built his business based on referrals.

He didn't take subprime loans.

He was doing, you know, a lot of very clean, you know, files.

And his business carried through even.

Even through all that, you know, all those tumultuous times.

So, yeah, I started.

I helped start a bank during those times.

So trust me, I get it.

Oh, yeah, it was.

It was incredibly tumultuous and scary.

And what's weirder now is in retrospect, when I met Jim at Yale and I knew that he was in the room when they were making those decisions to bail out the banks, it was really weird getting his perspective on, like, how bad it was and how close to the brink of failure it was.

And I would say for people who don't realize and you're just looking at it from like, oh, I saw the big short.

That perspective.

Yeah.

It was way more close to just everything falling apart.

Oh, yeah.

And it came down to one conversation in one room with all the stakeholders there, and it literally could have gone the other way.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Sometimes I wonder what could have happened.

Yeah, Well, I mean, who knows?

I'm giving where the market's at today.

You and I talk a lot about this on, you know, in the dms, but.

Right.

I have deep concerns as to where the market is headed.

And I know that sounds very Peter Schiff, like, where I'm just like, doom, doom, doom.

But I'm very concerned.

And I see people like, like Logan, who's.

Housing wires, economies.

Actually Irvine too.

Yeah, he.

I see him and he's so rosy and optimistic about where the market's going.

And I just.

I don't feel the same way.

Yeah, we talk about that too on the DMs.

And I'd love to get back into, like, the today's market stuff because I think it's really important you guys talk a lot about it here, but you know, it's.

I've learned a lot about it from watching this show, so it's great.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, we.

We try to scale back a little bit of the market commentary on the show just to.

We.

We want to find a way where we can.

I think a lot of people don't really relate to it because they feel overwhelmed by.

By some of the concepts that are probably a little more complex.

And rather than say, hey, I'm going to learn this, I'm going to figure it out, they just tend to not tune in.

So we're trying to bring people like yourself in who also have started businesses who are relatable, and they go, okay, I can do that too.

Right, right.

So.

And I think that we, we mix that in a little bit and maybe it.

Maybe it resonates a little better.

No, I love it.

And I think that the way you guys present those complex topics is a way that's palatable for people who don't have any idea whether you're what you were talking about.

So basically you're calling side stupid.

Yeah.

Who's not here today?

So I can see relatable side.

If you're out there listening.

I love you, man.

I feel like I already know you.

Trust me, he's gonna listen to this whole episode.

I'm gonna get a DM or message as soon as he sees that.

I didn't say it.

Chris said it.

Yeah.

No, but I. Yeah, I started working for my uncle at this mortgage company and I was there for about two or three years and.

And I got a.

You know, it was, it was great to like, kind of like learn a little bit about mortgage.

I wasn't an originator.

I wasn't even a processor, really, in that way.

And you had no desire at that point in time to do any that.

No.

Okay.

I thought it was horrible.

I thought it was like all this, you know, I was like in this, like post college hippie state of like, I want to just be out in the mountains, man.

I want to, like, be out there having fun and taking photos.

Like, what is this man made paperwork stuff that I got to send out a package of disclosures that's 80 pages long.

You realize how weird it is for you to say that now, right?

Completely.

Okay.

The irony is not lost on me at all, you know, And I just, I like the, you know, it's full circle, but we'll get through it.

I think that there's a purpose for it.

So I'm there for a couple years, you know, didn't really love the job.

I was just going to it because it was the only place that was, you know, allowing me to afford, you know, paying my bills, which you were.

In the ecosystem, you had a paycheck, you had responsibilities, I get it.

And I knew some people, so it was cool, you know, I, I was just making a little bit of spend money, you know, and I decided that, you know, I want to go do some more landscape photography.

I want to get out there a little bit deeper, venture off a little bit deeper into the unknown.

And I needed a truck.

And I previously had been a car guy, never a truck guy, never an off road guy, Never really been off road other than the one time my dad took his Land Rover LR3 out in the middle of Big Bear for like a Thanksgiving trip and like, you know, we like hit like a ditch and he's like, all right, let's get out of here.

You know, just turned around and, and came back.

That was the most experience I ever had.

And didn't grow up going out off roading.

Didn't go up, you know, doing any of that stuff really.

Just camping and.

But I wanted to do more.

So I bought a Toyota Tacoma and I said I'm going to put a small lift on it.

I'm going to put some 33 inch tires on it.

It's already four wheel drive.

Should be capable, reliable.

It always starts off modest like that.

I know.

And I knew how I was.

I was like, I, I've overbuilt every car I've had so far, you know, but this time I'm just going to take it easy.

You know, I said that on so many damn cars, dude.

Oh yeah.

And it just, it spirals, it doesn't work out so.

Hence the reason why I bought the Rivian is I knew I was never going to build this thing.

Yeah.

And I'm already going like, well, there's.

Some aftermarket parts out there.

They're coming out, right?

Yeah.

But first came out there was nothing.

Out there for him.

Which is the hugest selling.

The biggest selling point for me is like, there's nothing out here.

Yeah, no one's going to build anything for this anytime soon.

I got a couple years.

Oh God.

Yeah.

Don't get me started there.

I had a reservation for, for one of those and I thankfully I didn't do it, but I just didn't think it was off road capable.

Well, yeah, we're still to be determined, I think for longevity.

But yeah.

And so I bought this truck and I did those Couple of modifications in my driveway.

And I got out there and I just realized how much I fell in love with off roading and building the truck and having it become capable enough to go places that people.

Wildly addictive.

Yeah, yeah, super.

And I think it was more like just being able to get to these places that nothing else could make it to unless you had a vehicle that was ready to take you there.

And I would not only take you.

There, but sustain you there to becomes like the next evolution of it.

Yeah, that.

Then that came on later on.

I was starting with just day trips, you know, like, oh, I would find a place, literally on Google Maps being geography nerd, you know, and I would find a place and I would map it out on the computer.

And back then I, I, you know, we have devices.

I would just print stuff out and I'd just take them with me.

Oh, wow, the printouts.

It's very different now.

Very different.

And like the GPS would work, but like not off road.

You know, we didn't have like Internet connection everywhere.

Satellite connection.

What are you talking about?

We have Starlink like you have right now.

There's nothing.

And so I would just go to these places.

I'd take photos of myself there with the truck there, and people would be like, dude, where is this?

Like, how did you get there?

You know?

And I started to build friendships in the off road community.

And then one day I'm on Facebook just at work cruising, and friend of mine from high school posts something saying that they need a new sales guy at an off road shop right here.

Actually.

It's right behind, you know, this studio.

It's called Rebel Off Road.

I had a lot of work done from there back in the day.

Did you?

Yeah.

So the owner's wife is a banker who's in my space.

Kind of connected a little bit.

But yeah, and they, when they moved closer to, closer to this place, I was like, oh, wait, wait a minute.

Yeah, is this a sign?

Do I need to build another car?

I actually started.

My first day was the day that they moved to this, to this shop over here.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd actually never been to the new shop, but I was with the old shop.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Up in Lake Forest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I, I told my uncle.

I was like, hey, I'm.

I'm gonna go take this job.

And it was a pay cut.

You know, it was purely passion driven.

And I was like, I am closing the door of the mortgage industry.

See you later.

I'm out.

I did this One time in my, in my lifespan, I went to go work for Federico at Racing Dynamics.

Oh, yeah, okay.

Right after that, he came back and bought the rights back from what was then Electrodyne.

He'd sold the rights to them, was going to leave the industry.

But I was really big in the BMW scene for a while, which is how I got into all the cars that I'm building, everything else.

So similar stories.

Very similar.

Yeah.

So, you know, I didn't know anything about sales.

I didn't know anything about Jeeps, which was the only vehicles they were really building there.

I didn't.

I was the token Toyota guy who we had.

Like, for every 20 Jeep guys that would walk into that shop to build a Jeep, there was one guy with like a Toyota of any sort.

And I was the guy for that guy.

Because they're like, I don't want to talk to the Toyota guy.

Like, here, Matt, you can take him.

And, you know, it was a big war between solid axles and ifs and like back then.

I get it.

Yeah.

The Jeep JK was the new, the new platform.

Everybody was building them.

They were probably the most modifiable vehicle on the planet at that time.

I built one.

Cheap, cheap to mod.

Endless possibilities and a whole hell of a lot of fun.

Yeah.

And, and to speed through that business, I, I moved from there to marketing director within two years from an entry level sales position.

But during that time, I learned a lot.

I learned about sales, I learned about customer service from like a, like a shop standpoint, from someone who's spending $150,000 on their vehicle.

This is on a vehicle which costs maybe at the time a third of that.

Oh, much less than that.

I think that some of them were like 20 grand they were bringing in.

They were spending 150 grand on this thing.

And, and you know, you had everything from mild to wild in terms of builds.

But we're no longer talking about somebody who wanted an extra crostini with their soup.

You know, we're talking about a guy who's dropping a lot of coin and the level of customer service and care had to match that, you know, and so I was learning all of that there.

I was learning about supply chain, I was learning about B2B business because we were dealing with a lot of different, you know, suppliers for parts.

I was learning about being accountable for like timelines, you know, like, am I, am I going to be able to meet this guy's deadline for building this thing or the parts going to be here on time, you know, Can I be accountable to make sure that everything is here so that when the Jeep arrives we are not missing anything?

And the technician doesn't have a vehicle on the lift that's waiting for something.

It's going to sit there and then you're going to waste time and money.

Totally.

And there's a lot of mistakes, a lot of mistakes that I made.

I was sent home from that job on more than one occasion because of how big of a screw up I did there.

Really?

Yeah.

Huh.

Like, go think about what you did.

Like that kind of thing.

I actually kind of respect that way of doing it.

I, I came from a world where people would just yell at you all day long and capture the hell out of you until.

Yeah, I had a really good sales manager who just actually left that business after finally, after I think probably 15 years.

And he, he moved to Canada with his family.

But Shout out Taylor, he was great.

But that's a left.

Yeah, he, he taught me a lot.

It was some tough love, but I learned so much.

I think I know him.

He might be the one that did your build.

Yeah.

Taylor Blagdon.

Wow.

Oh yeah.

It was him.

Yep.

Wow.

He moved to Canada.

Yeah, he just moved.

It was just like his wife is from Canada.

Oh.

And they wanted to.

To be around more family up there and, and, and just didn't.

He's a pretty badass rig too.

Yeah.

He's had a couple.

He's had a jk.

He's at a JT Silver one, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Iron man build.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He had some amazing builds.

Yeah.

I learned a lot from Taylor.

I learned a lot from him.

And you know, I became marketing director there and we worked together at that company, kind of just trying to grow it and build it and, and you know, that business kept growing.

It's still growing.

Today.

They have a second location in Texas now.

Do they really?

I didn't know.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really cool.

And they're working on all kinds of vehicles, so I got to learn so much about, you know, that stuff there.

And when I became marketing director, I had to learn how to market a company, how to market a brand.

It is different than I think people think that it is.

Yeah.

The perception of what the consumer sees versus the design around the business side of it is a very different disconnect.

Right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's like you want to put your best foot forward.

You want to, you want to show off something about your business, like how do you connect to that customer?

And if you Want to grow, grow into a different cohort of people.

How do you reach those people?

You know, like, that business evolved over time.

It started out with just hardcore rock crawler Jeep guys, but, you know, as time went on, there's other platforms that came, came out that, you know, they wanted to capitalize on, whether it was like Overland builds or Toyotas, you know, which they moved into.

More, more, bigger trucks, you know, all these things, like, these are all different.

And the overland subculture has boomed in the last 10 years.

I mean, it is a massive sub industry that has kind of blossomed.

And I look at it as kids that were our age doing some of the things that we experienced.

Right.

That have grown up and can now afford to do those things, to build those things, and they want to take their families out and do them too.

And it's, it's actually kind of cool to see because it is in a lot of ways, like, community driven.

It is, Yeah.

I would say that we're just now past peak Overland.

I think that was during the pandemic.

Yeah, of course it was.

Yeah.

But there's many reasons for that and, and I can get into it.

But I think that the, what you're just saying is very true.

I think that a lot of the import guys who like tinkering on cars, you know, they, they're growing up, they're 30, 35, 40 years old.

They have kids, they have families.

Now you can't be like going out to a track event time attack with your Honda, you know, like.

Yeah, it's not, not a good look.

No, you want to scratch that itch, you buy a 4Runner, you put a bunch of parts on it, a rooftop tent, a lift, wheels and tires.

You take the family out camping for a weekend and that scratches the itch and.

Yep.

Yeah.

And I've seen it more and more and more and, and it comes, it becomes like this weird thing.

Like, you know, there's moments where like, you're supposed to be working, but then you're like, wait a minute, I want to do that one thing.

Yeah, that one thing for those guys is like, okay, how do I get like a pelican, you know, this or that or, you know, what do I need for the next trip?

Oh, I need a fr.

Or, oh, I need a cooktop.

And then you just wind up falling down this path of like, gear and like, you know, upgrades and I call.

Them the gear guys.

Really?

I mean, it's not my thing at all.

I'm very minimalist when I go out there.

But, but yeah, it's funny because, like, that, that whole subculture has grown.

It's starting to shrink a little bit now because, you know, people are going back to work and.

And you know, they're noticing that they don't like driving a truck that gets 11 miles per gallon every day to park and back, and they don't need a rooftop town.

I used to see them in my neighborhood where people would have like the camper shells and the rooftops.

Oh, yeah.

And they, they would literally buy, buy and build rigs that could not fit into their garage, which.

Okay, fine, I get it.

I had 35s and, you know, 3 inch lift on my, on my Jeep.

I get it.

But at the same time, you could see them, they were sitting under car covers on the street in my neighborhood, which became more and more dense with these, you know, excess cars during the pandemic.

And you see them slowly, one by one, just like disappear.

Yeah, they're going away.

Yeah.

And the guys who are sticking around who are in it for the long haul are getting a really good deal on these things because they're liquidating all of it and the gear too, on secondhand on Facebook marketing place.

That doesn't surprise me at all.

I've seen a lot of the.

Recently, I've seen a lot of the.

The Mercedes camper van kind of things.

What are they called?

The sprinter vans.

Oh, yeah, I've seen a lot of those on sale recently.

Well, yeah.

Van life as a whole, its own thing back then, too.

During the pandemic, everyone's like, I'm gonna.

Go live in van.

You know, I'm gonna go do that.

Social media glorified.

It still is, but it's not as in your face as it once was for a while.

Dude, there was.

Every single time I got on social media, I would scroll.

There'd be somebody else, like repping van life, talking about traveling and.

And now you're seeing less and less of it.

And I wonder if it's gonna die out or if it's just gonna kind of normalize.

Yeah, yeah.

I think people just didn't realize, like, how hard that actually is to sustain.

Dude, it's hard.

It's so hard and it's glorified.

But I think the, I mean, people understand, like, you have to deal with waste, you have to deal with rest stops, you have to figure out where you can park.

Yeah.

It's not as simple as I think people make it out to be.

Yeah.

And the overlanders too, or the, the influencers that you were just talking about.

It's funny because a lot of those guys are going away because these parts companies are not sending them as much free parts as they were during the pandemic.

You know, like, sales are down in that industry as a whole.

Sorry, I'm turning the air conditioning on.

It's getting a little toasty.

Oh, you're good.

Yeah.

Sales are down in that industry as a whole.

So first thing these companies are doing is they're cutting their influencer budgets.

So it's like, I can't get this free.

Yeah.

Roof rack for my van.

You know, like, people just aren't playing ball anymore.

So I've seen a lot of that recently where, like really.

And I look at this as more of like, you know, community economics driven.

But I've seen a lot of what I think are people that normally would get products that are really struggling to get brand deals working now.

Yeah, it's the creator economy has not been kind to a lot of folks in this industry.

You think that's consumer.

So obviously you listen to the show, you know that we've been really skeptical over consumer discretionary spending and kind of like the perspective.

I think without getting too far into it, there was like liberation day volatility in the markets.

People were freaking out a little bit like, is my job going to be there?

You know, our company's going to downsize.

Do you think a lot of that consumer discretionary spending is already hitting the influencer market and it's going to trickle down?

I thought that that would be something that would contribute to it.

But I mean, I've seen that this industry, like automotive enthusiast industry in those parts it has served.

It's like Larry the Cockroach.

Yeah.

It's not going to die.

Right.

Sure.

It has survived these, these swings.

But I think that the.

The problem is that a lot.

You know, I worked in a shop I've worked in since then for maybe, you know, half a dozen other companies that are small businesses in this industry.

I think that the way that those in these companies are ran is that when sales are good, you know, the owner goes out and starts buying stuff.

Yeah.

They start buying a new boat, they start buying a new rv, they're going to go buy another location because they think it's going to keep going up and up and up and up.

The location thing in.

Regardless of industry.

I've seen this problem.

So I used, I used to underwrite loans and I would, I would.

There's a period of time where I underwrote C and I.

Business loans.

Right.

Commercial industrial loans.

And you would see these companies that did well and then you would see them blow up everywhere.

And I got to look at a lot of those companies, like restaurants that you would see that went from one location to several.

A great example of this is the Salt Bay guy.

Oh yeah, he was well capitalized, ton of money.

And people don't realize is like, you can take people's money to capitalize your business as a quote, investment and grow these locations, but you have to stabilize their income.

Right.

And if you don't stabilize their income, curate an experience and build a solid foundation of reoccurring revenue, those locations will spike as people have an interest and then the income will go away as the interest phases out.

And particularly when you're him and you're selling like a high ticket experience and item that sizzles out even more and your normalized income winds up being not enough to service your debt.

And you wind up in a situation where you've now scaled way too fast and you have to scale back or close.

Yeah, that becomes like a reoccurring problem with entrepreneurs.

That's exactly what's happening.

And, and I think that that happened a lot with this industry because at the end of the day, a lot of them are just gearheads.

They're not business people.

You know, they don't have m. Like they just, they had a great idea for a product or service and there was a need that they're fulfilling and they were doing well.

And it's like you should have just kept growing the ones that are successful, the ones that just grew at a, at a rate that they could sustain.

And, and I think that the first thing that they start to cut back on is a lot of that marketing, a lot of that influencer brand deals like, because at the end of the day, like, that's the hardest thing to track back to sales.

Roi.

Yeah, it's really hard to tack into your.

Some of it is.

So much of it is reputation and visual.

Like there's no way to track, hey, you know, this guy bought my product because he saw that guy's page and came here.

It's very hard to quantify it.

Yeah, yeah, so that's, that's typically the first thing that they cut back on.

I think that that's what we're starting to see now is that unless you're established content creator, you've, you know, you've demonstrated that your ability to create content is what is actually attributing to sales in a quantifiable way.

That's where affiliate marketing is.

That's where I'm seeing much more people push affiliate codes now.

Yeah.

Because that's so much more trackable.

Yeah, but it's so, I mean, for high ticket items in that industry, it' hard to, to even be really good at it.

You know, if you're, if you're like doing TikTok stuff for like something under 50 bucks, you could be really wildly successful at, you know, affiliate marketing.

Yep.

But it's hard to do that with a $3,000 suspension system.

Oh, it's.

It's impossible.

Yeah.

You're just not gonna get the same.

And that the buyer of a high ticket item like that is generally going to be somebody who's sophisticated enough to just call you guys directly and have that conversation.

They're not going to go through some influencers page.

They want an affiliate code.

It's not an impulse buy.

It's not.

And it's, it's, it's very thoughtful and pragmatic.

Yeah, exactly.

So they, they spend a lot of time researching these products before they go into.

And that makes it even harder to quantify.

So I was one of those guys.

Like, I spent weeks looking at suspension options and trying to figure.

I still do it.

Yeah.

I mean, the studio's in.

Got a master class in overthinking stuff.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Shout out.

Chad GPT.

Yeah.

Jacky, would you help me out a lot?

A lot of the visuals early on?

Show me what this would look like, Right?

Yeah.

I'll show you some pictures when we're done.

Yeah.

Of like how the lighting, like the, the design, all that.

That all came from ChatGPT.

You know, I just did my garage gym and I think I have a single car garage that none of our vehicles fit in.

So I just said, okay, I'm not making this storage unit.

I'm gonna make it into a gym.

And I did that.

Exactly.

Did you basically just had it?

I told it to.

I want the tonal on the wall here, I want the treadmill here, and I want the floors to be this color and I wanted it to play with different wall colors and different patterns and stuff.

So we got to spend some time at some point in this conversation to talk about the weight loss journey.

You look fantastic.

Thank you.

You lost a healthy amount of weight.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'll try to fast track to that point.

I mean, I don't know.

I guess I fast track anything.

The way that this conversation has gone is like, it's almost like a history Timeline of my life.

Yeah, but look, it's a time capsule and to be honest with you, I think the, the end conclusion of where you are today is actually really cool.

So by all means, like, I don't, I don't want to detract from that.

Okay.

Yeah, well, we'll keep going.

Yeah.

I worked at Rebel Off Road for a couple of years and.

And after that I realized I was kind of in this glass ceiling situation where I wasn't going to grow any further from where I was.

And so you were cognitively aware of that and you just wanted more.

Okay, yeah.

I was never going to be the owner of that company and I was basically number two or three, but Taylor ahead of me.

But I think we were kind of, you know, we had different roles, but we were, we were at the same level and I wanted to do more, I wanted to grow more.

I understood business on a better level than I did before.

I walked into that, that, that shop and I wanted to just maybe see a different side of this industry.

So I worked at a dealership for about three months after that.

Never going to go back to that.

One of my first jobs was I worked for Irvine BMW.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, I hated it.

Oh, yeah.

Every sense of the word.

Yeah, it was horrible.

I worked at Heinton Beach Jeep.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, that probably wasn't good.

Yeah, yeah.

And I have friends there now, so I'm not going to talk bad about it, but I.

It was a very different environment.

Yeah, it's not a good fit for me.

I was the aftermarket parts manager and I still didn't like it.

Yeah, but aftermarket parts in a dealership is not the same.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

So I did that.

I moved from there to magnaflow.

The exhaust company.

Yeah.

And I worked there as a.

Just a tech advisor on the phone.

People were having problems installing their exhaust kits and they'd call me to help them walk them through it on the phone.

Yeah, I did that for about a year.

And you know, this whole time I'm doing content on my own social media.

I'm growing my own page showing people my build, you know, where the places that I'm going.

And I accumulated a bit of a following.

It was probably about, I don't know, eight or nine thousand followers at that point.

And look at all the exposure to.

Different industry parts of the same industry.

Manufacturing.

Yeah, all of that.

And it was cool to be able to get a holistic view at the end of this run of like every piece of it, you know, and the last One that I hadn't got into was really like, like the hardcore, like, marketing agency.

But I, I got, I saw a friend of mine actually sent me a job posting for a truck editor for Driving Line magazine.

And I knew almost nothing about them except for that they were somehow affiliated with Nitto Tire.

And I saw that it was in Irvine.

I was like, okay, it's local, you know, this is a different role.

So I go there, you know, just to see what the job was about.

I had no idea what I was going to get into.

And they said, okay, well, have you ever worked in like a publication?

I said, no, this is, this is my experience.

I'm very technical, heavy and I know everything there is to know about off road vehicles and trucks and I can kind of write well.

And they said, okay, well, we'd like to see a couple like, sample articles that you can write.

Yeah.

See what your writing's like.

Yeah, yeah.

And folks, this is long before CHAT gbt.

I couldn't just go in there and.

You couldn't write me an article.

I literally had to sit down for like a day and a half and just like write it and rewrite it and make edits and polish it up.

And I did that.

And the ideology of writing is going.

To change a lot.

Completely.

Yeah, completely.

And I even find that my own writing style has changed since Chat dbt.

Oh, mine too.

Yeah.

I purpose.

This is going to sound terrible.

I purposely humanize my writing in ways that I know are idiosyncratic to the way humans write.

Right.

Intentionally.

To make it clear I did not Pull this off ChatGPT.

Yeah, yeah.

Especially because a lot of.

So people don't realize that I do a lot of media quotes with journalists.

Right.

Journalists will hit you up if they know you.

They will hit you up via email and say, hey, I'm writing this article.

This is the context.

Can you give me like some, some, some sound bites?

The ones who don't know you will typically call you and have a conversation because they don't want to risk ChatGPT.

And even though they run it through AI editors, but when I respond back to them, they run everything I give them through an AI, you know, scan to make sure it's not.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

So I know that I have to write in such a way that they clearly pass because Even if it's 1% AI, I've had journalists call me back and be like, chris, you plagiarize this.

I'm like, what are you talking about?

And their AI scan will say that Literally it was a definition.

I think it was a definition of like a bond or something.

And I'm like, I'm an attorney by trade, so like I naturally memorize definitions.

So I gave you the definition.

So yeah, of course it's going to say it's plagiarized from somebody else.

That's the definition.

Right.

We even cite it and I'm like, bro, oh dude.

Yeah, but that, that's the AI world.

That's the world that we're living in.

Yeah.

You're gonna get those, those checks all the time now.

It's crazy.

But I didn't have that and I was, I had to go off of.

Off the dome, you know.

So you just wrote just article.

Three articles.

All right.

I turn them in and I had I think it was like six or seven more interviews with this company.

Wow.

And never understood that amount of interviews.

I mean I get it but at the same time it's like that's a lot of time and energy.

It was.

And I used to go straight from MagnaFlow, which was an Oceanside nice to drive down there for work leave at 3 o' clock because I get there at 7am and I come straight to the office here in Irvine and I do.

Did the interviews with them wearing my magnaflow shirt and later on found out that the managers thought that was a bad look.

That I brought my, my shirt from my work to.

To hear I was just interviewing for a new job.

Correct.

How was that bad?

Look?

She.

She still gives me crap about it, but I think it was just funny that, that it was looked at negatively when I had a completely different.

You know, I guess there's also different.

Different demographics.

Totally.

You know, writing in media versus you know, kind of the aftermarket parts.

I guess.

I guess it's a different.

Yeah, it is very different.

I didn't know anything about this company and I come to find out that they weren't actually like a publication.

There were actually a marketing agency and they were an agency of record for Nitto Tire that they created this publication Driving Line basically to just show a lot of, you know, the, the different areas of the automotive culture but having all the ways in the background some tie back to highlight the brand.

A friend of mine does this for a similar tire company right now.

Yeah.

Where he's effectively outside but really an inside kind of marketing guy.

Yeah.

And.

But he, he basically his job, and it's a really cool job is he connects with and I don't want to like out him, but he connects with other brands and then he makes sure that their product is seen on their brands.

Yeah.

They just, they co brand on these projects.

Yeah.

So what was crazy was back in 2016, 17, like they were the only ones in this space that had really been doing content marketing like that.

When you think about it, it's incredibly savvy.

Like I don't know whose idea it was.

Right.

But it's this subtle cross pollination if a brand is everywhere you look.

So let's say you're looking at like you're looking at a suitcase, but in the background you see Louis Vuitton.

You're looking at a home, but in the background you see Louis Vuitton.

Yeah.

Louis Vuitton is marketing to you without marketing to.

Totally subliminal.

It's such a brilliant design.

And social media has gotten way more in your face as of late.

But there are still some brands that do this incredibly well.

Yeah.

It's really.

That's how you get good return on investment.

Yeah.

And, and I think that they were at the time pioneering that especially in the automotive industry.

And, and I thought it was really interesting.

I thought it was way ahead of its time and I just wanted nothing more than to be a part of that team.

And they hired me as a truck editor.

I've started publishing articles like about technical stuff about motorsports.

I was flying all over the country to cover all kinds of events.

I went to Riyadh to cover an auto show.

That's cool.

Yeah, I mean I was going all over the place to just cover all these different stuff.

And a pretty big budget, huh?

It was.

Yeah.

Their marketing budget was substantial back in that time.

And honestly for, for being something that, you know, wasn't a direct advertisement.

It was wildly successful for their, for their business and still is to this day.

So somewhere along the line, you know, articles online and blogs.

That's back when blogs were still pretty hot, you know, and like articles were hot.

People were reading the stuff online.

They were getting newsletters and blogs were Instagram before Instagram.

Totally.

Yeah.

And social media started to pick up and their strategy was, was shifting to more video content and they hadn't really done a ton of it.

There was a lot of like polished video productions that they were doing.

They, they were starting to, to see the benefit in doing shorter, more at home style videos.

People forget that video started off as like these corporate promo videos.

Totally.

And then then pivoted to like everybody instantly had overnight a camera in their pocket.

Exactly.

And then they had a screen to view this content in their pocket.

And it change the landscape so quickly.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's happening all across every industry.

And I think that that's where they were seeing it headed.

They were very forward thinking.

And the company was called C Digital Labs.

They were basically just the agency of record, but they're also like a startup accelerator for a bunch of other companies.

It was really a great experience working for them because I got, I got exposure to a lot of the different things that they were doing at that company.

I think in some ways I go back and do it all over again.

Like that is something that I would probably want to explore as a career path that I never thought of when I was younger.

Yeah.

Because I'm in this space now and I've seen.

So you followed the podcast?

We grew the podcast from an audio only platform, which is why our streaming numbers on audio platforms are way better than our video stuff.

And we knew that we had to make the transition to video.

But it's incredible to see how many people get stuck and can't transition over because of all the work.

I mean, it's way more data heavy, way more editing heavy, and way more distribution heavy.

But the payout is you have a better product.

Totally.

And I think that there's something to be said for where like short form video comment content and brands are going.

I had a guy the other day who saw the podcast video and he was like, hey man, like I mentioned doing a podcast with you.

I was like, oh cool.

Like what do you do?

And he goes, oh, I. I'm a contractor.

And I was like, huh?

But he's like, dude, like, we have to have a personal brand.

We need this.

It's.

The world is really going hard into that.

And it looks like a company like that was probably way more on the floor Forefront.

And they recognized.

Totally.

Yeah.

And, and the funny thing was that nobody over there was really willing to get in front of a camera and talk about this stuff.

But they were like, they tapped me and they said, hey, could you start a vlog?

Make sure to wear your magnaflow shirt.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

And they ended up becoming a partner of Nitto too at some point, I think.

So it was funny to cross over.

There, but they literally asked you to start a vlog.

They tapped me on the shoulder, they said, can you start a vlog?

And this is where a lot of the personal fears started to show up in my career.

At the time I was about £350 and I wasn't comfortable being in front of a camera and talking and Being the face of this brand, of this magazine, and I was the only one that was doing it at the time.

This is going to sound like a stupid question, but bear with me.

Why did you think your weight mattered?

I was very self conscious about it.

Okay.

Yeah.

I've gone through periods of my life where I was.

I was very heavy myself.

I think that heaviest I got was like around 275 to 80.

But I carry it all on my face, so I get it.

But it's.

I had similar insights to this day.

I don't know about you, but I still look whenever I look at myself in the mirror.

I've never had a day where I look in the mirror and go like, oh, I feel attractive.

I'm the same way.

I've never.

I always been like body dysmorphia and all that that goes with it.

And the.

It's.

It's been a big part of my life.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Yeah.

And.

And just like the cringe.

I was always the guy behind the camera.

Right.

You gotta understand, like, I was always the one capturing this beautiful whatever it is that was in front of me, whether it was car landscape or whatever.

And so you agree to do this anyway?

I had no choice if I wanted.

You had a choice.

I mean, I did, but if I wanted to stay there and if I wanted to grow and you know, I had to make that choice to be able to.

To just grow it into my career and.

And you know, my mom instilled a lot of things in me.

One of them was like, if you're stuck between two, two choices, the harder one's usually the one that you got to do that's the right one to take.

And it's like you take the easy way out and you just say no and you go look for another job.

I could have done that, but I said, all right, let's give it a shot.

I like that.

You know, they had like150, 200, 000 subscribers on YouTube at that time.

And that's intimidating.

It was.

That's intimidating.

And I had to craft a show to test, basically.

Pilot test, this vlog concept.

Were you.

So you were in charge of picking the concepts, producing it, editing it, putting.

It out, publishing it, writing the description from start to finish, basically from ideation of whatever the episode was all the way through publishing and then even post publishing, walking, you know, going through the comments, answering questions.

That's a big undertaking.

There's a lot.

Yeah.

And it was on top of doing all the other, you Know, publication stuff we were doing was just writing articles and you know, doing the print magazine quarterly and all that stuff.

Just part of that would be in today's world, a full time job.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I was, I was tasked with this.

The first trip was, the first episode that we were doing was basically I did a road trip to Alaska and back for the Alcan 5000 and I threw this on myself.

I said, hey, what if I just did one vlog a day on that trip?

And they're like, sure.

And I didn't think about the logistics of doing that on a trip that I was taking essentially by myself and trying to upload, you know, driving nine hours a day, getting to the hotel, eating a quick meal, editing it for three hours after that in this hotel in Whitehorse, Canada.

And then you have no time to sleep.

No.

And forget trying to upload it.

I'd have to find the nearest, like fast high speed Internet in the Yukon and, and post it.

Oh my God.

So I got a crash course, you know, on all this stuff like GoPros, you know, downloading all the SD cards and everything into my little laptop.

And you know, I really learned quickly.

And you have no choice at that point.

Yeah, I didn't have a choice.

I was already in it.

And I called the show Chasing Dust.

And the crazy thing is that it is still going on.

I still do that vlog for them today, but I've kept that relationship with them this entire time because it's been so wildly successful.

They've now spun off probably a dozen other content creators that are doing the same thing.

And then now there's always love the.

Name, by the way, Chasing Dust.

Thank you.

I, I, I, I.

When I first saw it, I think probably a couple years ago, maybe longer, I, the name alone is what captured.

I was like, I'm in the name alone.

You know what's funny is they didn't like it when I first got it.

Really?

Why?

They were just like, yeah, I don't know what doesn't really mean it.

I'm like, yeah, it means something.

It's such a subtle nod to the, to the space that you think, well, I guess if you're in an agency perspective and you're not living, it probably doesn't resonate.

I grew up watching all these cool documentaries, you know, Dana Brown and, and Dust of Glory and all that.

And I took a lot of inspiration from some of these documentaries and things like that and everything.

I thought it was a fantastic name.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So over that time you know, I was doing a lot more video content.

Social media was bolstering that a little bit.

You know, I started growing a bit of a following.

Eventually I decided to, you know, I wanted to do this same thing but for other brands.

So I, I branched off and I said, I want to continue my relationship with you guys, but I want to be able to work as a freelancer.

And they took the deal and they allowed me to go and basically do the same thing, marketing for other companies.

You know, basically just doing video marketing, doing social media management and some of these other, you know, tasks that most shops can't do on their own.

Were they at all concerned that you were essentially the face of their franchise?

In this, in this vlog series, it's very public and obviously on a large channel that, that, that you may cross pollinate brands and confuse their ip.

I actually asked them about that before I went ahead and did it and the feedback that I got was that we think it, it bolsters the brand.

I agree, but that's, that's actually unique that a company from their perspective would say, that's cool.

Yeah, it was.

And it was really like the Runway that I needed to get started because you know, they could have just as easily said like we kind of own your face, dude, like your, your rip.

You know, you know, they would, they would do it in a passive aggressive way where they say, look, you can go but you don't get to be on this anymore.

Right, so your face is ours on this ip.

Exactly.

Which is terrible.

But a lot of companies do that, man.

Yeah, I was very, very fortunate that, that I had such a great relationship and still do with this, with this brand that, that they trusted me and enabled me to, to go and do this for other, other companies.

And so I set out 2019 to go do this and started my own business, Desert Chief Media and immediately got a few clients in my hands and it was cool to be able to go to these other small businesses around here and basically just show them everything I know about marketing and social media and I was, was that intimidating when.

You started it because you're walking in, you're pivoting to back to the sales role in some level.

Yeah, yeah, that was, you know, it's funny, I, I pulled some of those, those skills from the off road shop.

You know, I was like building out a proposal for these guys and I was, you know, building out a scope of work and I was showing them like, here's what I'm going to do, here's what I'm not going to do.

You know, you can't, you know, these are the things you can count on me for.

You know, I'm not going to pick up my phone at 2 in the morning and fix your website.

You know, like this isn't, I'm not ideal.

Yeah, exactly.

And, and, and this is how much I'm charging you guys.

And it's an ongoing thing and I need to, I need a commitment for this long and you know, like again all before chat gbt, you couldn't just tell it.

This is what I wanted to do.

I had to write the proposal from start to finish on my own.

But you knew like knowing the commitment of length of time to get return, you knew some of, some of those.

I see a lot of young people in this space that get in, into it and they don't understand like you.

I use a podcast as a proxy.

Again, a lot of people will start a podcast and then two, three episodes deep, they're like, I'm out.

Yeah.

So I see a lot of people who are in the professional space of producing them saying, hey, look, unless you're gonna do this for six months, like I'm not even gonna do one with you.

Yeah, man.

I mean I, I was so hard headed that like I made a ton of mistakes like that.

You know, I, I had undersold myself time and time and time again.

You know, I thought that I just, it was more important to just get their business and so I was trying so hard to just like impress the company.

That's hunger when you start.

That's normal.

Yeah.

And, but you know, at that time I was still, I had so much momentum that I was like, I'm just willing to work through it.

I didn't have a life, I didn't have a girlfriend.

I didn't have, you know, anything else going on.

I was just like by myself, living in this house and, and working on my own little projects and whatever spare time I had.

It's amazing.

What So I, I was single for a very long period of time.

I didn't think I was ever going to get married.

Married.

And then I met my wife.

She moved in on the second date.

True story.

And we've been together forever, since we have a son.

It's an amazing life.

But I spent a lot of time the same way.

Head down, just working.

And I know people like my dad would come over and be like, you know, are you lonely?

And I'd be like, no.

Like I, I feel totally fulfilled.

But for him it just didn't register right.

But for me, I found it such like a, I knew at the time it was unique and I knew it was a creative opportunity to just build totally and I really enjoyed it.

Season of building.

Yeah, I was doing that for that basically the whole time that I was from, you know, starting a driving line till when I started my own company and started rolling into that.

I think the real pivot was that I was living life really fast back then.

I was just doing whatever I wanted and, and I, all the while in the background was this like health thing that I was neglecting completely.

You know, I, I, you knew that at the time?

Oh yeah.

I mean I, I was probably 2018.

I was about 365, 370 and multiple comorbidities.

You know, I had like insane swelling in my legs.

I had like really bad pitting edema, pre diabetic sleep apnea and you know, untreated sleep apnea was like refusing to wear a cpap.

Yeah, they're intimidating.

They, they're not aesthetic people.

Oh yeah.

I mean it's, it sounds stupid, but yeah, I get it.

Hypertension, stage one, you know, 29, 30 year old kid.

Like so you, you had been to the doctor, you'd had your blood panels done, like you knew this.

I, I knew this late, a little bit later on, but I was, I was just like, I was just completely keeping myself ignorant of all that for.

A long time, staying as a way to dissociate from it totally.

And it started to get so bad that, that you know, the lack of sleep or I guess, you know, the lack of restful sleep was really the thing that pushed me over the edge because it just really caught up to me.

I was, it was during the pandemic and, and I was basically just like alone in my house for, for, you know, a year or whatever it was.

And I just felt like I was just depressed, like I couldn't get anything done.

You know, I was, I was, I was doing a lot of things that were harmful to my body and, and it started to detract from work and that's when I really noticed it.

Work is this weird.

So I, I've had similar challenges in my working history where I've used work as like a way to escape the realities that I need to deal with because it's easy to say I need to focus on this.

And it's hard to say I need to not focus on this and deal with this.

Yeah.

And I've gone through weight fluctuate.

My mom was over 400 pounds.

She just lost, like, over half her body weight.

She's.

I think she's actually under £200 for the first time in her adult life.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

And she's had some GLP1 help, but she also trains.

She listens to Huberman now.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

She's deep into, like, the health and fitness just world now.

And it's.

It's weird to have a conversation with my mom, who my entire adult life she was close to or above £400, to see her now in the complete pull.

I mean, she's training every single day.

She walks for hours a day.

She goes to ymca, lifts weights.

She has a trainer, she has a nutritionist.

And she's just.

She called me the day about cold plunging.

I'm like, what the hell, Mom?

Something switched.

Yeah, but she.

But she's also more vibrant than she has been.

I legitimately worried for a long time that she was gonna die.

Yeah.

But she was a nurse who ran a hospital for the mentally handicapped, and it was easy for the world around her to go, okay, that's something you should be focusing on.

That's morally and ethically, like, the right thing to do.

And it was hard for anybody around her to be like, you should be focusing on your health.

Yeah, it's.

It's.

I don't know.

And you can't go back in time.

No.

But I don't know if my.

My internal.

Like, the way I see myself as imposter syndrome is because I see me as her in some ways is part of the reason.

Like, I'm in pretty good shape now.

Like, you know, I'm in decent shape, but I don't feel like it.

Right.

Like, I don't.

I don't look in the mirror, be like, oh, I'm in good shape.

I always, like, worry that that's in my.

Because my mom and my dad are both, like, overweight.

Yeah.

You know, your genetics.

Yeah, I. I didn't have any of that in my genetics, which has made me feel even weirder, which is crazy.

But I totally relate to what you're saying because, you know, I. I feel like I could always go back to that, but it's.

Because it's already happened once in my life.

But, yeah, me too.

You know, I. I was.

That'll always be there, though.

It is.

Yeah.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Deal with it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's.

It's motivation.

Totally.

And, you know, when it started to affect my work, I remember having conversation with my mom and, and she's always been an advocate for my health, but I just kind of, like, I think, you know, subliminally, I. I just thought that I was gonna die early and that I wanted to live life to its fullest while I could.

And I had this crazy, cool career.

I'd done some stuff that nobody out there that I knew had ever done before.

You know, got to do all these crazy experiences with these, you know, these trips and stuff, and.

And I was living life fast, and.

And I didn't have any concept of, like, a future with, like, a wife and kids and, you know, the white picket fence in the house and, you know, like, retirement.

Like, I wasn't saving money for any of that stuff.

I was just living in the now, and I was spending money in the now, and I was just.

I was like, instant gratification, you know, across the board for everything.

And I had a. I had one conversation during the pandemic with my best friend Brad, that that basically was the paradigm shift that has resulted in the journey that I've been in the last five years.

And he called me.

We hadn't talked in a while because we hadn't seen each other during.

During COVID And, you know, he.

He was just saying, like, he's getting ready to propose to his girlfriend later this year.

He needed my help with, like, how to do it and maybe even shoot the photos for it and stuff like that.

And.

And he said, like, you know, it's maybe a little premature, but I. I'm cons, you know, I'm a little concerned about your health, dude.

Like, and he's built like a Greek God, you know, he's like, he's genetically very gifted, and it's really cool.

But, you know, I've always, like, I've never been envious of him, but he's.

He's always been, you know, basically a standard for, like, what I think, you know, would be cool to look like one day, you know.

Yeah.

And he tells me, he goes, you know, I, I, I may be up on.

On that altar, and, And I want you to be standing right next to me, but I want you to be up there looking like the best you've ever looked, man.

Well, what a good friend.

Yeah.

And I, you know, it's the hard.

What a good context to say it to you in.

That was good.

I broke down on the phone, you know, and I don't know what happened, but later that.

That afternoon, I went in the mirror, and I just realized that I didn't recognize who I was looking at and, and who had become over the last 10 years by just neglecting this, this person and just focusing on just work, work, work, work, work and, and becoming this, this career guy and achieving the next thing and whatever, you know.

So I, I just knew that I needed to change something.

I had no idea what I was going to do.

I tried to lose weight in the past.

I tried to diet.

It was just up, up, higher and it was just really hard.

There's a.

So I'm on I microdose a GLP1 now.

Yeah.

Tirzepatide.

Yeah.

But I've been leaning in shape before doing that.

I did it as a kind of a.

My mom was going on tirzepatite and I didn't want her to go on something that I didn't play with.

And the more I played with it, the more I was like, wow, this is really cool.

Right?

And there's some neurological benefits and some cognitive benefits, which I think are really powerful.

But that being said, I, I don't think people who I.

So I have that voice in my head to tell me to eat.

And this, this, the GLP one silences it in a way.

But I don't think there's stuck to my wife.

My wife is naturally petite.

She can eat anything she wants.

She's insanely fit.

I mean, she adds muscle like, like in all the ways that, that you should be envious.

It's phenomenal.

It's incredible.

She has like a naturally gifted, athletic, like, physique and she doesn't try that hard.

It's really infuriating.

But I talked to her about these things.

She doesn't hear like, the food noise.

Right.

And I don't think people who've ever not been overweight or gained like, body fat understand the difference.

And truly I didn't understand it until I got on the GLP1 and my mom had had some blood clot issues.

So I do.

I wasn't prepared to let her take anything that could risk her health.

So that's why I did it.

And then I take a shot of this.

And my first dosages were around the normalized minimum dosage.

It was like 25 units, whatever it was.

And the food noise was gone.

It was the most unusual thing.

And then as I talked to people about how I feel about food now, I realized that there's something, and I don't think we know as a, as a society, there's something biologically different with the way my body and my mind as a result of it Think about food as people who are naturally skinny, dude.

There's just something there.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And I've, I've also been dabbling in some of those GLP ones and kind of, you know, basically just experimenting with them and seeing how they make me feel.

And I found the same thing, but, you know, to just back up a little bit more.

I, I, at the time those didn't exist.

This is in 2020.

Yeah, yeah.

They weren't around and the only option that was available was to me basically was going down to Tijuana and, and having a gastric sleeve surgery done.

Oh, did you have done?

I drove down there myself and I mean I did, I did all the research, I did the pre op diet, I did, you know, the consultations, I drove down there, had the surgery done over four days.

So not the, not the band, the.

Actual surgery, the actual surgery where they cut 85 of your stomach out and they remove it from your body.

Yep.

And my mom had this done, by the way.

Yeah.

And, and I did that and, and I came home and I went through all that through Covid by myself basically.

And just like, oh my God, there.

Was nobody there with me this now.

And people don't understand.

That's a very tough recovery process.

Yeah, it was, it was rough.

I had a lot of people that were, you know, obviously supporting me, but not for, not, you know.

But you're still there by yourself.

Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I use that opportunity because I had heard all the, the stories about people who, you know, had had the surgery done and then they revert back to their old weight or even, you know, failure rate was like pretty high.

And I thought, you know, what's different about the people that are successful and the people that don't succeed with this surgery?

And I think that it came down to the lifestyle and how you actually like, use the tool to, to develop a new way of, new, new habits, new way of eating, new way of exercising.

And that is, that is harder than I think people give, give it credit.

It is, yeah.

And I, I set out on a course of, of like, you know, educating myself in both nutrition and exercise.

And you know, I, I got like a personal trainer's, whatever, you know, certificate just to, so I can.

Did you really?

Yeah, just to, just to see if I, you know, what I could learn about exercise and movement.

And then, you know, I took a bunch of courses on nutrition and I taught myself that.

And the whole time, big shout out to Ethan Suplee's podcast.

I started listening religiously to that podcast.

What a relatable story.

That guy.

Oh, completely.

Yeah.

Yeah, he.

And he looks incredible, dude.

Yeah, yeah, he's, he's really had a crazy transformation both in mind and body.

I think that he's just, he's developed such a crazy, you know, perspective on, on this whole thing, you know, eating and exercising.

I started listening to guys like Dr. Mike Isratel.

You know, I like Dr.

He's great.

RP strength.

Yeah.

And, and the science behind all this stuff.

He's had a surgery to move some excess skin too.

Yeah, he did.

Yeah.

That is a painful surgery.

Yeah.

He looked miserable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So over the course of a year, I lost 175 lbs.

Pounds.

And, and I, I, my goal was to build as much muscle or retain as much of that muscle as I could.

And they look incredible.

I mean, obviously retaining muscle when you're losing body fat at that cadence is not easy.

Yeah, it's very hard.

I've, I've gained some since I've gotten down to my lowest weight.

But normal.

Yeah, very normal.

I'm still working, work in progress.

But the fact is that I've learned a lot through that process, so it's been really, really cool.

And during that process, I also completely quit drinking.

I did too.

I quit like two years ago, though.

Did you?

Yeah.

It's amazing.

How do you feel?

I'm still adjusting on some level to the social stuff.

I don't have a desire to drink.

Sure.

But the.

We've, we as a society have, have built so much of our social engagement with one another around it.

Yeah.

So my wife and I have a tendency, whenever we, we get some time alone, we have a date day or something like that.

We don't go to like a restaurant and drink.

We go to the gym, workout and then go to like a restaurant afterwards.

Sure.

Yeah.

But it's weird.

So my brother and my siblings that are younger are all very much into like drinking is the center of their discussions.

Yeah.

But I don't crave it.

I don't miss it at all.

Yeah.

You know, every once in a while I'll have like a non alcoholic beer if I'm, if I'm missing.

Yeah.

Beer feeling.

But totally, that's rare.

Maybe three, four times a year.

I feel the same way.

And I think that the social lubricant part of it was huge for me.

And that was, that was one of the hardest parts about stopping was just like, what do I hold in my hand when I go to like a.

You know.

It'S just Weird.

And you know, like, it's.

I heard you guys talking about this on, on, on another show.

But, like, you know, you go into like these like, finance meetings and like, everyone's drinking and you're like the only one not.

It's a huge part of my problem.

So, like, I'll go to, like, I'll go to New York or I'll have investment bankers come out and they're in a high stress environment and kind of like you were, where they're neglecting their bodies to focus on the business.

You can see people do it now because you can recognize when people are doing that.

And I feel bad because I know how traveling, and you know this better than anybody, traveling is taxing on your body.

Totally.

You know, getting on a plane, getting off a plane, it has ramifications.

And you start drinking, you're now super dehydrated.

You know, you're taking a toll.

And you might not show it in like, weight gain, you might not show it, but it's having ramifications.

And I, and I go to these meetings and I'm like, yeah, guys, I'm not drinking.

And the automatic question I always get is, oh, dui, drinking problem.

And you're like, no, man, I just feel better not drinking.

It literally started with my wife and I just having like a competition.

And then I'm like, you know, honestly, I don't miss it.

It.

Yeah.

And it's been several years now.

Isn't it funny how when you tell someone that you don't drink, like, they start to immediately defend themselves and they're drinking too.

It's.

It's weird.

It's a social thing, social stigma.

Because we've.

And the thing is, so we pulled it up on the show, I think a couple shows ago, we pulled up like the, the spectrum of the drugs that you can take and how bad they are for your body.

Yeah.

And alcohol is by far and away way worse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But this is going to get really.

I'm diving into the weeds here.

But we as a society, and I don't want to sound conspiratorial, but I know it's going to sound like I'm trying to be Joe Rogan, but we have lived with a propaganda of what society and the government and people around us have told us is okay and not okay for so long that we have rationalized things that we know aren't true.

Right.

And you're like, wait a minute.

Okay, so the government is saying that drinking alcohol is okay, but smoking marijuana?

Well, up until recently, anyway, was incredibly bad for you and it was a dangerous drug.

And you start looking at the ramifications.

Just look at the data.

I mean, this is not an opinion thing.

I'm not a weed guy.

I don't really care.

But you look at the data and you're like, this one is clearly worse for you.

Right, Right.

But we've rationalized acceptance.

There's so much that we as a society choose not to confront that's in front of us because we just want to live with the paradigm.

Totally.

You know, and you're like, how does that make.

And there's so many, like old, like old wives tales, like sayings that are just like, apple cider vinegar is good for you.

Is it?

I don't know.

I haven't seen any conclusive data to that degree.

Nope.

But everyone's like, oh, it'll help levelize your blood sugar.

I'm like, you know?

Yeah.

Everyone's like, oh, you know, brush your teeth.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree on my teeth.

To smell.

I want to smell good on my teeth.

Like, look better.

But we've seen a lot of studies recently that say that a lot of tooth decay is genetic.

Right.

Much more genetic than it is about your maintenance.

That's right.

So that's why some kids who may not eat anything bad at all and not even a ton of sugar are.

Still getting tons of cavities.

Tons of cavities.

And you're like, well, is fluoride good?

Is fluoride bad?

And there's a whole like, sub argument there.

And I'm just like, bro, like, when are we going to start looking at the data and start ignoring like these government sponsored campaigns?

I mean, this was a diet nutrition too for a long time.

Totally.

Yeah, yeah.

It's, it's, it's really hard for the average person to know who to believe and what to believe.

Especially with the spectrum of content creators that fall on every peg along that line, you know, they're all over the place.

It's hard.

And there's money to be made for each of those narratives.

Totally.

And it's, it's.

People overlook the money to be made in the narrative and go, that's what I should be doing.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's about every, you know, every facet of like, of self improvement has that problem and there's always somebody there who's there to make some money off of you.

You know, very wise man once told me, don't ever buy courses.

Yeah.

I have lived by that credo for a long Period of time.

And I think people would get really bothered by it because there are so many people that are perceived to be legitimate that sell courses.

Yeah, but how do you know?

You don't know.

So say, and I have tossed this around, like building a course that works for continuing education, credits for realtors, for attorneys, and selling it for like dirt cheap, like 20 bucks.

Yeah.

As a way to say, look like we're going to give you real value.

It's not hyper expensive.

You can get continuing education credit.

You have to take courses in this to keep your whatever license you have anyway.

And I just can't stomach it.

Yeah.

I just can't.

There's something about it, right?

Yeah.

I just, I can't, I can't do it.

Yeah.

There's a lot of voices out there to listen to.

And I think that it's really important for people to just to try some things for themselves.

Don't just dump everything into some ideology.

I did that for a long time.

There was a time a couple years ago where I was hardcore hormozy.

Oh, really, Alex?

Yeah, I was starting a new business.

I was taking a step back from the marketing stuff and I wanted to start a business and I saw Starlink was coming up and I wanted to create these mounts for off road vehicles to be able to put a Starlink dish on your roof of your car.

And, and like, dude, when I was like starting that out, it was like I was listening to him like he was like, like a preacher, you know, like.

And I started to see some patterns in the way that he does, he does things and I was like just taking notes like, dude, he's like all work, you know, like he wakes up from like this time five in the morning.

He's just working until like seven or.

Eight in the morning.

He appeals specifically to a subculture and demographic that, that really resonates with.

Totally.

So he leans into it.

Yeah.

And, and you know, like I, I.

There's so many things now after a year, a year and a half of doing this business that I'm just like, I'm not like Alex at that at all, you know, so like I pick.

I think he would tell you he's not healthy either though.

He just did actually.

If you listen to the most recent Modern Wisdom podcast.

I love Chris Williams.

I do too.

Lighting the lighting that show was people, people call him kind of douchey and I don't know where that comes from.

I guess Love island maybe.

Yeah, fair point.

But the, the lighting in on his show is such A beautiful cinematic tone.

It was set a lot of the inspiration for what we did here.

Yeah.

But I saw.

I saw that podcast was four hours long.

Yeah.

I was like, I can't listen this whole thing.

No.

I started in the first half hour.

He's talking about how, like, he's departing from some of those tenets that he put out there for the last couple years.

Where.

Or it's like, who cares?

Just work harder.

Like, I kind of expected.

I kind of expected that from him because it makes sense for a single man who's got a wife who's equally as motivated to feel that way.

Right.

And I don't know what their.

Their thoughts are around children.

I don't think I've seen his comments on it.

But at some point, as he personally evolves and matures, that maturation will lead him to a more balanced life.

Totally, totally agree.

And I think that's probably what's happening.

Or it could just be burning out a little bit.

I mean, I don't know.

I think fatigue is real.

Yeah.

So I, you know, in the last couple years, I've been building up this business.

I've been, you know, trying to walk back some of the marketing stuff.

I feel like the kind of lifestyle that I want to live, which isn't extravagant.

You know, it's just owning a home in Orange county, which unfortunately.

And this has been fodder for a lot of social media commentary and some of my most recent posts around this topic.

Owning a home in Orange county is an extravagant thing now.

Now because of the cost of it and how much you have to make to afford one.

It's kind of wild, but let's spend some time unpacking why you wanted to start this business.

And in the process, there's a lot of people listening to the show who aspire to do this too.

I think the lessons you've learned along the way might be helpful.

Totally.

Let's do it.

I think that when I started this business, I believed that the only way for me to get to where I want to be financially was to have ownership in something versus working for another company or having a salary or a job like that.

Okay.

I think that's a.

That's probably a fair assessment.

There are W2 jobs which do pay a lot, of course, but those are far and few in between.

Yeah.

In a dense metropolitan area like Orange county, they're hyper competitive.

And then there's a whole entire cohort of people who are not retiring who would otherwise give up those jobs to a younger demographic.

Which are now sticking around for longer, which means even less of those jobs are available.

Right.

So I think being an entrepreneur tends to be the only viable path near term for a lot of people.

It is and it is no means a for sure thing.

It is a huge Hail Mary.

Because to start a business that gets you to some, you know, degree of success by, you know, standards here in Orange county, you know, that's.

That's a feat in its own.

To be able to start something that gets you to that point within a short enough amount of time.

It's.

But I saw it as a shot for a guy who never got a college degree, who never was formally trained in anything.

You know, someone who just had a lot of life experience, a lot of career experience.

Those are.

Look at your career experience.

The arc of it has been so diversified over so many different subtopics that it's hard to ignore that you had exposure.

People often ask me why.

I think that I'm.

I'm good in the banking space and I don't know that I am.

I feel that way or not.

But the answer is when you work at a startup and you build, you get exposure to all the different channels within a business that you otherwise wouldn't have.

Yeah.

Which gives you a much broader perspective of the business.

Your background kind of lends itself to that, particularly for starting an automotive accessory like or adjacent business.

Yeah.

And marketing that business.

And I think starting it was really the culmination of a lot of the experience that I had in the industry and outside of the industry too.

And I didn't know what I was gonna.

I didn't know how the business was gonna do.

I didn't have a clear path to where I wanted to go.

I just knew that I had something in my hands that I had built for myself.

And other people started asking me, can I get one of those so why'd.

You build it for yourself stuff?

So as a content creator and often finding myself in places like the middle of Baja where there isn't a bar of cell phone reception for two days, Starlink was a huge, huge leg up in technology.

I mean, I.

Not only just from like a, hey, I can post on social media kind of thing from the middle of nowhere, but it was a safety thing.

You know, you break something out there, if you don't have any means of communication to somebody, you can't get the parts you need to fix.

Was also an emergency contact in case someone were to get hurt.

I've had to use it before to do that to get help checking back in with family, back home, wherever you're at.

Navigation, being able to stream music, there was a lot of benefits that came with high speed Internet, literally wherever you wanted to go on the planet.

And the problem was that Starlink didn't make it easy to put it on your vehicle.

They just had a little kickstand thing that they said, okay, you can just set it outside and plug it into a 110 volt, you know, just permanent.

It's, it's kind of messy and frankly people having to break down stuff means one extra step and it's a, it's a inconvenience.

Yeah.

And it wasn't available in motion technically back then.

So yeah, it was like you had to have it parked but it worked in motion.

And so we were like, okay, well let's start to build them out.

For this Gen 3 dish which we started to iterate on, I had a business partner, actually two business partners, husband and wife, and they own a 3D scanning business.

And so they do a lot of engineering and parts development and they were the perfect people to work with because they were able to iterate on the manufacturing side and the design side much faster than if I were to take that on myself because I'm not technically, you know, savvy in that way.

And in the middle of iterating that Gen 3 dish, the mini came out and we were just like, oh dude, this is the product right here.

Smaller, more portable, 12 volt ready.

Had the router built into it and it was just really light and simple and.

And we built them out for that and that just took off.

Yeah, so it was really great.

So you decide on an idea, you guys build a concept, you start using it.

At what point do you feel like this has got traction?

I think it was about two or three months after I had started the company.

Not before.

This is before pre sales.

So we weren't actually selling yet.

But I just had so much interest from the, the landing page that I created.

We had I think 300 email signups for our newsletter when we started the website, before we even sold a single.

Product, which for a new product from a smaller company that's a huge amount of interest.

Yeah, from somebody who, you know, and all it was was just referrals from friends and family and posting it on my social medias and stuff like that.

But people who sign up for a newsletter like that are generally interested in the product and you, I mean even if you get like a 50 conversion rate on people who are interested in Buying it.

That's guaranteed sales on day one.

Yeah.

And that's what we had when we launched.

We had guaranteed sales in.

And.

And the company just started to grow and grow and.

And we actually didn't really have a lot of spikes during the holidays.

It was just kind of like this, like, up into the right, you know, sales trajectory.

So it's.

It's been really cool to.

To be able to.

To do everything from, like, the business side, the administrative side, the manufacturing, to the marketing, to customer service.

Like, basically all that under just like, three people.

And you guys are doing that nights and weekends or.

Yeah, pretty much.

I was.

I was leaving at the same time I got my mortgage license, and I can go into why I got that, but I mean, I. I just.

Yeah, I think that I had.

I had a couple of friends that were in mortgage, and they reached out to me.

They knew I was getting burnt out doing this marketing stuff.

And.

And, you know, after Covid, some of the money was going away for that, so they were like, hey, you know, you could get your.

If you got your mortgage license, you know, you can come work for us.

And.

And I said, okay.

It's been a long time, you know, since I've even been in that industry, but I do know a little bit about it.

So I.

Full circle, baby.

I literally just said, okay, I'll.

I'll.

It do take the course, and if I pass the test the first time, I'll see.

I'll investigate it further.

I just kind of did it to challenge myself, and I passed the test with flying colors the first time after, like, 10 days.

Doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, you.

You've been in this industry.

It was.

It was funny.

I didn't.

I didn't really recall anything from the.

The course that I took for the NMLs.

I really recalled a lot of my prior knowledge from.

From 2008.

9.

And for full disclosure and because I have to take a shot across the bow, I've been begging Saeed to do.

This for two years, really get his NMLS license just.

Just to get his real estate license.

Oh, real estate.

Yeah.

And he just has not done it.

Yeah.

So I'm calling him out now.

Yeah, it's smart man again.

Yeah, there you go.

He's not even here to defend himself.

He's not, but he wouldn't.

He wouldn't have much to say.

I have an active broker's license, so he could easily just put it.

Pop it under me and do whatever he wants.

Oh, yeah, Easy.

Yeah.

Oh, there you go.

Say you got to do it.

Yeah.

So, you know, and I, I got back into it, I realized I really enjoyed it.

And so I made that basically my full time job.

I was doing that basically nine to five, Monday through Friday, doing loan origination.

Not doing well at all the first six months because of just the market that we've been, things you guys been talking about.

It's been really hard.

Plus, you got to find your rhythm and cadence.

Oh yeah.

Which is its own separate self identity vehicle that you got to kind of navigate through.

Totally.

And that was the biggest challenge was like, how did this off road media guy, automotive content creator, like, like do this hard, right, Turn into being this mortgage guy.

But he also has this other business that he just started.

There were so many things in, in the air, you know, the last six months or so, just spinning a lot of plates and, and, and being confused about like what direction to go and what's going to get me to my goals and all that stuff.

And so on nights and weekends, I was at the shop packaging products, shipping stuff out, answering emails whenever I could at the office throughout the day, taking phone calls for customer service throughout the day.

When I'm at work, work and, and spending basically every waking moment working for the last probably nine months.

It's not very glamorous.

It's not.

And I think what's kept me going through it is that I know that this is again another season of building.

It's a season of work.

It's not something that's gonna be infinite.

Yeah, my.

I often get asked.

So when I was building this place, I was just, I had friends who were like, what are you doing?

Just pay for a contractor.

And I'm a licensed contractor.

And I'm like, no, like I should be able to do this.

Like I'm gonna do it.

And we would have these conversations, we would go back and forth and be like, dude, just spend the time with your family.

And I'm like, no, like I'm going to build this.

And people were like, why are you spending so much time and money and investing in it?

And you're working nights and weekends and for literally like five or six months, like I was working 16 hours a day on the weekends, and then I was working nights several times a week.

I remember the Instagram stories.

I'm like, dude, he's going hard.

I really should have made that like a vlog series.

I missed, missed the opportunity.

That's okay.

I should have done it.

But that's another thing to add to your plate.

That Day though, then.

Well, I'm actually considering at some point in time starting a new business and we can talk off, off the hot mics, but if I do it, I want to keep the central topic around what I'm starting quiet and I want to start a vlog series without telling people what it is and let it build up to a very public kind of opening launch.

Yeah, that's a cool concept.

So I, so this is, it's extremely, extremely well funded.

Like I have, I have a concept you're talking really, really big and if, and it might start out of this space.

Wow.

So this might be kind of like your gen 2 evolution of what this space was supposed to become.

So I'm thinking about, and historically speaking, my career has never been able to leverage the social presence in such a meaningful way.

But I was thinking about it the other night with my wife and I was like, you know what it would be really cool to do kind of like a Ryan Sirhant behind the scenes look at what business is like building something.

Yeah.

That I know is going to open at scale.

And I think that's, that's probably going to be what I'm going to do at some point in time.

I love that I haven't figured out when or how, but that, that, that's going to be.

Well, I figured out the how.

I just haven't figured out when, when.

Yeah, but you posted on that one.

Yeah, well, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, it's going to be really cool and then I'm going to, yeah, we're going to figure it out.

But I get, I get what it's like to, to have all the plates spinning and it is exhausting.

But there's so much you learn about yourself and you add another business kind of element to your background that makes you more complex.

Yeah.

And, and I, I, I struggled because a lot of times, especially with social media, I see people who are just specialists in what they do, they niche down too far.

In my mind they are the guy for that thing and, or, or they're One of the 10 people that, you know that do that one thing.

Yeah.

And I, I, I worried a long time about like, do I need to be that much of a specialist or is a generalist that has a little bit of knowledge and a lot of different things a better way to go forward.

And I thought about this on a very deep level.

Like I'm talking like, like you, like staying up at night staring at the ceiling and just thinking about the, the future of my career and where I'm going to be.

And it had nothing to do with the optics of it.

I mean, a little bit with like, you know, what content am I going to make about whatever I'm doing?

But beyond that, it was like, what's going to get me to my goal?

My goal isn't a monetary thing.

It's literally just a happiness thing.

Yeah.

And I think that people often conflate the ideologies of money and happiness because they are interrelated on some level.

But there's a point of diminishing returns.

When money comes in, it's smaller than most people think.

It is much smaller than most people think.

I think on the average, and keep in mind, the average salary across the country is closer to about 70, 70,000 ish, I think, think maybe, I don't know, I haven't checked.

I even checked a while almost, I think, is it, is it okay?

Yeah, yeah.

So I think once you get past like around that inflection point of what the average salary is, anything above that doesn't bring you the same degree of happiness that getting up to that point did.

Exactly.

And I'm watering down the numbers so I don't have somebody who trolls me later on saying you got it wrong.

But I have, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this as of late.

The money aspect and the happiness and the career and the building.

And I've come to the resolution, at least for me anyway, that it doesn't stop.

There's always going to be this infinite curiosity of self growth and not everybody has that.

You know that, right?

I don't know what it's like to not have that.

Did you find that when you pivoted to the mortgage space, you started making content that was finance related?

I was trying to, I'm trying to do more of it.

Right.

But I've been holding myself back.

Why?

Because I'm honestly afraid of what might happen.

What does that mean?

So this is getting real deep.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

I've been worried about this one really silly thing which is just losing people who have been around for the journey.

That's why I was asking is you've built, you curated a following in this niche that have been around for the journey.

But you can still do both, right?

Totally could.

And I planned it's, you know, like next week, next weekend my wife and I are going to go down to Mexico for four days and do a Bronco Raptor trip.

You know.

Congrats on the wedding, by the way.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And that That's.

I haven't even gone into that part of my life.

But, you know, meeting my wife has been, you know, so transformative for me.

And not just because, like, I found this woman that I love and I love to spend time with and who supports all these crazy things that I've been doing, but just the way I've been able to grow as a person has.

Has just been kicked into such a crazy high gear.

When I felt like I wanted to start building a life with her, that just changed everything.

It's.

It's a weird.

I don't want to call it instinctual, but there's something innately human about it.

It is, yeah.

It's weird that I already think about like what I want my future unborn children to have.

And I'm doing things.

Today we have a six year old and we waited till we were older because my wife didn't want kids.

There is something so incredible.

My mom used to smell me when I was a kid and she'd go, oh, like.

And I was like, that's weird, right?

Because, you know, but I do it to my son and I get it.

It's this caveman thing, right?

It's this pheromone based, caveman, instinctual, human thing.

But it also has like a biological cord.

And I don't know if anybody's ever tested this.

I feel like my cortisol, like my stress lowers.

This drops down when my son's in the room and I'm hugging him like.

So I.

When my son was born, I made it a point.

Every day I was leaving the office at 3:30, 4:00', clock, the latest I'd get home, we would have dinner together.

I'd give him a bath, I would put in the bed, I would lay in bed with him.

And the, and the reason, in part why was when he was born.

And a lot of fathers feel this way.

I actually talked to a dad about this last night, that when my son was born, I didn't feel like this immediate connection to him.

And it makes sense because the mom carries this child in them inside for nine months and then they're born.

And there's this instant connection because they've been connected in a way that we as fathers don't really have the same experience.

You see it, you're there, third party.

At least not right at the beginning.

Not in the beginning.

And a lot of dads feel that way.

They just don't openly talk about it because it's stigmatized to not feel a connection with your own Kid.

But the more and more I spent time with my son in those moments, the more that connection grew in such a meaningful and cool way.

But it's not talked about a lot, and I really wanted to be connected to my son.

And honestly, it's the best part of my life right now.

But, yeah, it.

It's weird how we, as a species, as a human, as animals, you partner up with whoever it is you partner up with, and it can really elevate a lot of you as a human in ways that you probably didn't expect.

Yeah, she.

She exposed things that I've been neglecting in my life.

She's, you know, bolster things that I. I needed bolstering in.

She's.

She's been the rock in terms of, like, my growth, because I. I don't think that I would have even tried to achieve half the stuff I have in the last couple years if it weren't for her.

So.

So what does she do for a living?

She is.

She's an esthetician, so she actually.

Yeah, she's.

She's great at what she does.

Yeah.

My wife is a registered nurse.

Very different background.

Yeah.

But I love that.

Having the different perspective around.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My wife's.

My wife's human eq and, like, not.

She.

I am not a social butterfly.

Like, this is a practice apathy for me.

I am not good at this.

If it were up to me, I'd shut up, sit in the corner, and just work.

Right.

Probably similar.

Same for me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My wife will go into a room and know and talk to everybody, and it's raging.

Yeah.

Like, she will just literally, like, she'll know everybody's backstory.

She knows every mom in the neighborhood.

She's, like, fully ingratiated in the details.

People, like, confide in her in ways they would never confide in me.

And you're just like.

Like, how do you do that?

What the hell, man?

Yeah, but it's.

It's a.

It's a beautiful symmetry.

It's the yin and yang thing.

It is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And my wife, you know, she.

She really didn't know where she was going in her career a couple years ago when I first met her, too.

And she actually took a career course that helped her kind of develop some of those, you know, those things that she.

She would like to maybe try and learn and fell in love with.

With skincare and.

And she just, like, boom, boom, boom.

Went to school, got the license, got the job, got, you know, all this stuff, and she just absolutely loves what she does.

I think number one in her entire company right now.

She really.

Yeah.

I believe in terms of sales and customer service and satisfaction, all that stuff.

It's a cool gig, man.

You could.

You could have a separate cottage business dedicated solely to that over time too.

And I have some friends who.

Who did that and then developed their own skincare products.

And it can.

It can really go in a lot of directions.

So it's really cool.

I also want to spend a little bit of time, like full circle.

So now you're in the mortgage space.

Yeah.

You have this hesitation about, you know, I guess, mixing the content.

Yeah.

But then how do you market and brand yourself in that space?

Plus there's a good argument to be made that.

And I don't want to bastardize people, but here, a lot of people in the automotive space could use the financial literacy that you could probably give them because you're in this business.

Which has been the cross section that I've been trying to plan out the content around.

How do you make financial literacy digestible?

By guys like me.

By guys who are mostly just gearheads that have dirty dirt under their fingernails.

And maybe they work a blue collar job or they don't know a whole lot about real estate.

Or maybe they're just.

They've never bought a home before.

They don't know anything about buying a house because of the market that we're in.

And they've been renting their whole lives.

That was the premise of the show originally.

Yeah.

That's why I started.

It is.

I feel like the expletive field rages were much more relatable than Dave Ramsey telling everybody that they're wrong.

I hate Dave Ramsey so much.

Yeah.

There's a lot of reasons why he's a dynamic devil.

And his finance people know that I hate him.

Yeah.

And it's a whole thing now.

Oh, good.

I'm gonna get a C and D at some point in time.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's good.

It's gonna come on Instagram.

Dude.

I used to have his book up in the background.

And then it caused all sorts of problems later on.

I. I wound up getting threatened by somebody on his finance.

Yeah.

I should probably pull it back.

And I did.

But a lot of people who listen to the show are actually car guys.

Yeah.

And I'm saying this to you in a way where I'm encouraging you to find your happy sweet spot where you feel comfortable doing it.

A lot of us who grew up loving cars also need the money to fund that addiction.

Totally.

And A lot of us have aspirations to do more and the concept behind the show originally was like, we can speak to people in a way that sounds more like two guys having a conversation that are our friends than it does some guy, like lecturing you on how you should and shouldn't be spending your money.

Yeah.

And I think that you have that.

I mean, dude, you've been fantastic on this show.

I appreciate that.

This is a very natural thing for you.

This is the first interview style podcast I've ever done.

Is it really?

Yeah.

You have a podcast set up though?

We haven't done anything yet.

You're kidding me.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah, we just started.

Started mapping out some content and getting some Realtors in there and stuff like.

That, so you don't need to map it out, man.

Yeah, that's the misconception.

Like, this is so much more organic.

Yeah.

So what's this podcast going to be about?

So we originally created the studio just as a content space.

We're still, you know, dabbling with the idea.

And who's we?

Like, what was it?

Me and, and, and Elliot, who actually is the branch manager.

Okay.

Okay, great.

And he's not a content guy, but he's.

He's more comfortable in front of a camera these days.

He's done a couple videos of me and, you know, we wanted to have the space to.

To be able to do whatever it is that we wanted to do in terms of content, whether that was a podcast or just doing, you know, some educational videos, or just talking to a realtor about what they do and introducing them.

We.

Our intention is also to use it to help Realtors kind of market themselves a little bit and forge relationships with them as well on a networking basis.

Realtors need authenticity in the business.

There's too many people.

Making matters Current is a great social media page.

I find them incredibly disingenuous.

They manipulate data to support a realtor narrative, and then these realtors go out and talk to their clients, some of which are financially literate enough to go, okay, that's not accurate.

You're now bending facts to make me to buy a home as opposed and get a sale, as opposed to being authentic.

Yeah, we've.

We've actually.

I used to trash a lot of the real estate industry, even though I'm part of it, and I've been in part of it my whole life.

My family's all part of it, because I was so frustrated with this.

And I've learned to embrace that there is an entire subset of really, really aspirational Realtors who listen to stuff, who really, really want to do the right thing.

Right.

And really educate people.

And I think there's a.

There's a value for someone like you in that space.

I hope so.

And, you know, I. I actually am one of the weirdos who took that fiduciary responsibility seriously when I should.

When I took that NMLS test, and I passed.

And, you know, I cringe at a lot of Realtors and mortgage brokers that are making content these days.

And that's part of the reason why I thought I could bring value to this industry is because I come from a very authentic place of creating content.

It's just really off the cuff.

And, you know, I was.

My content was also full of expletives.

On my Instagram page, I would openly bash UTV guys.

You know, like, I was totally too edgy for a lot of brands they.

Didn'T still do, by the way.

Just.

Yeah.

Some shows I don't.

Sometimes I do.

Sure.

Yeah.

And.

And.

And I.

You know, I feel like that level of authenticity really connects with.

With the right people, especially those who don't want to listen to some dude wearing a suit or, you know, wearing, you know, a tie, talking about something that they don't actually even really understand.

I used to love my suits and ties.

Yeah, I used.

I had custom suits.

I had.

I mean, I went above and beyond to dress very Italian, very well, and I invested thousands and thousands of dollars.

And to be honest with myself, and my wife's probably gonna laugh at this, I. I don't like putting them on anymore.

Yeah.

I don't enjoy it, and it's just not who I am anymore.

Yeah.

And that's okay.

And I think that there's a whole subset of people out there who appreciate that.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's a weird thing with society, too, where you have to look the part for some people for them to take you seriously.

And for me, my background, my pedigree, you know, I don't think I'm the world's greatest at anything, but, you know, I've done a couple things, and I find so many people will look at me and be like, nah, you know what you're talking about.

And you're like, why you're wearing a hoodie.

I've literally had that comment on social media, you're wearing a hoodie.

I'm like, how does that.

How do you discredit me automatically from wearing, like, wearing a hoodie?

But if the perception is interesting, it is.

So I want to be Mindful of the time, we're getting long in the tooth, you know, because you're easy to talk to.

But what's the next chapter for you going to be?

Because I'm going to check in and hold you accountable.

Yeah.

I've since taken a little bit of a step back away from Rev Link from my starlink mount business to focus more on mortgage and finance.

Would you start another business again?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

I think that being a mortgage broker is in a way a little entrepreneurial because, yes, you're working for a company.

It'S a lot entrepreneurial.

You're working for a company, but at the end of the day you're in charge of getting your leads, you're in charge of working the business business and all that.

But in no way am I averse to starting another business.

I just don't know what yet.

You ever thought about starting your own mortgage company?

Not yet.

I don't think I know enough about it yet.

I could help you do that.

I hope Elliot's not listening to this.

He's like, he just came on.

No, no, no.

What do you mean?

I think everybody in the space ultimately aspires to have their own autonomy and I think that's a perfectly reasonable law long term goal.

So.

Sure.

Elliot, don't get mad at me.

It's all love.

Yeah, yeah.

I think, I think growing the content side of what I do is, is, is really in my sights right now, is making what we do very relatable, you know, to, to the average guy.

You're gonna be really good at it, I'm telling you.

Right?

I hope so.

Yeah.

And I don't.

I want to just show people that there's a way to do this without sounding super cringe or just like spouting off stuff that isn't, you know, isn't factual.

And you know, you hear.

We've talked about this before.

You know, people like to say it's a great time to buy a house.

And it's like, buy now?

Yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of that going on.

Yeah, there is.

But here's what I'll say too is I, I used to come out like guns blazing on some of this stuff.

And there's.

Guys, we mentioned Logan over Housing Wire.

He's, he's a hardcore housing pundit.

Now keep in mind, he works for Housing Wire, so he's got a vested interest in the outcome of that narrative.

But I think he legitimately believes what he's talking about when he talks about Housing.

And he would argue pretty compellingly to his defense, using real good data, that it's always a good time to buy a house.

Yeah.

And he would.

Stanley, firm behind, you know, firmly stand behind that.

I get it.

I don't think that at this point in time, I can safely say that there's.

That anyone really knows what's going to happen next.

But I think that's what gets lost in translation for most people is that from a business perspective, volatility is not your friend.

Yeah.

You can make money, but you can also lose a lot of money, and that's essentially gambling.

Yeah.

What's the VIX at right now?

It's actually more stabilized.

It's lower.

Yeah.

It's not as bad as it had been historically.

I learned about that from you, by the way.

Vix.

Yeah.

The hostility volatility index.

Really?

Okay.

Well, yeah, I think there's a lot more that I.

That, you know, that I've learned from you.

Really?

It's weird.

You inside.

You inside.

I will say it's both of you guys, but.

So we'll close the show on this side.

And I still struggle with imposter syndrome from time to time.

And I worked under a guy who I didn't even realize was mentoring me for the course of.

Call it 20 years, who in some moments was very mean to me.

But he was a former bond trader, and he had this incredible view of the capital markets, the secondary markets, Wall street, and how they all interplayed with the treasuries and bonds.

And I would come in the mornings and hear him, like, yell and, like, be upset and his commentary anecdotally.

And over the course of, like, 20 years, I picked up way more than I realized.

Like, just stuff like where I'm like, oh, I don't even know where that came from.

Blacked out.

And as we've done this show, more and more time has gone by where I'm like, I think I learned a couple of things.

You kind of know what you're talking about.

Yeah.

And I don't mean that in, like, an arrogant way.

I mean, that isn't like.

I'm kind of stunned that I know what some of these topics are.

And for me, it's.

It's like I don't realize how much other people don't know, because I didn't actively go out and learn it.

I just learned it by.

As a byproduct of being in the business.

Yeah.

And hearing really smart people, smarter than me around me, talking about it.

Yeah.

And the.

The one thing I can tell you is is that I'm still constantly learning about all these things.

Right?

Right.

Even for shows like when we talk about the vix like said will go and do some research and I'll learn some new things about the history but I nerd out on it just as much as I do like talking about it.

I still read about these things.

So, you know, I'm learning from you, you're learning from me.

We're all learning from each other.

That's what makes it good.

My favorite frame for all this to tie it up with the bow is like I tend to think back like is the 18 year old version of me proud of who I am today day and what am I doing today to make the 58 year old version of me proud of who I am?

Is the 18 year old proud of you today?

He is.

All right.

Very proud.

All right man.

Good man.

Yeah, you should be.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Coming out man.

I appreciate you having me on.

Yeah.