Family, Business, and the Entrepreneurial Journey - Jake Friedlander

[0:00]  guys welcome back to another episode of the heart and hustle podcast I've got a really a really good friend and I'm incredibly excited for you guys to spend some time I'm excited too on the podcast Jake Freelander bro thank you so much for joining me yeah I appreciate it you know I've always been inspired by your spirit your approach to life in general but more importantly you and I have a lot of shared experience for the fact that we're both Building Family businesses yep and there's a lot of dynamics that people kind of don't appreciate about that entire growth process yeah and so today I want to take a little bit of a deep dive into that but first why don't you give everybody an introduction to yourself and cool kind of what you're about totally so um born and raised in Las Vegas I'm 29 years old I'm in a family business we call tough skin it is a marble protection product my father's the one that invented it and when I was 22 I had

[0:50]  a little bit of a wild dream that I wanted to make music and I was going to school for business I had changed my major three or four times both me and my sister who was at the time living in Los Angeles for working for Rockstar Energy company we both were feeling like this isn't like what we're doing isn't it and I had a because I switched my Majors I had a good amount of school to go through so we I ended up dropping out of school so that I could work on music and so that I could join the family business because it was like go to school for business for another three years or join a family business and learn a business from the inside out yeah I also had this really great teacher I I don't remember his name but um when I moved back from San Diego I went to CSN and this business teacher is like a business 101 class

[1:36]  um and and you know just I'm thinking okay easy peasy 101 let's go I'm excited to learn and I walk in and the guy's like it's this really old is this really old fella maybe like in his you know early 70s mid 70s and white hair short guy looks like a professor and he's like look I've made a lot of money in my life and my my passion is teaching my goal one day like this is first day my goal one day is to die in the classroom writing things on the Whiteboard like that is my true passion so he's like you can look me up I don't care it doesn't matter I've made money though trust me and you you can look it up if you want this guy was a multi-millionaire instantly answered the question of like why should you listen to yes instantly and he was like I'm not gonna give you much homework I I'm gonna do one thing for you and if you can do this one thing you'll get an A in this class and you'll

[2:23]  do great and if you take what I teach you over this next semester you could run a business and you could succeed in business no matter what okay so his thing was he had a hundred rules and each um I don't know it's like maybe every three weeks you had to remember five rules and you had to write them out to the T everything had to be the same the periods commas apostrophes everything but if you did that that was your grade yeah at the end of it you had to just write 25. but you had a whole quarter to learn and you're learning time by time so it was relatively easy to do and if I would just go home and write them down and I would do it like a couple times a day and then it's like imprinted in your brain so that was my first business class ever now I changed my major from Kinesiology to philosophy to psychology to business and my first business teacher says if you never took another business class

[3:10]  and you just follow these rules you'll be okay yeah and it kind of just like I'm tainted already you know I'm already thinking what am I doing but I moved back I went through a little um a little bit of a um I don't know exactly how to explain it but I I went down the rabbit hole when I was um 18 years old I started looking out on the internet I was I was in living in San Diego with some friends and I think at the time this was about 10 years ago now and I just started looking up like what is the Illuminati and just like I started going down the rabbit hole yeah and there wasn't enough information for me at the time to realize or recognize that there was like maybe a middle ground yeah I went from my analogy kind of is that everybody is born looking at a wall everybody's looking at the same

[3:58]  wall everybody's got us or not the same wall but a wall everybody's got a son father mother one or two maybe neither whatever the situation is everybody has a son everybody has a moon everybody has experiences inside of this wall each wall is painted differently but everybody's looking at a wall yeah now to get over this wall you have to either experience things learn things go through things you know all the ups and downs of life and you have to want more then you start to climb this wall when you look over the wall when I did I saw anger I saw um corruption I saw Troublesome things to an 18 year old looking at the world like maybe 19. what is how come nobody's ever said anything is this your first experience kind of like getting out of I would say the mindset of being a child and looking at the rest of the world and

[4:45]  being like where do we fit yeah well who am I what am I doing and I definitely went a little crazy I was convinced at the time and I I lived with a couple of my friends they were all scared of [ __ ] of me at the time that like I didn't want to go to sleep for a good solid like month I didn't like going to sleep because I thought when I went to sleep like I was going to wake up and the war was going to happen and like the war was going to be starting just like Red Dawn like planes are flying over I gotta kill my way to get back to my family my family's in Las Vegas like I'm already I'm already losing the battle because I have to go all the way back and now I start talking to my dad at this time obviously he's like oh you know [ __ ] son and so you know he doesn't really know but we had a friend and have a friend still to this day we actually bought just not that long ago bought a little plot of land on his Ranch in peoch it's like outside of Peach and so he's you

[5:33]  know kind of the crazy guy that didn't do well in society moved out to a ranch right so we have had some connections me and Jeff still do have this we and I still believe a lot some of those things because it's evident even more now more than ever some of the things that I was going through but I didn't have the perspective or the concept of like the internet the real world and maybe there's this middle grade like the the gray area in between yeah that like nothing is really black and white there's always two sides to a conversation and there's sometimes almost always a middle ground where Maybe This was done and that was done but reality is maybe somewhere mixed isn't it interesting like you know I had a conversation on one of the last podcast episodes where we talked about the reticular activating system of your brain and it's like when you start

[6:19]  making things aware in your brain your brain has an amazing ability to start honing in on those things yes and so we really talk a lot on the podcast about like mental diet yeah and so when you get into some of those stages where like you're looking for information yeah you've got social media that's feeding you oh my God as well yeah it starts to form your world for sure worldview which is really interesting yeah and that that happened to me and at 19 impressionable like I was I was I'm so fortunate enough that I had um my family to fall back on because I ended up coming back to a lot moving back to Las Vegas I went to CSN so I could go to UNLV so I can play lacrosse okay I got to play lacrosse with like some of my best friends still to this day and as you know I was a little overweight in high school and I came back I lost 80 pounds I did a physique show in San Diego like had this incredible experience all while kind of

[7:07]  going a little crazy yeah and then move back go to CSN um go to go to UNLV so I can play lacrosse get to play with my best friends now I'm fast as fast as I've ever been as strong as I've ever been and for the first time uh in my life really I felt like I was on the same playing field as everyone else okay now there's no Advantage nobody is like I cannot say I have no excuse they're like oh he's stronger than me or oh he's faster than me like maybe he's bigger but like we're on the same field and I always felt like I was missing something like somebody else had something else that I missed and I just like whatever it is I'm I'm not full I'm missing something and that's why it's not working out and that was Monumental for me Monumental at the time and I was recognizing it but I don't think I fully grasped at the time what was going on so let's boil that down a little bit yeah

[7:54]  right so you and I have both gone through our weight loss Journeys yeah right and I feel like there's a part of me that's always going to be anchored in that chubbier version of me do you know what I mean and that creates that sense of almost like inferiority it does right or that insecurity inside myself and so I feel like even to this day I have to work extra hard to get to the same level as everybody else yeah I'm not sure if that's a chip on my shoulder that's advantageous or if that's going to be something that's going to push me to the next level but it is something that I recognize about myself for sure I think it's I think it's advantageous because similarly to like when um there's a guy named Mike Malak the reason I bring it up is because he had some troubles with drugs and then made a book wrote a book called I forgot what the book is called but it's basically like him hitting rock bottom and now when he talks about it on

[8:41]  his podcast he says well now I feel like it's a superpower because I got to go through that thing and like maybe I'm not gonna say that losing weight makes us have a superpower but it does give us this thing that like for me it was advert adversity I had to go through this adversity of like feeling inadequate feeling like again like I'm not good enough I'm chubby I'm overweight and like looking at myself in the mirror and seeing how people reacted to me and being like Oh I felt and maybe it was me judging me but like I always felt like when somebody saw me they saw this chubby little kid they couldn't that like couldn't figure it out this is really interesting to me because I was having a conversation earlier today about the term of like agency so having the power to impact the world around us and often when we feel like we don't have control it starts to create that sense of like inferiority of like I'm

[9:28]  just getting swept up yeah in the world and I don't have the ability to impact my way in life yeah you know what I mean yeah for sure yeah for sure and so that happened I come back I get to play lacrosse incredible and then I drop out join the family business tough skin and at the time I was just doing installations because that's like kind of what I was good at and that's what we needed yeah and my dad was you know doing most of the sales so I got to go you know enjoy that learned a bunch of stuff kept working on music and I definitely went through some periods that weren't great because I was now I had this urgency of like I had just went through this thing I thought the war was coming the war is not here but it still seems like it's imminent yeah and the way that I get out of this is by having good music and I need to

[10:15]  practice all the time and I was staying up too late not making it to a job on time I think one of the last straws where like my parents basically fired me for a week is um I missed a flight oh wow and I had been up at you know working on music till three four a.m I was like oh two two hours three hours I'll be fine but it was not just that one night it was The Compound Effect of like all the nights and then you missed the one night that matters because you didn't go to sleep but I didn't have a good relationship with sleep either I didn't know and we're young you know you don't yeah you're Invincible it doesn't matter so that happened I feel like I've gotten to grow up a lot and I put my first song out last November which has been a huge thing I came out with a music video as well done by Kyle shout out to Spirit and um uh when I put it out then there was like

[11:05]  this thing of like is this good like is this even worth it am I even because I had spent so much time working on music that releasing it was almost like what right why are you like but this is the thing this is why you did all this you spent all this time and then I had to go through the like well now I'm not as angry yeah but I think I but the the context is still the same we still have the same problem so it's been figuring out who I am as an artist and how I want to be portrayed because I I do listen to music and listen to the words like I want to know what people are saying and when I find an artist that I'm like I [ __ ] with what he's got to say I'm I'm all in like I'm listening to everything and then when I make music I'm like I want people to get my message and it's um it's still uh I I think we're always

[11:54]  trying to dig for that piece of gold yeah music so let's talk about what your message is yeah so what is my message yeah what is your message so it sounds like you've come across a lot of adversity in your life you've had to develop the personal skills to be consistent you've had to overcome challenges you've had to push your world to you a little bit in a couple different ways definitely so how does that message kind of get conveyed in your the music that you're making so that's a great question and I don't know if it's I think that it's the best version that it's ever been but if I were to like boil down what I want people to get from my music and maybe this is down the road even if it takes time like I'm I'm happy with that but we need to course correct we need an update in our system in our way of life we as Americans and as America got a chance

[12:42]  200 plus years ago to create a country and now we're kind of falling into the same routines that we left the other country for as happens so I think we need a new a new education system we need a new prison system we need a new political system we need a new um you know policing system a new drug system a new drug enforcement system because what we're doing isn't necessarily working and I hope that by talking about it we can bring forth people that also are willing to do the work because there's people out there like right now Tulsi gabbard Marion Williamson um I think even like Ben Shapiro the breaking points podcast Crystal and sauger like them putting forth the best information they can like even kind of

[13:30]  what happened to tuckle Carlson this not that long ago him going to Twitter like that is the system breaking down and being like this isn't working because he was with him for what 15 20 years he was do he was their talk show host yeah and now it's not working and it's like it's not working for a lot of people and I think that a lot of people feel that way and that's how I felt and I think I wanted somebody to tell me that I was not alone yeah and I started making music to like kind of round up people to be like we feel this way and I don't want to let our system just go awry and be like oh well uh we tried or did we like I want to say that like I tried yeah and I've I've um over the past few years accepted both paths I am especially with the family

[14:18]  business like I work my ass off there so that I can afford to pay for my ship that's getting me to My Island my metaphorical Island yeah but I'm on a ship now going there and I want to take care of my ship because I want to take care of myself and whatever I want to be involved in I want to be able to say that like I I while I was there I impacted it in a positive way and I was able to like you know build it up you know the conversation or the least the topic about so we work every single day right most people show up to work every single day and often that is a vehicle which will get them to somewhere else yes but it's interesting when you're building a business with your family especially yeah because my question for you is does everybody's passion align with yours so does everybody realize the role that Jake is playing in facilitating this role inside of tough

[15:04]  skin he's using it as a vehicle to get to his metaphorical Island does everybody else's perception of what you're doing are they okay and supportive of that type of mission um they are a lot more now okay because I think it was just a phase for them when I was younger it was like oh whenever he'll be done with that yeah but now that I've gotten older and it's still something that I'm sticking to I think that they understand and they saw me obviously like my weight loss Journey as well so they and I felt like I'm a I'm a long game guy yeah I'm I learned early on that if I want something I'm fine working for it and like that happened with the gym same with you like there was no instant gratification with losing weight yeah and the same thing happened with music I've been working on music the last seven eight years of my life like I I just put out my first song really realistically in that time span

[15:52]  so like I'm happy delaying my gratification to to get to my goal and they definitely understand it more now we also recently in the business um we hired this company the lady's name is Rebecca and it's a process called the EOS system it's an entrepreneurial operating system and it basically it it made it it gave us a way to break down our business and to make sure that everybody's in the right seat doing the right job oh this is so relevant for me right now so there's a um an integrator there's a like the the bird's eye view guy like the ideas guy which is like basically at the time my father and still is now and eventually that's where I'll take my position of but there's the bird's eye view the ideas guy there's the integrator that's the person that kind of like makes the things happen to some

[16:40]  degree and most of the time has the final say which is my mother the owner and then there's like the sales side there's the installation side there's the dealer Network side there's the you know the different parts of the system and then everybody has like their own part so everybody knows what their part is and knows what their job is and we do meetings on a pretty regular basis and we talk about like everybody has rocks yeah so you make five rocks for the quarter for me it's like my sales quota it's new relationships with Architects and designers it's three Hotel quotes that are above a certain amount for me um just because yeah and then like I think my other one is four samples done in hotels so new hotels that we haven't talked to yet that have a sample that we've done inside their bathroom vanity inside their bar whatever the case may be so those things happened

[17:28]  and those are under my rocks and then we talk about them but that has made our business system a lot better and I I do believe that my the other thing that I do is now accepted and my my father while we were not that long ago we were well we were just in Miami and we went uh we drove up to have dinner with our dealer up there and while we were in the car the Dealer's name is Derek he was like Hey like how is your hip-hop thing going you know and we talked about it a little bit and it's it's definitely still a little bit awkward for me especially with my father with like my parents definitely with my Dad yeah and Derek you know they're just older people and I'm like music my music like I think they get the idea when I talk to somebody they totally get the idea

[18:15]  now musically I think for me that's kind of a way to like help get people involved yeah because I can't have the conversation with everybody that's impossible but if I can get you involved in the music then you can be on board even if you don't like my music you can support the idea that I'm pushing forward yeah and so my dad was like you know I gave him the pass that if he makes it big well relinquish his duties yeah and like we had it was a good it was a little laugh but it was also like a that was nice you know because it was not only in our talk it was with somebody else validation validation so that was definitely nice and I I feel like I have so much validation with people that are our age or even older people but with my parents it's just so funny because I it is such a broad thing that I'm trying to accomplish and it's not I don't believe that I have to do it all I just think that by kicking down the door and

[19:04]  starting a conversation we can start to group together the people that can make it better Educators there's professors that and Educators all around the United States that could help build a better education system but if we go to politicians that aren't Educators that aren't teaching kids like you're disconnected and you can't tell that person how to how to run a good school so I think that we just need to like not burn the thing down we need to create new laws to make a better Society yeah like for me and at me and my dad we talk about this one a lot but um oh [ __ ] citizens united yeah citizens united is a law that makes it possible for basically corporations to pay billions of dollar Millions to billions of dollars into our political system it's

[19:51]  what's made it possible for politicians to be bought frankly yeah lobbying all of that jazz if we get rid of that and we take money out of politics politicians can no longer be worth 100 million dollars or 30 million dollars like I think as a public servant I'm all about people being wealthy I'm all about it do that I if that's your goal and you need the money and you want the money do it but as a public servant to the country that should be off the table yeah normally like our idea of servitude does not come along with being incredibly wealthy no there's a disconnect there's a disconnect yeah and and and I think that it's happened slowly over time like it was one law at a time one one maneuver at a time one thing that happened at a time but it snowballed and now we're here and it's like if we just

[20:40]  let the snow keep rolling we're gonna run off the cliff yeah eventually like there is people like Tulsi gabbard and even like um Robert Kennedy Jr I'm not saying he's the guy that needs to be the next president but like right now the political system is kind of like shushing him and not letting him do his thing and like they don't want to have a debate they don't even want to have the DNC like I heard that they don't even want to let Biden debate with other people and it's like no [ __ ] because he shouldn't be the like yeah he can't hold the conversation like he just fell over like again and it's like I don't think he's a bad guy but like we need something better than that like there has to be a better option and I think because we're coming from a younger generation we recognize that there is so much opportunity for different representation yeah from the people in the society that we come from that when we're kind of operating in a legacy system it's like hold on why are

[21:28]  these four people the people who are supposed to drive us forward you know what I mean like the system that we're stuck in is really kind of laborious to make change and the change is the only thing that's really going to save us for sure you know and it's tough and that's why I feel like and and I think luckily my perspective has grown because for sure when I was younger like I was making songs like [ __ ] the system like yeah basically let's burn it all into the ground and like I'm so happy that I didn't put that out like there's some music when I go back and listen to I'm like hey this isn't bad yeah but that's not the message that I have now because I think that I've grown and I've see the world a little bit better and like I can have more perspective about it but it is strange that so little people want to talk about it and like a lot of people I've couple podcasts that I've heard recently they're like not even want to get into things that are conspiratorial or pushing the grain or like

[22:16]  controversial and in a way I think that's the only way we move forward is by having uncomfortable conversations but I think we need to be having the real uncomfortable conversations that are about our system and our real livelihood not um not things that are insurmountable yeah there's always like a sense of moral distress right in our society if it's one topic or the other right so many people kind of are finding themselves baited into having these conversations but also there's a extreme sense of like political correctness today which stops a lot of those challenging conversations to be had yeah and so it's like when we're operating in the safe space consistently it's like you can't get a different perspective or you can't even help people think differently no by creating an inclusive conversation and that's what I keep hearing you say is like I'm trying to create a message that

[23:04]  creates opportunity yeah for people to come together and for us to collaborate and also experience different you know perspectives of mindset as well yeah which is incredibly powerful and that's kind of where democracy in itself and like the ideals of where our country started really came from yeah but now like you said it almost seems like we're backtracking a little bit to where we came from it definitely and that is a little bit scary yeah and you know I have a lot of opinions about social media and how today our generation of people is dealing with a factor of distraction that has not only been prevalent in the last couple years that our generation and Society in itself doesn't really know how to deal with but it's also being weaponized as well 100 so it's like we have conversations you see the news the tabloids all this kind of stuff there's always something to talk about but often that thing to talk

[23:51]  about is not the thing that we should be talking about of course distraction it's a distraction yeah and so we're gonna have to figure out a way to be able to navigate that for sure and be because there's so much distraction it makes it also harder to find the thing or things that matter more yeah and there's so many things that like if something happens they can just like push five other things and like that gets swept under the rug and we barely talk about it yeah there's an idea that I think about often I just brought up to my mind but it's like our generation today confuses Authority with popularity oh so it's like you see a message like great example I see stuff on social media sometimes that will be like headline this football player or this basketball players trading teams and it's got 50 000 likes I'm like oh that's crazy yeah and then a couple days later I'll see a reputable news station come out and be

[24:38]  like this is what's actually happening I'm like oh damn I thought because the world was looking some way because a whole bunch of people agreed with it yeah but I didn't even have the sense of accountability to recognize that that was credible or not and you know what I'm saying and I think that is that's a that happens in so many ways it happens with news headlines it happens with I feel like it happens with so much stuff because all you have to do is see the headline and not look into it and then similarly like you get into those conversations and now it's like all you've got is what you saw on the news and it might not even be totally true but now you're arguing with somebody off a topic that you may not know enough about but you used to be able to say like I think back to when our parents growing up and grandparents like when they watch the news it was relatively trustworthy like they they had a general sense of trust and now it's like with so

[25:27]  many news stations if you don't do your extra research like you probably have bad information and that in and of itself makes it for more confusion and more distraction because I think a lot of people nowadays are just like politics yeah I don't even want to deal with it I have a hard time voting and like I shouldn't I should be able to be like I'm gonna pick one and it was hard last time to vote but it also comes down to that sense of agency right that I was talking about a little earlier when you feel like you're not contributing to the bigger conversation you start being like okay if I don't even matter what's the point I'm gonna vote and like do we do our votes matter like we want to say they do but like realistically if we're not even getting a chance to look at the best candidates and have the best options like we're choosing from a from a you know a bad spot a spot that's not

[26:15]  really a winning position and now we just have to be like and kid to ourselves that like if you're picking this side I'm picking this one and we're uh but I think I think the good side of it or the Silver Lining is that enough people have had this similar reoccurring thought and I think now more than ever ever people are like no both sides suck yeah and I think that was something that even four years ago or during the pandemic wasn't the situation it was like Trump or you know and and when people got um caught into um what was it the um what January 6th there was no the group The Insurrection yeah but the group was um start with a q q Anon Q Anon yep so when Q Anon started to wrap people into

[27:04]  pedophilia and killing babies they sunk their teeth in I mean but like those so this is going to bring up my point yeah so I was at a conference last weekend and this guy um was talking about how we live in a reaction-based society today so the way to influence people is to get a reaction out of them and so we've seen the media over the last couple years has really turned into a reaction Factory for sure by the headlines we see by the stories they run and even best way to get people to be involved is saying what reaction can I get from society and loop it into my cause so if you align with the reaction I just got from you then you should also be in line with what we're talking about as well yeah you know what I mean yeah and that's a very sedictive and very powerful way of influencing people yeah that is being weaponized for sure you know I continue to worry about our society because everybody in this

[27:52]  game today of media creation is getting better and better and we're modeling what other people are doing and so when you have a bad exam sample of using influence inappropriately people are like oh I can do that as well for sure you know what I mean and that's scary for sure and I think so many of these things have so many outlets because this in a similar way I think that when people think that their government is corrupt or that the world is corrupt like it's just easier for them to also do it too same thing it's like the mindset of oh if it's already happening I can do it too yeah and I think it kind of like I like this example but like when when Diddy came out with bad boy in the 90s he was like everybody's good so I'm bad I'm the bad boy yeah and it wasn't necessarily I'm evil yeah that some people thought like oh he's bad it was more like everybody's good I'm just gonna do the different thing yes and I feel like we it's like a

[28:40]  pendulum and it swayed to this bad side and we've almost like gone you know now we're starting to hopefully swing the pendulum back because people are realizing that bad now isn't getting us to the good and like I think there's always like that good versus evil pull and at the moment it does kind of feel like the evil is winning a little bit yeah and it's just and we just have to pull it back to this side like it's you know to some degree hopefully yin and yang is yeah I mean but like in our society we also see that negativity also gets reactions right and I think one of the things that I worry about from our perspective in general is that we come from millions of years of adaptation where our brain pays attention to the things that are threats and going back to the optimization conversation yeah it's not as click-baity when someone shows you something positive right but

[29:29]  it is clickbaity when someone says yeah exactly somebody got stabbed yeah exactly where our media leads today and I always like going back to the conversation we have a little earlier with the mental health diet yeah it's like dude when we are consuming consistent negative stuff yeah no wonder you're going to see a secondary factor of anxiety stress feelings depression depression all that kind of stuff all those things it's like yeah guys because subconsciously you're on a diet of negativity and Terror all day yeah so what are you doing to proactively kind of overcome that stuff and often people are like I don't even know where to get started for sure you know I think it's such a and it's I think as for for men for me as well it's like I've really had to decide and like make some decisions about things and decide to like continue to do them or like decide that this is what I want to continue even talking about because in some respects there was times when I was

[30:16]  making music that I was like I haven't put out a song yet I could just stop yeah I don't have to do this and there was little points of that and for me it's helped me to grow and like to be me and be the fullest version of myself but if you are not having those Outlets or aren't getting those outlets and you're just being consumed by other people's things then I think it again leads to like well now I'm not doing the thing that I want so let me just watch other people get injured or something that's also not what they want either yeah and it's like this like reactive thing full circle it just like kind of keeps going around and round and like oh in some ways we have to just break the cycle but that's an individual thing like you can lead a horse to water you can't make them drink I think that's like one of the philosophical's greatest questions is like how do you get somebody to want it for themselves because if they don't want it for themselves it doesn't matter

[31:03]  and I think that in our world right now A lot of people are just like well [ __ ] what are we doing like what's it for if we're you know and I think a lot of people that are struggling for money and food which is a lot of people right now and it's it's it's staggering when you hear like 70 of Americans can't afford a thousand dollar you know deduction or emergency something like that it's like if 70 of people can't get a thousand dollars that's you know food for a week sometimes and if something happens to them and they can't afford it they have a tire that gets blown out it's like as a society we have to be able to make everybody have a better standard of living and be able to enjoy their life a little bit more or nobody's happy everybody starts you know and then I think the answer that we're seeing is Pharmaceuticals like oh take this pill this drug will help you but as we know

[31:50]  drugs lead to more drugs and lifetime patients and there's no money in in healthy people yeah and we've seen uh moderna and Pfizer make billions and billions of dollars off of a vaccine that is you know questionable to some degree and it's like we paid for it our taxpayer dollars paid for the for the studies and for them to be able to make these incredible drugs and if it is like why do they get all the profits like where does the you know again I just feel like it's the system needing a little bit of an update and going back to why we left the UK and Great Britain was to find a better way and to create a new life and it just like in a way we just got back into the rut but America is really the last stand in a way like most people in I just maybe I'm ignorant in this sense and maybe this isn't correct but I feel

[32:37]  like in China there's not as much chance of people thinking that they're going to change their class change their status or even like like do something more than what they were born into and I think America has that opportunity which is why I still believe that like it's here the answers are here and we have to kind of lead the world back into what is you know the right thing rather than being the world's police because that's not really what I feel like most Americans I mean we just need more people to lead by example for sure right and I was listening to a podcast the other day where this guy was talking about the prevalence of ADHD diagnosis in the United States and he was like let's just take this at a global stage and you know ADHD in the last couple years has become something that everybody says they have but ADHD really is a diagnosis that is serious I mean it's a pathology of your brain not being

[33:24]  able to kind of focus on things yeah but what he was saying was in the United States there is a diagnosis 10 of children are diagnosed with ADHD in the United States one percent of children in Europe are diagnosed with ADHD and so he was like what's going on here where's the other nine percent where's the other nine percent coming from and why is there so why is there a 10x rate of people being diagnosed in the United States it's because of our culture and the Pharmaceuticals that come along with that behind it but what he was making the point of he was was like I always push skills over pills and one of the issues that we have I love that right that's incredible I was like it's very interesting he was like the biggest problem that we have in society today is our ability to have emotional regulation the biggest problem we have is we can't manage our emotions and so when we talk about the use of social media and how

[34:10]  much time people are spending on their devices today it's not the devices it's a side effect of our inability to manage ourselves yeah like a great example is like when the majority of people today are bored what do they do go on their phone on their phone when they're when they're nervous exactly and so what we're looking for is we naturally our brain starts saying okay I want to feel different so how do I feel different and it's got an anchored behavior and pulling out our phone and hopping on Instagram and getting into that little dope that little dopamine change but it's not the dopamine we're searching for our brain is putting an anchor in the behavior that led to the dopamine chain that's crazy it's the behavior before the action it's the behavior before the action that's crazy but no one has these conversations around awareness of like hey guys if you're having these feelings you need to kind of build the skill set which will help

[34:57]  you identify these things and not and not kind of go directly to the behavior because like the thing I worry about today especially in our younger generation it's like we're exposed to social media more so than ever we're supposed to Mo negativity but we're also exposed to other things like instantaneous access to things like pornography yeah right these type of activities are very corrosive at a macro scale of long-term exposure especially when with impressionable kids especially with impressionable kids and it's like if you're training these kids who have accessibility to these things instantaneously on their phones at such a young age what is the downstream effect yeah for sure the same thing that comes along with the my argument against the the um the vaccines and everything is we don't have enough data to be really able to see what the long-term effect of these things are the same with Pharmaceuticals the practice of medicine today in itself is always pill first but see if we can fix it yeah but what

[35:46]  is the undiagnosis plan yeah for sure have you ever heard that so whenever you go break your arm right you go into the doctor and they say we're going to put you in a cast for five weeks and then you're going to be healed or we can go to rehab after that that is an undiagnosis plan the problem that we have with ADHD today is they're like we're gonna put you on Adderall and we're gonna see what happens infinitely yeah yeah yeah there's no undiagnosis plan so it's like what is the long-term effect of putting somebody on a prescription or a medication making them think they need it and then making them think and it turns into an identity yeah you know what I mean and like I'm just so passionate about this is because I see like so many people absorbed by the tools and we play this role of victim yeah rather than taking accountability for the things that we actually have control over yeah you know what I mean 100 and I think for for for my experience I think a lot of it comes

[36:32]  from having to go to a school that isn't necessarily teaching you things that you need in your life and for me growing up even like we both kind of were in the middle ground where my first cell phone I got when I was in high school but it was like it was a little qwerty keyboard you know what I mean black and white had this snake game like it didn't really do much but call and text and you didn't really text because it was annoying yeah and you're t90664144 you know so it's like that was until high school and now it's like with kids happening like you said having so much access to I think that it makes it more difficult to go into a school especially when you have the information at your hand like in high school we didn't have an iPhone that had all the answers in it which I remember when my phone literally like had an antenna that I pulled out the top and it had like a super sketchy like TV signal yeah you

[37:19]  know what I'm saying we didn't have the technology but I feel like now if you're asking a kid to go sit down for eight hours and I think in general boys are not meant to sit down for eight hours the first thing in the morning like exactly you make them wake up early and then they go sit down for eight hours and you're just kind of like in a way it does feel like you're getting indoctrinated into like this is what you do because when you go to work you're gonna work for eight hours and you're gonna go home and then you're gonna have your life let's talk about the education system in general so I love being able to bring up this point it's like so why was the education system in the current form implemented in our society John D Rockefeller exactly so talking about preconditioning a generation of people who are going to need to come into an industrial revolutionized America yeah and play in the role of like stay here for 45 minutes hear the horn Buzz move to the next station yeah and then when you've got a generation of people who

[38:05]  come up like that it's scary the impact that it has on our society in general but why are we still participating in the same society that Rockefeller stood up or one of these other people and it's tough because at the time it was only like fifth grade it started with fifth grade and then it went to eighth grade and then it went to 12th grade and then it went to college and then you need your Masters now you need your doctorate and it's like it's just this ever evolving like you need more yeah but I think again it's like them in a way America is this like Progressive thing and like more and more more more but we're like missing the point but like okay now we have technology we have all this information if you go make a kid sit for eight hours for 10 12 years it's like they have the information what are they doing doing with that time like yeah you definitely learn stuff for sure don't get me wrong agreed but it's different when it's like we could be teaching other things like why don't we

[38:52]  talk about taxes in school why don't we want kids to be able to create a business entrepreneurship is extremely difficult it's something like 98 of like entrepreneurial family businesses small businesses fail and that's for a reason because it's [ __ ] difficult and there's a lot of hours and there's a lot of things that go into it but like what about skills like you said skills over pills I think with a lot of kids like I never really I think it would have been cool if there was like a car garage in in class and I could have gone and worked on cars like that would have been a fun skill and that stuff is becoming more proficient now and more relevant now because our generation didn't really learn that like I can change a tire for sure I can change it battery I can do so I had to change my radiator one time and my Mustang it was great but I didn't do a lot I did minimal things and like barely being able to change a tire like that that ain't [ __ ] that should be learned immediately but like we're

[39:39]  missing the real world things and we're still getting this like indoctrinated Industrial Revolution hey you have to learn all these things and I'm not saying math and and and and English aren't important but like do you need to know trigonometry going out of high school I've never been able to like you know I've there are equations that I had to learn but I've never applied them and it's like we he should be if for me education should be about getting kids to get to their fullest potential yeah creating opportunity creating opportunity and finding out more about what a kid is good at learning that's the same skill before the pill because it's like our school system now is like oh just figure it out in there but like one of my favorite things is like when a kid goes away to college right they're expected to make some of the biggest Financial commitments of their life taking out

[40:27]  loans credit cards and everything like that at 18. but yet a month before that they were having to raise their hand to go to the bathroom yeah that is a gigantic jump It's a gigantic jump and I think with our society there was like I definitely felt a pool to like go to school because that's what everybody else was doing and like that's what you were supposed to do so it's like that's what you do but if you're deciding and making that luckily enough for me I was willing to change my uh major and like I tried Kinesiology it was great that wasn't what I wanted to do went to psychology went to philosophy went to business but like had I not had that wherewithal to be like okay maybe this isn't what I want I might have gone to school for four years graduated kinesiology degree and done nothing yeah them and stuck and then I would have been stuck and now you have bills to pay and now you have to pay the loan back so it's like it's just this cycle of getting people stuck inside the system in a way to keep people you know it is it is to keep people down I mean

[41:16]  the system I had a thought about this the other day I was thinking about um just the in general the fact of student loans and I was like how can a government agency expect for someone to take out a loan with no plan to return it that makes no sense to me and then I saw a headline on the TV that talked about how the government just agreed to raise our debt ceiling and I was like oh because what they're doing is they're just doing what they think is best they're taking out loans against people with absolutely no plan to actually pay this stuff back yeah for sure that's why we're three trillion in debt or whatever that's exactly why we're there so there was a thing that I learned recently and I think it was it was an Ivy League school I think it was Cornell they were talking about but the guy who was talking about it was basically like most colleges have this yeah they have some type of index fund yes that has this was Princeton Princeton yes this is the endowment they were talking about how

[42:04]  the endowment has grown so large that the interest in itself could help all these kids who come to school it could pay all of the professors yep all of the it could let the kids go for free they could eat for free and house for free and the interest it's it's me that's being paid just from the interest not even from the actual fund so it's like they literally have enough money to let everybody go to school for free and not lose any money yeah and make money and make money yeah but instead it's like oh no we're not going to do that you guys still have to pay and it's like this thought process of like we need more we need more we need more it's like we're really missing that like all we want to be able to do is work provide for our family and live a good life and I feel like if we could just get people to give that if if we could get our politicians to give that back to America we would be in a great place and like most people would be a lot more happy because that

[42:53]  hap you know uh pavlos hierarchy of needs or whatever Pavlov if if people can't get out of like that initial stage they can't even think about the other things they can't get to the next Parts they can't open up and be more expressive and work on their talents and work on the things that they actually want to work on because the only thing they care about is food and um there's actually a really cool YouTube channel called Jubilee have you ever heard of it never heard of it I just recently started watching it and I've watched like 20 of them now but it takes like the last one that I saw was um it was African Americans and uh um people from Africa yeah and then there was like a trans or liberal parents and conservative teachers and it just has these people like Star art not argue but like start going back at it and then it was like police officer versus gang

[43:41]  banger and then it was white versus black and then it was gay versus straight and then it was beta male and alpha male and they have hundreds of these interviews and you start to listen to these people you start to hear about sometimes the problems and one of the last ones I listened to was the rich and the poor and it was so interesting that so much of it is a lot about mind State and about like mind frame because three or two of the rich people started off like had terrible lives growing up and then the four poor people they and you listen to it and it's just so interesting to hear other people's perspectives and like what they're going through but it does feel like one of the guys was like honestly if I just had like 500 extra dollars a month I if I could just get a little bit I wouldn't have to worry about these things but my job I'm not making enough and he's like I'm an artist I'm a content creator but

[44:27]  my I work a retail job yeah and now the mind frame state was like the what one of his things that I saw was a drawback was he was like if you're paying me 15 an hour I'm gonna work for 15. I'm gonna I'm gonna give you 15 an hour and the rich guy was like no no you should you're seeing it backwards because if you if you work for more than you're getting paid you're going to end up getting paid more because they're going to want a trip they're going to want to promote you and give you more money yeah and if you work for what you're paid for you're only going to get paid for what you work for and it's like and I think for me I got to learn that in a in a pers in a long frame for with working with the business because I was like working and I was always trying to give it my all and I feel like now finally like I have the not only the resources but the ability to also do more in the business yeah and I did have to work for not not that I wasn't getting paid while working for my

[45:14]  own family business but like I was always doing more than I knew because I felt like in the long run it's gonna pay off and like it is my family there's obviously a huge like um responsibility in that because you always want to make sure that you're giving your portion of the pie and you're not like the leech or the one that's not doing enough yeah and that definitely has created it's created a good Dynamic now but I think growing up has my father being my boss there was definitely times where like it was hard to differentiate like who who was my father and who was my boss and like you wouldn't always want to tell your boss everything and like where do you distinctively be like is this am I telling my boss right now or my dad now that I'm older I'm I'm glad that I went through those things because in some ways I had to not internalize but like deal with them myself because I didn't necessarily want to tell him so I'd have to be like okay

[46:03]  well how am I going to deal with this because I don't necessarily have that thing so let's take an opportunity to kind of pivot the conversation towards like the family business right so your dad inventor of a technology correct an entrepreneur right one of the easiest ways but also the most scary and difficult ways to get out of the system is to be able to start your own thing yeah so your dad is an entrepreneur what is his background and how did he kind of get started so he was a military brat growing up my grandfather was in the Air Force and um he moved around a bunch and then he ended up in San Diego and he was a business broker he had done a couple other things but he had ended up being a business broker and he sold a couple businesses and then this one guy they were in San Diego ego and this one guy came to him it was like I want to buy a Window Tinting Company my dad did a bunch of research called a bunch of people got a you know just like got the full scoop for him the guy ends

[46:51]  up buying a window tinting business and my dad was like this is a genius idea like there's not a lot of people doing this and like I want to do this so him and my mom had just had my sister and um they were like well where's it hot who's going to need window tint yeah and they moved to Las Vegas and they opened up well he actually ended up buying the name from somebody but Las Vegas window tinting it was started in like 88 he bought it in 90 or 91.

[47:15]  he buys the name and he this was like The Testament to my father but six-month-old daughter mom's at home he would wake up at four in the morning and had flyers and he would go put flyers out on people's doors he would run the house run and just put flyers on people's door go home mom's making breakfast little babies there and little baby Katie and just basically prayed that the phone rang yeah and it started ringing and he started going out and doing the job himself and then he went into a house met a lady this lady became his sales manager met another guy he became his installer and still to this day Steven I mean we we still know him and you know like family we you know I knew he knew me before I was born basically um so starts a Window Tinting Company Las Vegas window tinting like it definitely had a lot of Advantage

[48:02]  because of the name people look up window tinting in Las Vegas Las Vegas window tinting you know and he did a lot of like work as well to make that happen in relationships and um he was working we were doing a project at the Green Valley Ranch and the engineer was like okay I've got 80 of these beautiful red marble tables that look like [ __ ] and every week 20 of these have to come out and my Engineers are constantly sanding them down to get the etching out oh wow and so he was like opportunity please help us yeah and my dad at first was like I don't know [ __ ] about Stone like I'm sorry but I'll go home and look but I don't know and he went online looked up you know how to protect marble from etching and there was basically no guarantee with any liquid sealer still to this day there is no liquid sealer that will stop the acid reacting with the calcium-based stone and creating an etch or stain

[48:50]  so for the first year we were the he was the guinea pig and we just like just put [ __ ] down like we're in the film business like a clear graffiti film a security film of this or that or this or that how thick I'm not think how scratch resistant All That Jazz and that led into so the person the the company that we bought film from for most of our time with Las Vegas window attending his name matico that's the name of the company and they are the people who still make our product today so at that time we went to matico and we were like hey look there's definitely some things we need to change about a film because it's on a window and it's then going to Stone so there was a lot of improvements that needed to be made and most things on Windows weren't made to be scratch resistant they are made to get scratched and then get taken off like a graffiti film or a security film somebody can break it but it didn't have scratch resistance was never a thing right so that was one of the first things we

[49:36]  started working on now we're on the sixth version of our film we have about 41 dealers um every city in the United States has covered Mexico Canada turkey Dubai Australia Italy London um a couple other ones a global footprint that Global started with Dad running out at 4am panning out yeah like postcards postcards and like growing the thing and like there was definitely some times like I remember we almost lost our house at one point we had to foreclose on our home we ended up short selling our house but at that time we also got like the job of the of our our business's Lifetime and we did the Vdara Hotel at the time when they built it it was like an incredible design but the sun basically came down hit the curvature of the window and created what they called a death beam or a death something like

[50:24]  that girl yeah and so it would literally like the sun would hit and it was so hot that it would come across and it would like burn chairs up somebody was it it lit a car on fire like it blew a car up oh because somebody parked in the wrong spot and it hit it and it stayed on the car long enough that it literally started the car on fire and blew the car up oh wow there was a person who like it burned they were reading the newspaper and it burned the newspaper and started to burn them like they were like this reading it and it came across they were like ooh hot sounds like an episode like MythBusters crazy right it's somatico actually created a film that would work good with this and we did the outside job it was a huge job for us I was actually 16 at the time so I couldn't even do it because it was on the outside of the vadara like you had to like get on the um whatever those things are called and yeah like the window cleaner things swing stage I think yeah it would go over and hang down from the vadara and like it was very specific rules like if

[51:12]  the wind was over five miles an hour at Gus they couldn't do it because like the swing stage would swing back and forth and it was sketchy I'm kind of glad that I didn't do it I think I would have done an appearance but like holy [ __ ] it was scary you had to like every single thing had to be tied up like nothing could fall off every single tool had to be tied up and connected to some Carabiner that was connected to the swing stage but they did the job it was huge for us it saved our business it saved our our our our our life to some degree and we ended still in unpotting the shorts on the house but I remember that like going through those things so I and I remember watching my father work his ass off he still does to this day he's so here's the thing that I like to be able to talk about when you're talking when you're an entrepreneur and you come from an entrepreneurial mindset as a family right risk doesn't seem to be as scary because you've been exposed to it

[51:59]  throughout your entire life right it's a huge thing in Psychology to help people get over feelings of anxiety and stuff like that is exposure therapy yeah you've been exposed to risk your entire life yeah right and so is that why you feel so confident in like being able to do all the other kind of stuff that you do um now that you say that I would definitely say that there's like like a family saying of ours is that we don't gamble we gamble in our life every single [ __ ] day exactly every day yeah we gamble in our life every single day so it's hard to go gamble at a casino when like we're gambling all the [ __ ] time yeah so like yeah we started like we we actually right now we've expanded the most we ever have but I remember we started like this company was called Decon 7. and we actually didn't start the company but there's a lab in like New Mexico Sandia labs and they created this like hydrogen peroxide mix that would kill Anthrax and it's

[52:47]  like still used in military uses now but we kind of got a hold of it this was like 15 20 years ago and the guy was like oh my like it was it still is an incredible product we tried to get back in and failed again but like what the bottom line people didn't care if it was that clean yeah because there's 99.99 this killed like three more nines which is billions of organisms but like people don't give a [ __ ] yeah the margin of improvement wasn't like that it's not crazy enough to get people to move from their other companies no rocks yeah so we tried we lost a bunch of money in that had to take a loan from my grandpa you know like definitely I remember like things being good things being bad and yeah now that you say that for sure I think that my life I definitely saw a lot of risks and I guess now it's like when I did see the world as being the thing that I kind of wanted to take on

[53:35]  to some degree that risk was like oh well I do this every day and it's risk to reward like I'm willing to do it and like we're already taking risks so like why not jump for the biggest risk if we've already and for me luckily like I have gotten to work in the business I have gotten to learn a lot of things we've gotten to see the trials and tribulations and now the product is the best that it's ever been so like it has been nice to like grow with the company and like now like as I was saying earlier that like this is definitely the best I've ever felt and a lot of times I did just like keep my head down and keep moving there was times I'm sure I went through times of depression that I didn't even recognize where Depression was just like just shut up and keep going like it's gonna get better it's gonna be okay yeah because growing up that was my life like there wasn't a good point for a while until I came back and started playing lacrosse when I got

[54:21]  these like oh I'm on the same playing field yeah that was like my first like ah moment yeah and I was at 21 basically or 20 years old so like it took me a long time for me to feel like happy and like I definitely had happy moments my family life was you know like I had both my parents who love me who adored me but like out in the world I felt like I was disregarded yeah and like didn't matter and I'm just this chubby kid and it was like oh I just hate that I did and I worked really hard to not have that be the case and like still to this day like I don't really go to the store without putting clothes on that match good and look good like I don't leave my house even my girlfriend there's times that I won't I'll wash my hair because my hair I had a hat on yeah and I took my hat off and my hair looks bad and we're in the home yeah I'm not leaving but like I still have this thing that like I'm always gonna try to be presentable and I'm always gonna try to put my best foot forward because that gave me an advantage growing up to like make me

[55:09]  feel good yeah and I've just kept it and it's just like yeah I think it to the end to some degree I have uh uh like a not a lot of quit involved in my well I mean the biggest thing for me is like you know I have conversations about money and kind of how things go and it's like money my my dad established of my mindset of mine I was like money comes and money goes yeah but the confidence that you have in yourself to make more money is really that superpower it's that kind of lays within me so it's like what if things happen it's like it doesn't matter yeah exactly things will happen yeah for sure 100 I think that that's definitely been something that I and and to some degrees I learned in the gym yeah 100 showing up every day showing up every day going to the gym wanting gratification and like knowing that it'll be better and like I I looked

[55:57]  up like I remember when I was 21 being like when I'm 25 it's going to be sweet when I'm 30 it's going to be sweet and now I'm like I'm here I'm in the place like I can give myself some you know like even when I put out my first song It wasn't until that was in November it wasn't until February that I took a break and was like hey good job yeah I gave myself a little pat on the back and that's so important man yeah do you know what I mean because when you have that high achieving mindset we often find ourselves in the gap between where we are and where we're trying to get to yeah and often people don't pause enough to sit down and look at the gain of How Far We've really come and that sense of perspective and gratitude about all the challenges that you've overcome in your life the business the overcoming the losing contracts the customers the wins it's huge it's huge you know what I mean like I try and put myself in that mindset all the time yeah for sure and I think it's uh in some ways it's been

[56:44]  building slow at a time like one at a time and I think I you know I I think somebody was just some one of the grant cardones or something like that was like win a day yeah if you can win a day you can win a week dude I think you just saw my I put a piece of content was that you yeah that was me okay okay okay if you win enough days you win the week yeah weeks you can win the month if you win enough months you can win the year if you win enough years you can win life yeah if you break it down to that small little tactical stuff of like I'm just gonna win today yeah that's it you know what I mean and I've been dealing with a couple Demons of like me trying to get back in shape me getting my diet back on point me trying to be more focused and less distracted like we've talked about and sometimes it's a minute by minute battle to be like I just need to win this next 10 minutes I just need to not eat those cookies exactly that's what I'm saying ice cream sandwich then I

[57:30]  keep thinking about myself in like my mindset of like okay Keenan how long can you stick with this because when I turned 30 years old at a real conversation with myself I was like how many times are you gonna continue to have the conversation with yourself of man I wish I wouldn't have stopped doing that one thing I was doing going to the gym working on this project yeah I'm tired of being disappointed with myself so I'm gonna fight right now for my future version of myself I'm gonna be like dude we did it dude that is such an internal battle I think that excuse me I would imagine that's with everybody and in our particular case that is a constant I think it's a constant battle and even with it's so interesting the relationship that we have with food and I think that's one of those things that

[58:17]  like you learned with being overweight that like some people never deal with like my fiance Jen yeah has never really been overweight has never really understood and like there was a moment we had in our relationship when she was like why do you like think about food so much like why do you like like I I still am I am we're always our heart our harshest critic and I have been so deeply upset and saddened and disappointed with myself for so many in in so many instances that like it still draws a thing that like sometimes I eat too much I'm like God damn it and it's like yeah all comes back flooding in and when I really had this conversation with her it was an understanding and now she under she understood it more but there's still this like but it's not the same yeah and tell you until you feel this way about food and like it in

[59:07]  it impacts so many people because we have such a huge obesity rate and I think that's something that I'm I'm kind of pulling back into into my message because to some degree I I took it out a little bit and I haven't really talked about it that much in my music because I in some ways I didn't want to talk about it because I was like ah just you know what am I going to say just some chubby little kid yeah but with how many people are overweight I think that it does need to be a message and I think that at all times we should be trying to encourage people that are in that position to try to work on it because I can only imagine that the way I looked at myself in the mirror has to be similarly to when somebody else does we all have that shared life experience man and like around you you feel good when you look good yeah even when you dress good but like I know my I used to think that it was my clothes that made

[59:56]  me look fat now it's like no it's not yeah it's not the clothes it's how you feel and how you fit them and it's a struggle and I think the bigger conversation than just losing weight is our food yeah and how we eat I agree I don't know if we need to go into this but we can if you want to I mean it's a it's a huge component what I really want to talk about really quick first yeah is so you know when you're building a business with your family there's trials and tribulations and something you talked about was the EOS entrepreneurial system which I think is really interesting very cool so your dad is the founder of the business yes you already gave the nod to your mom as the [ __ ] owner the owner yeah she's the owner I mean so is my mom exactly but the question is is like how do you find your role in the business are you filling gaps have you gone through any type of experience where you're like I don't feel like I have the power to influence

[1:00:44]  this role in the business I need to switch it up yeah how is that growth process so it definitely so um about a year and a half ago we hired a girl named Kayla she was fantastic she was with us for about a year and a little bit more and at that time I was transitioning from doing more sales or sorry from from doing more restoration and I had Gad um gathered two guys or one guy at the time now we've got two guys at our installation team in Las Vegas yeah we feel really lucky to have gotten both of them they're incredible Daniel and Albert we are just we are just feel fortunate to have shout out to the boys they're incredible and we tell them all the time we love them and they yeah fantastic guys and so at that time I was kind of transitioning into sales and my dad had gotten an assistant at the time which was Kayla quickly it kind of became there wasn't enough for her to

[1:01:30]  do with just assisting him so he gave her some sales and when that happened I did feel a little bit like oh that was kind of what I thought I was going into and I had a little bit of struggle there because then it was like well what am I gonna do yeah so we get Kayla yep she's in a great a great addition to the team yeah it wasn't enough for her to just assist my dad so she goes into sales she kind of takes over the residential sales in Las Vegas and like half the strip me and her split it in my head I didn't really feel like there was enough for two people to do it so I needed to find other things that I was doing so my main thing became relationships with hotels now that I'm here just to caveat I do think I'm a relationships guy yeah I am not a Salesman I'll do sales I'm happy

[1:02:19]  with sales out of necessity for the business I'm happy with doing installations I'll do whatever is needed I'm a I'm a mini I'm a uh I wear a lot of hats yeah but I'm a relationships guy at my core I love getting to meet people getting to talk to people creating relationship with them and giving value to whatever it is they have especially with tough skin if you've got the marble you've got the issue we've got a solution and I'm not gonna I don't need to hard sale and that's one of the benefits of the product so she goes into that and I start to have to kind of diversify what I'm doing because in some ways I felt like I'm not really getting I'm not really doing a lot but if you sell one hotel it's worth it yeah and I need more like I was I did feel for a little bit that like I was just turning my wheels because I if if you have eight hours in a day to work yeah

[1:03:09]  and or more whatever or less whatever yep and I'm just calling hotels like half the time they don't want to talk to you yeah most of the time you're calling you're like talking to somebody at the front desk okay can you leave them a voicemail for the engineer and they don't really give a [ __ ] so like there's times that like it just took a long time and like it was just has something in my nose there was times that I just felt like I was turning my wheels and then me and Jen actually just took our RV out for the first time um back in January I think and while we were on the trip Kayla called and was like hey I found you know I got a new job I got a basically a job selling Windows and I'm gonna take it and we at the time like it was an immediately I was like I'm so happy for you right and it was a perfect timing for me because I had gone through the motions of I learned how to talk to

[1:03:58]  hotels I learned what works kind of what doesn't and I learned that being in person is probably the best way so like sometimes I'll just go to a hotel fly to a hotel stay at the hotel talk to the engineer because when you're at the hotel they're kind of obligated to talk to you yeah now I'm I'm a customer you have to talk to me now I can tell you about it yes I'm in room 242. come check it out yeah and so I got to learn that and do that and then when she moved on it was kind of just like the perfect fit that now I'm back involved with everything in Las Vegas gave you an opportunity to take on more responsibility as well and bigger things because I was I wasn't necessarily thinking that way at the time I was thinking okay I'm gonna do this part time with the sales of the hotels then it was like now you're doing this most of the time because Las Vegas for me in Las Vegas I'm probably spending 20 hours a week of intentional work 20 hours maybe 25. that's talking to customers

[1:04:47]  talking to the strip but like on the on the Strip on on all our properties the guys have a a root that they go and check in with all the places yeah so they report back to me okay this needs to be done I can send a code out for this talk to this person talk to that person but like I don't have to go do those things anymore yeah so now I'm able to delegate some and I'm able to make sure that like everything's getting handled but I know that I was there that was one of the issues that I had is that sometimes if Kayla sold a house the guys would call me and be like hey I need you to help me with this and I'm like dude I don't even you need to give me so much information and it was kind of hard sometimes to get caught up because if I'm off somewhere doing something else and I have no idea might take me I might be in a meeting I might be doing something and it might not get done as quickly as it needs to yeah it did work out kind of perfectly and I think she loves her job I'm like obviously we're

[1:05:34]  happy that she was able to get a promotion to her her you know for her own self and it worked out because now I kind of do feel like I'm in charge yeah um with that being said we started I also started to go to more well I've always gone to conventions like the HD show and a couple other ones but this year and specifically I went into basically all of them yeah and so the last one that we did that was the one of the big ones was called Hotel point and you basically pay to get to talk to Executives and you get two boardroom meetings where there's 15 Executives from all around all around the United States from different um Hilton Hyatt you know Ritz Carlton Four Seasons put me in the room the hot the highest people yeah they get sent to a hotel point because and it's a copesthetic relationship that hotelpoint puts it on the hotels get to bring in their their people and get to show them what the newest upcoming technology is yeah there

[1:06:22]  was like a company that had paint that you could like put a a torch light or two in it not light and like stick your hand in water on the other side and it was still cold wow incredible stuff so the hotels want to send their people there because it's The Cutting Edge technology and you pay to get your seat at the table to talk to them yeah and you also have lunch you have dinner together you have breakfast together you get to talk to them and like that was the most like oh this is me because all I was doing was talking and like I ended up talking to one executive from um he he sent us a job that we're going to my one of our stars going to San Francisco next week to go do a job and go talk to this guy for me but we were on the escalator and I just started shooting the [ __ ] with him and we started talking and he's like oh man what do you guys do we start and I gave him my card he sends me and now we're

[1:07:08]  going to go you know do a bid on a job in San Francisco so that was like just fluid fluidity for me and like and uh and now I think I recognize it the most yeah um one thing that you said a couple times I caught my attention was you don't have to Hard Sell right because the product in itself is that good yeah right and you're meeting a need that obviously the marketplace needs but my question is is in the sales process have you ever felt yourself needing to be more salesy or does your ability to speak with confidence come from conviction because you guys know that your [ __ ] works I think um most of the time the latter and I just go in and say it the the thing is is that when I break it down so if you have marble yeah there's three options

[1:07:55]  one is you can have a traditional restoration cycle this is going to cost you a good guy is going to charge you 20. you might be able to get it for 15 a square foot let's just say average 15 a square foot our product is gonna cost Thirty to thirty five dollars a square foot when that restoration guy leaves and you paid him fifteen hundred dollars or two thousand dollars so does his warranty and that same day if you spill something you create that same problem again and he's going to come back some people on average it's going to be about every year if he comes every year by the second year you've already paid for our product and you've gotten no protection so if you choose not to go with us that's fine but I'm going to give you that's just I'll send you to a Restoration company that we work with but those are your options no liquid sealer is going to guarantee most of the time that's a sale that in and of itself the other option is more

[1:08:43]  there's a company called more anti-edge it's like a liquid pour over you UV cure it it's about three to four times our product so if they go to them they're going to find that it's a hundred dollars a square foot so you could have our product installed three times which on average a five-year lifespan that's 15 years yeah and you've only paid for their initial install that eventually is going to need more upkeep so it really does just make sense and for me I I've never really been like you have to sign yeah like you need to do this yeah and I think that that is from a place that again I'm fortunate enough to like not feel like I I don't really have a quota like we don't we talk about hey this is what we want to do but like there's no micromanagement that like you didn't sell this job what was the problem yeah because like some people don't want to buy it and it is expensive

[1:09:30]  it's not cheap 35 a square foot a home that's only 100 square feet that's like it's like our average home size 3 500 yeah it's not an it's not an inexpensive product so some people just don't have the budget which is a fine it's it's it is what you know we try to work with people when we can you know certain situations there's we have designer discounts contractor pricing so there is other ways but typically it's the people who buy marble most of the time ninety percent of the time are not buying marble because it's not expensive or expensive yeah they're buying it because they want it yeah and the person that wants it is gonna need tough skin and so that is our Market is the in a sense it's the one percent that is buying the marble that it wants it to look good that it has the natural beauty because if you put you have Quartz in your kitchen

[1:10:17]  it still it does look good there's no doubt about it but if you put it next to a piece of marble you're like oh this is what it's emulating yeah that's fair I didn't even realize I had courts in my kitchen but I'm glad you picked up on that yeah yeah you know I'm in the business I gotta know I gotta know but yeah and it's and it shouldn't have problems it's resin based the problem with courts sometimes one in certain situations courts can become really expensive but if it does have an issue it's really hard to fix yeah that's one of the benefits of Natural Stone is that if you buy a piece of marble no matter what it can almost always get fixed with our product now it becomes practical and so we're our goal is to our bread and butter is a designer that's designing for a hotel or you know some some person and they say hey we're going to put marble in and we're going to spec tough skin so that you can have marble and it can be practical so that way the end user is like already on board so that's

[1:11:06]  our our primary customer is getting to the person before they buy the marble because people go and ask for marble and then oftentimes the conversation goes well you probably don't want marble because it has these issues right you want to be integrated into the sales process at every single level because what happens is that when people call you after the fact you now have to sometimes be like oh well this is what you bought yeah rather than it's like oh yeah you knew about this going into it but like every once in a while we get somebody who's like oh they said it wasn't going to Edge that bad but in the first day I had a party and I spilled and it's red yeah and it's like oh yeah well your stone is calcium-based some people think oh well this was really expensive did I get a shitty product and it's like no you bought a piece of stone that's just calcium-based and calcium reacts with anything acidic so basically everything that we use in a kitchen in a bar and in a restroom whatever it is is

[1:11:55]  gonna react with that and people do like we had a lady like it's probably three or four years ago um every morning she woke up and put Saran Wrap over all of her counters in her kitchen it was only like 80 square feet so not huge but she put every single morning put Saran Wrap so that her kids and the babysitter wouldn't mess it up we put tough skin in and it was funny because she ended up we ended up it was in Seattle so we had to fly up there we sent a box and we needed a little bit wider of a box because of the way she measured but we put a semen in there she was like I don't care you have no idea how much stress and time and money that saved me because every single day she woke up and like she was like it was an extra 30 minutes yeah bless her heart and now she's like oh I don't have to do anything yeah so it does that is the benefit and when people talk about you

[1:12:44]  know I have a I have an answer for almost every quarrel and the reason why I asked you that question a couple seconds ago is because like I hear the passion in which you speak about your product yeah and the conviction in itself is the sales process for sure do you know what I mean yeah it's not you don't have to sell me on it because you're telling me about all these experiences and the commonality of how we all kind of experience yeah our own home lives and how you guys benefit so I think that's really cool yeah and I where that comes from yeah I don't know I mean you've been grinded dog well no but like the I feel so I think okay to go back to the ADHD thing just for a moment I did get diagnosed when I was a little bit younger but I don't know necessarily if I don't think I have an attention deficit problem I have it if it's not interesting to me problem yeah and and that is completely understandable in a shared experience I

[1:13:31]  think a lot of people have and so with music and when I get to talk about the world and when I get to talk about my family business just like I'm so integrated and involved that like I love it yeah we're speaking about your world view yeah yeah and like it's how I look at things and it's like I mean this is a conversation I want to kind of pivot really quick so they talk about burnouts okay right and they talk about burnout comes from doing work that we feel like we are not impactful in yes so it's like we show up every single day we put our time into this but it's like dude I'm not really making any progress and nothing really nothing really happens but it's like why is Jake Never burned out about making music if you're staying up till three o'clock in the morning yeah why does that happen so you're passionate about it yeah and I think that everybody gets burnt out I've gotten burnt out for sure there's definitely been uh there's been many times when I was like this isn't what I'm gonna do and I think when I was younger and I don't know if

[1:14:19]  my parents knew they were doing it or or whatever the case was maybe they talked about it but like there would be times that I would get upset and they would just leave me and be like you know go feel your feelings whatever yeah and the next day they'd be making breakfast Hey Jake how you doing good morning you know they would never take that into the next day and I think growing up I had this like okay well the day's end I wake up it starts over oh that's a good perspective so when I went through music and there would be times I'm like [ __ ] this I don't want to do it I would just wait a little bit and then I'd go back down and sit at my computer and I'd listen to something be like oh this is kind of good oh I there's a little something here yeah and then I'd want to keep doing it again and whenever I also felt like this isn't what I wanted all I would need is one conversation I would need somebody to start talking

[1:15:08]  about something and maybe like oh I get fired up about it yeah because I want to have the conversation but if I for me I think music is my is my vehicle to get me to the conversation yeah and without music I I used to think I needed music to to give myself a seat at the table I don't necessarily have that same perspective now but I do see music as a credibility thing to be like look I've said these things so that you know this is what I mean yeah and I heard you perk up about that a little bit earlier when your dad gave you that validation on the car you know what I mean like that kind of stuff really matters yeah for sure because I I you know there's a little bit of like I hope you do still you know and I think growing up it was like there was so much it was all business a lot of times it was like business and still we go on family well we call them

[1:15:54]  biscations uh we'll go you know we'll go somewhere and we'll have family meetings but like even when we're not in the family meeting half the time we're talking about business like we are a business family and like at the dinner table 70 of our conversations revolve around a job or a business proposition or this or that and so it is like it is all we do to this to some degree like and that is partly my father and my and and him because he definitely has been like a rock to that to that have you ever felt like there was a time when the business first ratio of your family Dynamic kind of created friction for sure do you ever think that there was times when like dog we just need to shut this down or of you or your sister ever been like yo I don't want to be a part of this anymore definitely and I think growing up one of the reasons I think I needed to find myself a little

[1:16:43]  bit when I so I graduated high school early a year early and I moved to San Diego with my friends I think in that process there was nothing I didn't want anything to do with the family business and not that I didn't want to do it it was just that I was like I need to do something else I need my space I need my space I need to figure this out and that's when I lost the weight that's when I became a personal trainer I was going to school so like I was getting to figure out a different life and then when I moved back the business was there and I was just and I was doing it because it was like yeah this is a job I can do it and I could I was at the time when I moved back I was a personal trainer um and I worked a deal with um Jay Jung at the city athletic club that I basically paid I paid a lesser amount than everybody else but I had very specific hours so I was only allowed like I only had like a 7 to 12 clients at a time and I would only work for like three to four hours most at a day okay so I I was like hey

[1:17:31]  look I'm coming to you because I really love being a trainer I would love to keep my clients but if I pay you this much I'm not going to make any money because I'm not even I can't work these hours so he made a deal with me it was a great thing I got to train my people I also worked in the family business I also was going to school and playing lacrosse that was like the first burnout feeling that I ever had just because I was doing way too much and then starting the music thing and doing the tough skin and well at the time it was Las Vegas window tinting in tough skin that was really like the merger of the two that it was like okay I did these things and now I'm happy doing this thing knowing that if I work towards being a good you know making music and being good at being a rapper then this thing will be able to help me along that way and it has been such a copacetic thing that like I've learned so many life lessons not in music and through tough skin but have led to

[1:18:17]  things in music and things and music that have led to better things than tough skin so um that Dynamic is very interesting to me because I feel like in today's world of social media and we've talked about this a couple times today people want to do business with people that they like right we don't want to do business with Brands but connecting on a deeper level like music I think is so advantageous for you to keep sharing that story yeah because there's so many human experiences that people can relate with you on thanks have you had that experience as well I'm not necessarily in business because most of the people like I'm working with engineers and like most of the time it's older people and like none of them are really like I'm not telling them about my music but I have found that it has happened outside of business where I've gone somewhere and somebody been like oh my gosh like I listen to your music and then we talk about business and then it

[1:19:04]  ends up being something like I gotta um I like when I went to a bar one time and I was waiting for a friend ended up talking to a guy we started shooting the [ __ ] we ended up doing a job with him because it was just like we started talking and then he was like oh my God what do you do and then talk about family business he's like holy [ __ ] I have marble and it was just like this like random funny thing but I feel like most of the time in in my business relationships only maybe the people that follow me on social media which is like the dealers and the people that I train um but like the engineers and the designers and whatnot like most of them don't necessarily know about it yeah and I also I think I've created a lot of growing up I created and still to this day like most of the time the music part of my conversation is later down the line yeah like I don't lead with I'm a rapper or I

[1:19:52]  make music I typically lead with oh I'm in a family business and da da and if we go further into conversation we go further into conversation because in some degree I feel like I keep my music so close to my heart that like it means so much to me and I also think that I'm saying up you know a lot yeah that I I mean I love the fact that you're like speaking your truth though do you know what I mean like that people can connect with you on the message that you speak I think that's incredibly yeah and I think and I guess to that point most of the people that I work with if there is an opportunity like I will say like we'll talk about something you know like maybe it's not music related but it's the conversation that music is driving towards yeah and that person then connects and is like oh okay like I've definitely made that connection not necessarily including the music but like talking about something or like oh wow you know it's tough that we just passed

[1:20:39]  this law or like this thing just happened like it feels like we need to be more connected rather than you know divided so I think I probably bring that into conversations a little bit more but um yeah yeah there was definitely times I mean I think with anything there's there's good times and bad times there's but you know the last probably the last three years I've had the most gratitude and like um forgiveness to myself I think as well and like um acceptance of who I think I am and what I want to do and like what I'm really doing um that it it's definitely and I think humble humbleness like I truly I I think I came from a place you know probably similar to like I was never

[1:21:26]  really like exuding confidence so I feel like now I do but I don't necessarily need to like boast about it yeah that's fair so I typically I find myself in a lot of situations just like being a chameleon and just like I'm in this situation but I'm gonna let it I'm gonna let it evolve how it's gonna evolve and I don't necessarily always feel like I need to now interject yeah when I was younger I definitely felt like I was like I need to and I I felt like I was right as well I think that's something that happens when you're younger than like I know stupid but like the spirit lives on this is definitely the way if when you die this and it's like [ __ ] you don't know [ __ ] like you can't you can't know that like and now it's like there's so many religions I just hope that people if people are using religion to get to a better place I'm all for it I think people should follow anything that helps them get to

[1:22:13]  some sort of Peace in their life yeah and then it was like oh well maybe this is wrong or maybe that's right and it's like no nothing is nothing is right or wrong for the most part even the bad guys don't have to be some of the bad guys are good and some of the good guys are bad so it's like there is no like oh this is exactly how it is and now I feel like I'm in a in a place where I'm happy doing what I'm doing and I and I know that I want to make an impact in this thing and in a sense I'm still just moving towards it and whenever that day comes that day comes but like I'm I'm ready to stand at attention when the time comes and until that point I'm kind of just like moving yeah you're just continuing on yeah I mean it's really important to keep marching forward the last thing that I really want to touch on here today is something that I really admire is you and your sister's relationship yeah for sure so you guys have been as tight as thieves the entire

[1:23:01]  time I've known you guys and it's been very interesting to look at it from the outside perspective realizing that you guys are also operating a business together yeah how has your relationship with your sister changed over time and has it ever become taxing because of business because you guys from the outside yeah are like best friends yeah for sure and we still are I think that Growing Up So growing up we didn't really see each other a lot like obviously we were in the same home but like she was two and a half years older so when I was in third grade she was in sixth grade yeah so like we never really were in school together we never really were in sports together and then my freshman year of high school she was a senior and that was the first time we got to go to school together yeah she drove me to school she helped me pick my outfits even though I would never wear them again today but like she helped me pick my outfits for the first five days it was like hey this is cool that's cool she drove me to school I got to like walk in with her friend friends and feel

[1:23:47]  like I'm a part of a thing yeah that was like the first time I had ever felt that like oh I'm people like me and I can be here and like be cool and not that I didn't have friends but like I always like we moved around a couple times went to a couple of different schools I never had like like when I started playing lacrosse there was a couple friends that were older than me that I'm still friends with today but they all grew up together in the same neighborhood they knew each other for like 10 years and I was so I had so much admiration towards like having these people that like they're your friends yeah and I didn't have that like core group and then my sister kind of became that group pause one second yeah hello yeah could you let them through please thank you sorry again so that's that that's when we really like became tight and then she went off

[1:24:34]  to college I kept going through high school and then we connected back when I moved back to Las Vegas and we lived together for a little bit okay that's when we really like became best friends like living together yeah and then when she moved to California that was definitely like oh wow she's over there but I think in a lot of ways it strengthened our relationship because when we lived together there was LA Times where we butted heads because it was like when you live together with people now I totally understand why living with one person is fantastic like my fiance but like when I when you're living with friends like you're gonna butt heads you're gonna fight and like I'm just glad that I am friends with the people that I still live or that I lived with but like I could easily see and I know people that live with people and now they're not like they don't talk yeah so I'm glad that I have that open relationship with those people and with my sister but I think it strengthened our relationship and when we were doing business together it was never like we were never competing and we were never

[1:25:21]  like oh well you did this so I got to do this although there was things that like when she makes more I'm like I want to do more yeah or when I'm doing I feel like she does that same thing and like now the biggest the one of the hard things is that she is in Los Angeles kind of she is the boss and by herself and there is times that like I feel like we lack the support we should be giving at times but it's also tough because we're busy here and we're doing like she's doing Southern California a massive market for us but in a lot of senses like we're doing the rest of the world and like I cover most of the dealers west of the Mississippi like if they have problems or questions they call me and like a lot of their you know just like they're conversing throughout the weeks and then I have my install team in Las Vegas and then I also have the hotels that I work on selling as well and the relationships that I work on building so there is

[1:26:08]  times of like I feel thin that like I can't help her and that sometimes it feels the worst for me because I'm like I know she needs help yeah and there's times but like I also feel like that's the person I can qualify I'm like one event or like oh I want to just tell you about this thing and like talk about business because she's probably had a very similar experience and then not like talk [ __ ] about people but we can just like have that moment of like ah let me just and we can both give each other that moment every once in a while and I think it's nice to have somebody that like I can talk to about with business and they totally understand like they know exactly what I'm talking about and vice versa at times and so there's like I'm going out there in a few weeks and I'm gonna go me and Kyle are gonna shoot videos and content for the jobs that are hers and I'm gonna go help her guy and then we're gonna hang out on Saturday and like it that like those are moments it just makes those moments so much more special because I

[1:26:55]  don't get to see her as much yeah um so it for me I mean that's like my road dog you know she she saw me go through so many things she was there at my physique show with the go Jake sign like she's been through there you know she's seen me grow up and so there's some degree that like she has a perspective of myself that I don't have yeah and she puts me in check sometimes too which is great that like I can tell her things she's like are you sure like is that really and uh and at times I'm like [ __ ] I don't know maybe thank you for like saying like no or saying something about it so I think that we have a very honest relationship with each other and we have a very open relationship that like we can talk about things and like feel good about things and also at times vent and like be like [ __ ] this is just like sometimes you just need somebody to talk to and like vent to and like I know that that person is always in my corner and it's always going to be Katie and that definitely is a special thing and like I there's definitely times in certain

[1:27:43]  situations where like I have to separate like me my life with Jen and my life with Katie because to some degree there's times that like it crosses and most of the time it's great but there's other situations where it's like oh I need this time with Jen like yeah I gotta spend time with James compartmentalize and then sometimes I have to spend time with Katie without Jen like there is certain situations but those are like the ladies in my life that I'll you know they're gonna be there forever no matter what so for me it's like I just have to sometimes figure that out but they both know at any moment in time I'm there for them regardless you know doesn't matter so that feels good and uh yeah that's my dog yeah and dude she's she is [ __ ] killing it like um last year we got to send out an email there's only one dealer well there's two dealers that we have Katie and then there's another that's called

[1:28:30]  Nets but they covered 13 states in the Northeast okay but last year maybe a year and a half ago we had a thing and Katie sold the most like bought the most tough skin so like we got to send an email to all of our dealers all these other dudes you know all these other businessmen that are all doing great and say Hey you know just so you know my daughter Katie yeah she beat everybody yeah but the thing is is like we focus only on tough skin like we don't do restoration we sub it out because we create relationships she actually recently did bring on a Restoration company so now she's gonna be like a full service thing but she focuses her most of her attention on tough skin and a lot of our dealers have it as like an addition to their product so they do restoration they do they have a slab yard they sell Stone they do this they do that and they offer tough skin we don't offer we only offer tough skin

[1:29:18]  we don't really have other things so it does help us focus more because we're in a sense a one-track pony like you come to us for this and if we have other issues I'm just gonna give it somebody that we know and they're going to give us stuff that is for us so it's like again a back and forth um but yeah that was a good moment that we got to send that yeah I mean I think that's what it's really about at the end of the day we want to be able to build memories with the people who we love you know what I mean and I just want to thank you so much man we're just wrapping yeah bro thank you so much for talking about the heart that you really come here with but also all the elements of hustle that you have as well I appreciate it I appreciate you Doug all right man thanks guys that's been another episode of the up or another episode of the heart and hustle podcast thanks for tuning in again appreciate it thanks Jake you're the man that's awesome all right bro