I went bankrupt...now I own a billion dollar portfolio

I went bankrupt...now I own a billion dollar portfolio Speaker 2: 10 years ago, this guy owned $0 of real estate. And today, he's got a portfolio of about a billion and a half dollars. And he did that with no outside investors, just starting from scratch, one property after another, flipping, flipping, flipping, compounding until he built a billion dollar portfolio. He's also my brother-in-law. And I've known the guy for 10 plus years. I've been asking him to come on the podcast and he likes to keep a low profile. But finally, he agreed to come on and tell his story. And the story is a little bit crazy. He started off as a broker. He ends up making a few million dollars doing deals as a broker and then gets caught holding the bag when one of his clients, I don't want to say screws him over, but leaves him holding the bag and he ends up $15 million in debt and instead of declaring bankruptcy, He decides to try to pay it all back piece by piece by piece. He does. He pays it all back and he ends up with a billion dollar plus real estate portfolio using a very specific strategy. So in this episode, I asked him how he did it to tell that story and to explain the strategy and his approach to real estate because it's a little bit different than anybody else. So enjoy this episode with my brother-in-law, Sanjiv, aka the Rhino of real estate. Unknown Speaker: I feel like I can rule the world. I know I can be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. All right, my brother, we're here. Speaker 2: Your story is a roller coaster. You have crazy highs, complete lows where you lose it all, and then rebuild back up 20 times bigger than the first time. So I want to go into that story. Today, you are sitting here. You've got a collection of real estate assets that you've built up over the last 10 years. That's now how big, roughly? Speaker 1: About a billion and a half in total. Billion and a half. Speaker 2: So 1.5 billion today, and that's really in kind of just a decade. So I want to go through the steps of how you got there. So where did the career start? In the name of the podcast, My First Million, right? Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: How you made your first million? Speaker 1: Yeah. You know, for me, it started, I went to law school, did an MBA. Speaker 2: Did you plan to be a lawyer? Speaker 1: I was full on set on being a lawyer. I went to law school, worked for a very famous lawyer, Mark Geragos out of LA. We were working the Scott Peterson case and it was very intriguing in criminal law. When I met my now wife or my wife, she was very much against me being a lawyer. For some reason, she was always programmed that you're gonna do certain things to win cases. So we'd always talked about, I'm gonna work for a lawyer for five years and then I'm getting real estate. She goes, why do you need to work for five years? Why don't you just do it? Me thinking, I'm like, oh, wow, that's a different thought. Speaker 2: I don't have a good answer to that. Speaker 1: So I ended up opening a real estate broker's office. Went back to my hometown where I grew up, a town called Modesto. I opened up this real estate, just broker's license and I have a small 100-foot office and a phone. I start calling people, trying to understand the market and really I think my first high came when I sold my first building. I called someone and actually I needed to grow my office and I called this person. I said, hey, what if I lease your office? Will you let me sell your office? He said, yes, if you lease it, I'll let you sell it. Speaker 2: So if you become a tenant, you could be the broker. Speaker 1: You got it. Speaker 2: Was that planned or it just happened to be that way? Speaker 1: No, I don't know if it was planned. It was kind of just like, you know, sometimes you never ask, you never know, right? And so at that moment I had asked, it was an older couple and I sold the building for them quite fast and I made 60 grand. And from there I started, you know, doing real estate brokerage. I started understanding and I started meeting different tenants in retail. You know, I was working for Jack in the Box, AutoZone, DP Arco, different tenants that I would help get them spaces for. Speaker 2: Now tell me, because today you're a real estate developer, but essentially you started as a broker. I think many brokers want to become developers and it rarely gets to the scale that you got to, right? What were you like as a broker? Are you just dialing for dollars? What were you doing? Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, gosh, man, I would be knocking on doors. I'd be calling. You know, I learned early on that if you don't ask, you don't get, right? And so it was no real like shame in my game. It was kind of like, you know, it's just like, hey, I'll ask. And so, you know, oftentimes we'd be going to anywhere, whether we go to an Indian party, whether we go anywhere. I was growing up. What do you do? How do you do it? Oh, you're a doctor. Oh, you own this office building. Would you ever sell it? No, but I'll lease it. Speaker 2: Great. Speaker 1: I'll take on the leasing business. Anything at that point to build up my CV or resume of things that I was able to get done. And so I fell kind of into a deal with a jack-in-the-box operator. And you know, this person was probably the first person in my life that ever, you know, I would call, I thought was a mentor or even like a father figure. My dad was a little bit different and I kind of drank the Kool-Aid. And so I started doing really well because what would happen is I'd have this relationship with these Jack in the Box guys and I'd know where they want to go. I didn't have the money to do it myself because I was just starting out. So what I would do is I would basically do development in a box. I would go and I would Find the property, I get the tenant, and I go to another developer and I'd say, hey, give me the buy, sale, lease commission. Give me all three, I'll manage the process for you. As time went on, I started to manage their construction process. I didn't have the money to do it, but I was doing it. And that went really well for me until the jack-in-the-box operator, you know, basically didn't pay their payroll taxes, you know, kind of fell in dire straits. And, you know, a week before, maybe let's say three days before, we're supposed to close a big deal and I was going to make my first $10 million, not even my first million. Speaker 2: Just on the commissions from the buy-sell-lease side? Speaker 1: So what had happened was we started buying property with these guys buying it. So in essence, we would buy it, we'd do all the work, and then they would buy it later on using their lines of credit. And so what happened was this person that we were developing for was the largest jack-in-the-box franchisee in Sacramento. And then what ended up happening was they didn't pay their payroll taxes. Speaker 2: But you had bought it on spec, thinking this guy, he's good for it. He'll take it off me. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I still remember. It's funny. I would sit there at night, and you know there's an old rule that you know people said never count your money, but I mean I would be looking at that sheet every night. Yeah, baby Let's go. You know you because you're taking a big risk. Yeah, you know at that time I didn't understand the risk, but you know it was a big risk I look back now, and I said wow that was you know I think I borrowed like $15 million. Speaker 2: How were you able to borrow $15 million at the time? Speaker 1: I mean, it was all private lending. I went to private lenders. When you come out of school, you get a W-2 or 1099. I was 1099. I was a broker. Banks didn't underwrite it. The banks looked at it and said, oh, you went from this to this. Wow. We don't understand. Speaker 2: We can't understand. Speaker 1: We don't understand it. Right. And so, you know, as they don't understand it, then all of a sudden, you know, you're like, oh, OK, well, where's my options? And so we had you know, we had everything kind of lined up and, you know, literally three days before we're supposed to close. And we were we were getting ready to close. And, you know, this person's not on their phone. This person would talk to me daily. They would call me. They were the first person in my life to ever call me son. I drank the Kool-Aid harder than anybody. And then, you know, this happened where they ended up getting in trouble and, you know, kaput. The deals kind of got soft. Speaker 2: Right. How many did you have? Speaker 1: It was 10 total. Speaker 2: So you committed to 10. You borrowed almost $15 million. You're ready to make your first $10 million. You're looking at the sheet every night, three days before. The guy gets popped for whatever he was doing outside of what you guys were doing together. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And now you owe this money. And there's no way out, because you signed it, you're under contract basically. Speaker 1: No, we bought the property and we owed the debt. Speaker 2: You sent the money. Speaker 1: Yeah, right. We spent the money. It was there. And so, you know, I still remember, you know, and this is where the lows start, right? I still remember, you know, going home to my wife and, you know, three days I cried. You know, literally crying. Grown man, just like tears coming out of my eyes. And my wife says, you know, look, you always like to work out, Sanjiv. Like, go to the gym. Get out of the house. Go to the gym. And so normally I used to go to the gym at like nine, 10 o'clock at night. And there'd be two, three guys in there, you work out. You know, the gym was always an interesting atmosphere because you have no clue who the other guy is. He could be, you know, homeless. He could be a billionaire. You know, but he asked you, hey, what do you do in the gym? Right? Hey, bro, let me, can I get a spot? Let me help you out. So there was a guy I used to work out with at nighttime and there'd be very few of us in the gym. And so we would always say, hey, how are you? We talk about life, but we had, I generally had no clue who he was or what he did. And so this random day we walk in, I walk in the gym at 2 o'clock and this guy's standing behind the front desk. I look at him and I say, what are you doing, Dave, behind the desk? He said, oh, come into my office. You got an office there? Speaker 2: So he was a manager? He owned the place? Speaker 1: He owned the place. He was the owner and he's actually said, hey, I'm trying to sell this place. Speaker 3: I've built a few companies that have made a few million dollars a year and I've built two companies that have made tens of millions of dollars a year. I have a little bit of experience launching, building, creating new things. I actually don't come up with a lot of original ideas. Instead, what I'm really, really good at, what my skill set is, is researching different ideas, different gaps in the market in reverse engineering companies. I didn't invent this, by the way. We have this guy, Brad Jacobs. We talked about him on the podcast. He started four or five different publicly traded companies worth tens of billions of dollars each. He actually is the one who I learned how to do this from. With the team at Hubspot, we put together all of my research tactics, frameworks, techniques, On spotting different opportunities in the market, reverse engineering companies and figuring out exactly where opportunities are versus just coming up with a random silly idea and throwing it against the wall and hoping that it sticks. And so if you want to see my framework, you can check it out. The link is below in the YouTube description. Speaker 1: I grew up bodybuilding at a young age and so I was always, you know, very fascinated by the fitness business. I was a trainer when I was in college and, you know, for me it was like, oh my gosh, you know, and I asked him, I said, does it make money? And he says, yeah, it nets $30,000 a month. Oh, quickly I'm starting to think, all right, I can do my real estate, I can buy this gym, I can do all these things. Speaker 2: So this is still while you're on the hook for the jack-in-the-boxes? Speaker 1: I am all the way on the hook. Speaker 2: And how long of a period did you have to like kind of resolve this? What was your plan? You're going to start opening up jack-in-the-box? What were you going to do? Speaker 1: I couldn't open up jack-in-the-boxes because I went to jack-in-the-box corporate and I had recorded a deed restriction on these properties. So basically I recorded something Before closing, again, you learn later on in life. Never do that. And so I was kind of stuck with this. Speaker 2: It could only be that. Speaker 1: It could only be that. And it was a random deed restriction that we had created and I couldn't get it off because the guy was still alive. So I couldn't quit claim it. I couldn't do certain things. It was kind of a very unique situation. And so in essence, I bought the gems to pay for my real estate. And then, you know, the first month in, you know, I still remember, wait, so how'd you buy the gym? Speaker 2: So the guy says, it's netting 30 grand a month. Speaker 1: The guy says, I'm netting 30 grand a month. I need to get out of this. He says, you know, I have a big tax bill, so I don't want to get paid up front. How about you take it on and pay me over time? Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Speaker 2: Paying installments. Speaker 1: Perfect. All right. I went home, I asked my wife, I said, you know, hey, I want to buy the gym we work out at. And she laughed, you know, no way. And then 30 days later, sure enough, we bought the gym. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: And needless to say, she doesn't laugh at anything I tell her we're going to do now. She's, you know. So we bought the gym and 30 days in, you know, I go to the bookkeeper and I'm like, hey, where's my check? Speaker 2: Yeah. Where's that 30 grand? Speaker 1: Where's the money at? Let's go. And she says, actually, you need to write a check for $22,000. I said, what? $22,000? How? I was going to make $30,000. At least give me $15,000. And so she showed me how. I didn't understand how to read a profit and loss. There's a difference between cash and accrual and all these things that you show. And you know, he had slimmed it down not to show every manager. He showed it, you know, and not in a bad way. He just showed it the way that it could have been. Speaker 2: He saw it. Yeah. Speaker 1: That's what he saw. It wasn't what was actually there. Speaker 2: And how old are you at this time, roughly? I am 28. This is 2008. And there was a period of time, the way my wife tells the story. So you're my brother-in-law. The way my wife tells the story is, You start dating her sister. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: And you're this guy that comes out of nowhere. You are like this hotshot real estate guy, young, right? Like I think you're pretty... 25, 26. You're 25, 26 and you were making millions of dollars as a broker, which is not common, correct? Like you must have been a top, top performer. Is that fair? I mean, I don't know much about the broker world. Speaker 1: Yeah, at that time I was. Speaker 2: I mean, you know, and you're buying her nice gifts and you're living this great life. And when the Jack of the Box thing happened, at some point, I don't know if you've got to this part of the story, at some point you're like, you have to move back in to the parents' house. You have to move back into your childhood bedroom. Has that already happened or am I jumping the gun? Speaker 1: No, actually, so what happened was, basically, long story short, we're paying for the real estate. I have to go become the general manager of the store. And we didn't have enough money to pay everybody, so my wife ends up becoming the Zumba instructor. And so she's teaching like, you know, she must have been teaching 30, 40 classes a week, maybe more. And she was great at it, but you know, we were just at the gym all day long. And in order to pay for our stuff, you know, we went from a Range Rover to a Ford Fusion. And we got out of our house to pay for, again, we're paying the bills. We were always like, let's pay. And so we then ended up at my childhood high school room. And I still remember this the first night. And my wife was a little bit upset. You know, we went from this standard down to this, you know, naturally, you know, it was it was it was a very big culture shock. Right. And what I didn't tell you was that in order for us to buy the gyms and not a lot of people know, I had to come up with a little down. My wife pawned her wedding ring. She's a ride or die. When you talk about a ride or die, that girl's been with me through it all. Speaker 2: By the way, are these, because I know her, but I don't know her back then. Her idea, your idea, you're like, hey, if only there was a way we could come up with this. How did that conversation go? I gotta know. Speaker 1: It was definitely not her idea, but she got on board with it fairly fast and she understood that If we fail, we fail together. If we feast, we feast together. At that point, we were feast or famine. We're either going to be able to try to figure out how to eat or we're starving here. In life, it was a big up and a big down because you're 27. We're driving a brand new Range Rover. We're living in an $800,000 house. This is amazing. She's got a nice, fancy And everything on the outside look great. On the inside, we owe all these people money. Speaker 2: Who do you go to, by the way, when this stuff's going down? You're not a big mentor, network guy. You've always been a lone wolf, as long as I've known you, really. When shit's hitting the fan, obviously you're telling your wife, but how did you try to get out of the pickle? Because that's an unbelievable amount of money to owe. You owed $15 million. Speaker 1: I mean, and you know, honestly, I was crying in the fetal position at home. My wife just literally said, get out of here. I have this story I tell my kids, the light bulb story, right? And what it is, is I'll plug in a light bulb for my kids, a lamp, and I'll just turn the bulb on, a hair, and the bulb turns off. And I asked my kids, I said, what does this mean to you? And my kids look at me, they're young. Unknown Speaker: Oh, I don't want to see it. Speaker 1: It means that success is just this much far away. The difference between a successful light and a broken light is a hair. I always had that kind of mentality that I'm almost there. I might have not always been there but my mentality, oh baby, I was let's go. We lay down at night and we turn the light off when we're the first night back and we look up and In my age group, I'm a little older than you, we used to do these stars and like stickers on the ceiling. The glow in the dark. You turn it off and the whole world appears. And we turn off the light and we hadn't stayed in this room for, you know, forever. We just, we had our own place and we both just start laughing out loud. And I told her, you know, I said, give me nine months. Give me nine months. I'll figure it out. And, you know, the switch kind of clicked for me then. Speaker 2: You made a promise. Speaker 1: I made a promise. I got to stick to it. You know, it's almost like when people take a weight loss challenge. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Right. I've got a reason to do it. This is my timeline. Let's do it. Speaker 2: But you have no plan yet. Or you have a plan or not. Speaker 1: Well, you know, I said I'm going to grow the gems. Right. I had I had we started to turn it around the first one. And then we're like, let's open up a second one. And, you know, we ended up being able to build a second store. It took us a long time. It took us a little bit. It took us about a year. And, you know, we just started working harder. And honestly, like I just, you know, I would go to the gym if we need to pay a bill. I would go to the gym and sell memberships myself. I'd some nights work till midnight till we close. You know, we were 24 hour in the first store. And so I would just If I needed to get it, we had to go get it. We lived very, very within our means. I still remember we would share food for probably about five years. We wouldn't go anywhere and eat. Two meals right there would be one meal. She would eat whatever's left. I would eat and You know and vice versa some nights, you know, don't get me wrong There was times when you know, I ate first but most of the time it was sharing and trying to get there and so as we started to build the gyms up and That's when we started getting back to like, okay, we're paying everybody. Good things are happening. Let's go. Speaker 2: Could you not just declare bankruptcy with the jack-in-the-box situations to at least get to zero again? Speaker 1: I could have and that may have been the smarter path. I went to law school, so my law school professor was always like, bankruptcy's immoral. No, it's not. But these thoughts are put in your head in life that you don't know where it came from. Speaker 2: By the way, spoiler here is, you end up creating, I think at one point, the largest gym chain in California, right? In Northern California? Speaker 1: We were one of the largest. We were definitely the largest private operator. We didn't have partners, so we ended up getting to 82 stores. We were growing the business and we had done some really smart moves along the way. I would option properties, which we can talk about, and do certain things in our leases that we just started learning. We built a great culture. We had almost 2,000 employees and it was a fun run. Speaker 3: Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler Training did with Hubspot. They used Breeze, Hubspot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled. And people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to Hubspot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. Speaker 2: So the brick by brick is the first one, the guy basically says, pay me as you go. Give me a little down payment. You pawn the wedding ring. You get the down payment. Yep. You turn that gem. You thought it was profitable. It turns out it really wasn't. The cash flow really wasn't there. You start to squeeze it by working your ass off. Great. A year later, you get the second story. Give me a sense, because I've never owned a gym. A gym like this, what do they net? If I see a gym around the corner, I think these were golds gyms at the time. Speaker 1: Yeah, we went to five with golds. Speaker 2: And then you created your own concept. Speaker 1: And then we created our own concept. Speaker 2: So it could be a typical, like a golds gym. What do these things make, revenue, profit, roughly? Speaker 1: It depends on the Gold's Gym. If you're in Gold's Gym LA, which was kind of like the Mecca, they're making $8-10 million a store. Jim is a fixed cost business. Once you've paid your employees and your rent and your lights, it doesn't really go up. What may vary is if you do personal training, it may vary on certain services. But generally, it's a fixed cost business. So you want to get to a certain number of members and then after that, everything is profit. And so it's a higher margin business. Most people, Jim said, at one point were 40% profit margin. Now, I'd probably say they're closer to 20, 25 because labor has increased and membership prices haven't increased as much as maybe They could or should, but there's also a lot of competition, right? There's only so much pie in every corner or every other corner there's gyms being opened up. Speaker 2: So what did you figure out? What did you do differently that let you build this 82-store chain? Speaker 1: Well, we started out as Gold's Gym operators, and we realized that Gold's Gym was a bodybuilder model. There was people that would come in the gym, they work out for three hours a day, heavy protein, people are farting, drinking, sitting there for, you know. Speaker 2: It might be the worst type of customer to have. Speaker 1: Yeah, they abuse your weights, but they use it, right? And then you start to look at this model called Planet Fitness, where they're signing up 15,000 people at a low price, and when we were in the gym business, they were just coming up. And so we went and saw one and we said, man, this is actually interesting. They were serving pizza and bagels, things that we just never even understood why. Now we understand it's because people will come and eat pizza twice a month or every week and they'll get their 9.99 worth. So they were smarter than most. They were already ahead of the game. And we then started seeing other brands. We said, oh, well, Gold's has some good stuff. And so we started combining the models to create our own model. And we created basically a large box, high volume, low price model with classes and group training. And we basically combined Gold's Gym and Orange Theory and a Planet Fitness all in one. And in that process, we started doing really well. Speaker 2: Did you figure out any great insights along the way? Like, you know, my first business was a restaurant business and restaurant business location really, really matters. One thing we figured out very quickly was Chipotle spends, I don't know, $40 million a year figuring out the best locations to be. You could just try to get next to every Chipotle is actually just like, now you spend zero, but you get the benefit of all of their location scouting, right? We figured out that you could look at the receipts. And if you understood how to read the code, you would know how many customers this Chipotle gets versus this one. So I could even compare within that which location is better than the other, right? So like we started getting a little smarter about how to play the game better. Were there any moments like that for you in the gym business that you started to figure out maybe How to pick up members faster or how to take the average value of a customer from $10 a month to upsell them in some interesting way. Any good business insights from that? Speaker 1: You know, what we did was we created a really unique referral mechanism. And so what we did was we realized people love things for free, right? I mean, a lot of the people I've heard talk on your podcast, it's like, give them a deal that they can't ever say no to. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And I think that's always a great business tool of keeping the back of your mind and you're starting anything or doing anything. You know, we created this, me and John, who's my COO and like family to me. He's been with me a long time and we sat in a room and we're talking back and forth. What would make a member want to refer someone? And Shaan said, you know, jokingly, give it to him for free. You know, I said, yes, that's what we're going to do. And so we're like, how do we do that? And so we're like, all right, well, Shaan's paying, you know, let's say this for every person Shaan refers that joins, he could get a dollar off his dues. And so in that process, Shaan is $30 a month or $20 a month. Shaan has to refer $20 a month for that $20. And we found that our members, like when we did our sales pitch, we said, hey, Shaan, you know, our membership's $39.99, but you can get it for free. Would you like to know how you get it for free? People will be like, yeah. Great. Just refer your friends, your family, your coworkers, anybody you want. Here's the pass. We're going to write your name on it, Shaan. How many passes do you want? Shaan says, I want 40 because I'm paying $40. Great. And now when they sign up, they come in and give us Shaan's pass. We would connect it to their membership. Shaan's dues would now go down by a dollar. It was amazing what we saw where people were so motivated. Speaker 2: Wow, even for a dollar, that worked. Speaker 1: And it was amazing for people for even for like, you know, because you'd have people that would go down from 40 to zero and all of a sudden two people would quit. So their membership's now two bucks. Who's the two people, you know? And you're like, well, okay. Speaker 2: They start shaking people down. Speaker 1: They start calling people and be like, how did you, how did you get out of the gym? I mean, I watched it happen myself. So we created this referral We had a concept that was really good and that kind of escalated us. And then we started to realize, look, as we grew the gyms, we learned what we did right and we learned what we did wrong. For example, we would build pools in some of our gyms. Well, there's nothing wrong with having a pool, but the reality is you're gonna have two to three, maybe four people in it at a time. It's gonna take 10,000 square feet. 6,000 to 10,000 square feet. That's a lot of footage for four people. We started just realizing what our model was as we went forward and then we just decided, okay, we're going to give a great value at a great price and then we're going to incentivize you to refer people. It worked. Speaker 2: How long did it take you to get out of the holes? Speaker 1: The initial mistake was big. Fast forward to 2011. I now have 12 gyms. And I'm with Gold's Gym. 12 Gold's Gym, 2011. I had bought some property. And one property I had, I paid $4 million. I owed 750. I'd been paying them every month at 13% for three years. And so I go to this lender. I actually went to high school with this guy's granddaughter. And they were good old boys from where I grew up. And I went to them and I said, hey, look, If I give you $50,000, and for me, $50,000 at that time was all I had, will you rewrite my note and give me another year and change my interest rate? Because I'm now starting to climb up on the cash, right? And my sales, I have 12 gems, they're all doing well. So the guy says, sure, Chopra, bring us a $50,000 cashier's check tomorrow. I said, okay, let me have my lawyer draft up a document. You don't trust us, Chopra? You need a lawyer? Again, no mentor, no coach. Go get the $50,000 cashier's check, bring it in, put it on their desk. Two weeks later, I get a foreclosure notice. Now, call them, what's going on? Say, oh, well, we think this property's worth $4 million. So we're going to take it from you. Whoa. So in the initial time, I start calling around and then I go to Gold's Gym. The next week I go and the guy has now passed away, but he's the president of Gold's Gym at the time and I go in and there's this big Gold's convention every year. Whether it was Vegas, LA, San Diego, it was at the time it was in Vegas. I still remember I went and met with them and I said, Hey, look, I've opened up 12 stores in three years. You know, I'd like to open up 50. And he laughed. You can't open up $50M. We can't even open up $50M. He said, but look, I'll do you a favor. You can open up a gym for every time you have $1M in the bank. So you want to open up $50M? Show me $50M. Remember, $50,000 for me was, ooh. So I had this franchise agreement. And so I called this lawyer, really trying to save the property, right? I called somebody I knew from law school and said, hey, man, I got this property. Can I sue the lender? What can I do? And we're not really in the lawsuit type of thing at that point. And so I filed bankruptcy. I said, no, tomorrow I can't do it. And then we started looking at the benefits at the time. We were paying everybody. And long story short, we ended up filing Chapter 11. We were able to rebrand. We paid everybody 100 cents on the dollar that was secured. And we started growing the gyms after that. And in the process, we reorganized our life. We paid all the people, all the 15 million we owed, we paid with interest. But that also built me on the next round that we'll talk about, right? Some of those lenders are still great friends to today where I can pick up the phone and call and say, hey, we're from the Bay Area, right? So I call them and say, hey, can I get a loan? I just called one. And they said, yeah, we'll do it for you in a heartbeat. You don't need anything? No, we know. You stood behind. And so, you know, so we started building the gyms and we started building more gyms and then really we had no real estate at this point. We had sold our house. We had sold our cars. We just had gyms. We were just a gym operator. And I think by 2015, We'd gotten up to about 33 stores and decided to tell my wife, like, I want to get back into real estate. But I didn't have the seed capital. Real estate was always capital intensive. And so I looked through my portfolio and sure enough, I remembered I optioned that second gym in Oakdale. So, I basically used that option to buy the center and then I sold it to someone else based on my new lease. Speaker 2: Sorry, so explain how this works. So, if I've never done real estate, I understand how this option buys, what do you mean? Speaker 1: So, in our lease, we put this option, let's say you're Mr. Seller. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And we say, Mr. Seller, we have the right to buy this at, we'll rent it for now. Correct. Speaker 2: But we have the right to buy at a defined price. Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: At this defined time. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: In order for us to do that, we just have to tell you we're buying it and we have 60 days, 90 days to close. So we knew there was a buyer who wanted to buy gems and do other stuff in the market. Broker approached us and said, hey, would you sell this? They didn't know I didn't own it. But they said, would you sell it? And I said, actually, you know, and so we had optioned out like I think it was like three or four million bucks. We sold it at seven million. Speaker 2: And so you knew risk free in a way because you have the option to buy at a defined price. You already know there's a buyer lined up. So you're not speculating as much as long as you believe that they would close, that they would actually buy the thing. Speaker 1: Yeah. And there's no such thing as risk free because if that buyer blows out, I didn't have the money to buy the thing anyway. Speaker 2: But you did like a double escrow basically. Speaker 1: In essence, we did a double escrow and we made several million dollars and we're like, wow. Speaker 2: And so now that I've invested with you, you do this a bunch. And it is like the two sweetest words in the English language are double escrow, which basically is like we agree to buy a thing. But before we even have to take the money out of our pocket, We sell it. So the same day they ask us for the money, we just take the money from this guy. We give them their share. We pocket the profits. You bought the thing and sold the thing on the same day without ever having to take the money out of your pocket. Beautiful. You do this all the time now. It's great. I'll do a deal with you and you're like, By the time we get to buy this, we're already gonna have sold $10 million, $7 million worth of the equity, you know, because we already have buyers lined up. And so you did this for the, so that's how you did your first deal. Speaker 1: That's how I got my first seed money to buy real estate. And then I just started buying and flipping for, you know, for years. Speaker 2: And you were doing it the same way, gym options or no, that was just like. Speaker 1: I did a few gym options. I did a few gym sales. Then I got enough money to go buy a property and build a gym. And then I ended up hooking up with this company called Harbor Freight Tools. And so, as I started getting into 15, 16, we started getting the higher number of gems. We're like 65, 70. We bought this building in San Francisco. Yeah, I remember on Market Street. Market Street, yeah. 1, 2, 3, 4, Market Street. I think you actually came there once. Speaker 2: Yeah, the vanity, the address. I remember just thinking, you got 1, 2, 3, 4, Market? Speaker 1: I was, yeah, I know. And there was, you know, every day we'd go out and pick up the needles that were outside. It was crazy. But, you know, like, at that time, we had a store there in a non-profit. A mosque, you know, approached us and said, we'd like to put our church here. And we negotiated a deal and we said, well, we wouldn't make that money in probably like 10 years. Speaker 2: Running a gym. Speaker 1: 15 years of running the gym. So, we sold it. And then, you know, like, we're like, oh, well, we made some money here. And as I was building my next store, somebody from Harbor Freight Tools randomly called me and said, we'd like to lease that box. So, I go home and tell my wife, what do you think? I wanna build this gym. I'm used to building all these gyms. She says, well, why don't you just do it, right? And so we did it. And we ended up building a very big relationship there. I'm a big relationship guy. A lot of the tenants we work with, we've worked with for years. And we ended up doing over 100 for those guys as time went on. But yeah, it's just kind of evolved as time went on. And then we got to 17. And, you know, my dad was not really the, I won't say bad things, but he wasn't a loving type, a little bit abusive. A lot abusive at times, but you know, he was just a different character. So, you know, my thing was whenever I have kids, you know, we can't change the past, but we can sure as hell change the future, right? Yesterday's gone, but tomorrow has not been written yet. And so I kind of always had that philosophy, but I wanted to be a great dad. But during this time from 2008 to 2000 and probably 16, I worked seven days a week. Probably 80 to 100 hours every week. I mean, I would get up at 530 and be in the gyms and then I'd come home by midnight. I'd come home every night. I just want to see my wife and kids. And I'm thinking I'm doing a good job because I'm busting my butt, but I'm still, you know. I'm still trying, but my table was wobbly. You know, we talked about this. Speaker 2: Give the table a metaphor. Speaker 1: So I always have this belief that there's three, your life is like there's three legs to a table, right? Your family, your job, and your faith. And your faith doesn't have to be God. It could be your faith in fitness. It could be your faith in the way you eat. It could be the faith the way you treat people. Speaker 2: A code. A code you live by. Speaker 1: It's whatever you believe your faith is in for you to feel like you are foundationally sound. Well, if any one of those legs, you know, let's say my job is strong, but my family life is weak. What happens to the table? It wobbles. My faith may be weak and my job may be strong. My table wobbles. And so for me, I was working a lot. I was making money. There was a great relationship with my wife, but one day I'm driving home from Santa Maria. I had a gym in Santa Maria. It was probably on the coast. It was probably, gosh, I'd say 400 miles from my house. And I would drive in the morning and I would come back the same night. I'd go train. I'd go meet the managers. I'd walk my store. I wanted to see and touch and feel. Anyways, my second son Chase, your nephew, calls me. He's crying hysterically. Put your mom on the phone. My wife gets on the phone. Honey, what's he saying? And she's crying. Says, you know, he really misses you and he wants you to come visit. He doesn't think you live at home. And I'm going home every night on purpose, right? Like I'm driving 400 miles. I'm like, I'm going to be there. I think I'm being a good dad. You know, I'm kissing him every night. I'm watching them. I, you know, and so the whole day, it didn't sit right with me. And that's when I decided for myself, I said, I built this great business, but I can't do this long term. Because for me to do it right or the way I wanted to do it, I was unable to do it and be a good father. And so that kind of changed my path of where I started focusing more on real estate. Speaker 2: And the type of real estate you do, because real estate's a big word, broad word, could mean anything, you do shopping centers, mostly. You've done other stuff too, but now you do retail shopping centers. And as a tech guy in Silicon Valley, that always felt super random. Retail shopping centers is like, okay, oh, you're like an archeologist. You do dinosaur things. I get it. What are you talking about, dude? But it's this incredible, and now I invest a ton of money with you because I'm like, We're blown away by this, but just explain kind of like even just the space, the sandbox you play in, why you play in that sandbox and like, you know, what's your model? What do you do? Speaker 1: You know, 2010, all the news was retail's dying, you know, but what it really did was it insulated retail because what happened after 2010, people started building way more multifamily storage, industrial. But they didn't build retail shopping centers. No, they built these pads a lot more post-COVID. Because what happened in COVID, right? You are closed unless you got a drive-thru. And so those businesses that had a drive-thru, they crushed it. And as time went on, you know, there's been a lot of retailers that have left. It's no doubt. But retail has sustained and it's kind of become a supply and demand thing where it's like, you know, and what we are is we're value-add retailers. So we're developer. So basically what we do is we find things that we feel we can add value to, whether it's new tenants, whether it's breaking it up and selling it in pieces, whether it's construction, We always have a game plan to go in and do something. And I often get asked, why didn't the other guy do it? Why didn't the guy before you do it? I don't know. Sometimes it's just there. Sometimes people just been in a project too long. There's been times I've been in a project for five, six years and I'm like, I just wanna be done. And then there's been projects I've been in for five minutes and I'm like, let's go. It just happens in this business. And so, we've built a lot of good relationships with a lot of tenants. And the good part is that we can email these tenants or their brokers within, we're looking at a center, we can find out generally who wants to be there. Speaker 2: Give a sense of what good looks like in real estate. What have you been able to do in your track record? Speaker 1: You know, typically what we see is we see people trying to compare or, you know, match the S&P or kind of be standard, you know, 7-8% a year. They get some depreciation, you know, and they're happy. Speaker 2: They're diversified. Speaker 1: They're diversified. They, you know, they can do certain things. And we're more, we target for our folks now mid-20s to low-30s annually. And in order for us to get there, we actually have to go do something. Speaker 2: You went from having zero real estate assets to over a billion dollars in real estate assets in 10 years. How do you do that? Don't we all want to know? Speaker 1: I mean, I think you have to find someone who's already kind of figured out that game and kind of run with them, I would say. I'd also say that, like, it's compounding. You know, you buy one deal and you sell it. You made some money. Now it's when you do it again and again and again and again and again. And so in our business, I was able to compound it by doing it again and again and again and again and again for many years. And so I would tell anybody who's young, like, you know, you're gonna start with something, right? And then you gotta figure out how to make that make money and move on to the next. Because if you stick to just one, there's a lot of people out there, they have one building, they enjoy it, but they didn't compound it to really get to where they could have. Speaker 2: You had also told me one of the deals we did, you know, I'm learning about this as you go, and you're like, oh, we're buying this center. And you're like, there's a so-and-so grocery store. And one of the reasons we're getting this price is that that grocery store, they only have like a year left on their lease, but they have an option to extend it like 12 or 15 years, but they, you know, they're not picking it up because they don't have to yet. They have one or two years left right now. And I was like, okay, so what's the plan? You're like, I'm going to get them to extend it. And I was like, but why? Why would they do that? How do you know? And it was a combination of intelligence. You were like, well, I know it's a high performing store. I know they should want to extend it, but they don't have to do it proactively. But I do know the person who's like runs their real estate. She used to run real estate for this other company. And actually, one time she left me holding the bag. She pulled out of a deal last minute and I ate the loss and I didn't hold it against her. I treated her well, even though we took a big financial loss on that. I believe she's going to treat us well here. And then sure enough, like, you know, we buy this thing and suddenly we got a 15 year lease extension and that property's value, you know, skyrockets from that. So sometimes it's also about taking a loss well, not just when somebody wins. Yeah, it's all, you know, it's easy to high five when things are going great, but how do you, how you act when things don't go your way defines the character and defines the relationship, right? Speaker 1: A hundred percent. I mean, you know, How you act on a loss is almost more important than how you act on a win. Speaker 2: Well, your kids play sports. Do you teach them this when it comes to their baseball, their pitching, what they're doing? Speaker 1: We try. I mean, they're young. They got a lot of emotion. So it's kind of a fine balance because you don't want them to want to lose, but you want them to understand how to lose. Because in life, in order for most entrepreneurs out there, Most guys have had some sort of failure in their life and then boom, it clicks. And they use that as like a catalyst to just skyrocket, right? Not every business person is super successful right out the gate. And most guys who have made it really far have... I've had to grind their way through. And so, you know, for my kids, that's what I want. I want to see them, I want them to do baseball. Baseball's a sport of failure, right? You hit three out of 10, you're in the MLB, you're a Hall of Famer, right? That's 30% of the time you're touching the ball or hitting the ball. So I like the sport because it's mentally, and I also believe like, you know, sports are a great way for kids to learn to compete, you know, and have healthy competition. But at the same time, you have a lot of people teaching their kids that I've seen, They think they're competing with other kids. I try to teach my kids that you're competing and I would tell any adult this. Not to look at everyone else. Because I can only do what Sanjiv can do. I'm competing with me. Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a guy who came on this podcast. He had this great phrase. He goes, he's an investor and he talks about investing in founders. What do you look for, man? What are some of the key things? And he goes, I want to know if they're pre-fall or post-fall. He said, all great men have a fall. I love it if they're already post-fall because I know that they know what it takes to come back up. I know that they're going to have a certain level of maturity and humility because they're post-fall. And pre-fall, you always have to be wary because somebody who's only ever seen the ups, you don't know how they'll handle the downs. You don't know if they'll even anticipate that there can be downs. They might get so full of themselves that they don't actually see that that's a possibility and they don't guard for it and, you know, watch for the wall and make the turn as you need to do when you're riding the race. I've always remembered that. Speaker 1: And guys that redline or push the limits, they're going to have some falls. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: Until you get to the edge, it's kind of like one of those things. So, you know, some of those people who have never had a fall, maybe they're playing it, not playing the game as hard as they maybe could be. Speaker 2: Right. What are some other like core, I don't know, philosophies that you have? Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think Core philosophy, I always think of this, what would I advise my son to do? Speaker 2: What's an example where maybe if you had just been thinking from your own perspective, you could kind of talk yourself into something, but when you think about it, like, what would I advise my son to do? The answer is much more clear. Can you think of an example? Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean like when a tenant burns you or when people burn you and you say, man, I want to call that person and tell them I'm not going to do any more business with you. You know, we're going to use the stick. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And what do you gain with that, right? What would my son, what would my son Shaden gain from that? Okay, the other person knows you don't like them. They're not going to bring you any deals. They're not going to do anything. Or you could say, hey, you know what? This one didn't work out. Let's find another one to win together on, right? It's a long game. It's not a short game. Life is a long game. It's like things go full circle, right? People say, what does going full circle means? It means as you're going on longer and longer, different opportunities come up. It comes all the way around. And so for that, it would be an example where I would probably tell him like, hey, look, don't kill the relationship. Build the relationship. Find another way to win with that person. And don't hold on to the, you know, that's the problem is most people hold on to memories that are, you know, the right word, I would say the memories that affected them in a negative way. So they carry these negative ways. Instead, you can forgive, you don't have to forget. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Right. I mean, and so it's so there's been times in my life that I've even had to use this for my own. Like I tell people a lot of times, like, you know, I will sometimes have to make a decision. And I will think as if my sons or my daughters are the ones having to make that decision. And I asked what would I tell them? And most times it takes me five seconds. And this is something that I had a conundrum about in my head for weeks. You know, oftentimes I talk to you and we're outside and you say things so commonsensely, you know, like, well, why have I been thinking about this for two weeks? Shaan got this to me in like 30 seconds, right? Speaker 2: All right, listen, the two most beautiful words in the English language are email subscribers. You need more email subscribers. I guarantee it. I don't care how many you have. You need more of them. Speaker 1: I need more of them. Speaker 2: You need more of them. We all need more email subscribers because email is an amazing way to build your business, to build an audience and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on the TikTok algorithm, the Instagram algorithm. It's how you get people to engage directly with you so you can get them to trust you, to like you, click products, check them out, check out your stuff. That's how you build a relationship with people. And so email subscribers are key and they're free. It's an amazing tool. And the tool I use for my email subscriber base is Beehive. It's a tool that was built by the folks who were actually running Morning Brew. So they were running growth at Morning Brew. They grew it to 4 million subscribers. And along the way, they had to build out all these special tools in-house that made Morning Brew great and helped it grow faster, helped it make more money, helped it nurture the email subscribers. And so they took all those tools that they built internally and they said, could we provide those as a separate startup For anybody to use and not just Morning Group. And so they made it available to everybody. Because before Beehive, you were duct taping five different apps together. Google Docs, MailChimp, Stripe, a spreadsheet in your dream. It was all bundled together. Well now, Beehive is just one tool that does it. And it's a single purpose thing. It's what I use for my newsletter. I send a newsletter out to over 100,000 people and that's what I use. And so for listeners of My First Million, they're actually doing a special code. So if you're thinking about, hey, I should have a newsletter. I should have subscribers. I kind of want to build an audience that way. Well, check it out. They'll give you 30% off. Use the code MFM30. Go to beehive.com. That's B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com and use the code MFM30. I'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you. Start scaling your content today. What have you seen, just because you're in retail, what have you seen as the trend? What's going on? What's changing? Maybe what's dying, what's exploding. What can you teach us, because you see a different part of the world than we do. You see more of the leading indicators. You know who's expanding. You know who's contracting. You know which locations are thriving and which ones are struggling. What have you seen, I guess? What's going on? Speaker 1: So for retail specifically, there's been a lot of new things called experiential retail. It's come out in fitness centers. We've been there for a long time, but now there's pickleball, trampoline parks. You know, retail is important for any centers to drive traffic. Speaker 2: So retail used to be like, you know, where that now it's, let's say, pick a mall or a trampoline park. It would have just been go buy clothes at the store, right? Basically, that's the shift that's happening is like, People buying, you know, maybe more of that stuff is being bought online, but you can't buy the experience online. Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's places that are thriving like Ross Dress for Less or Burlington Code or TJ Maxx. My wife loves home goods or TJ Maxx. Your wife loves it. It's like a treasure hunt every time you go, right? And they're sourcing things that people can go and they're looking for that treasure. Speaker 2: Look at all the junk we bought, but the deal we got on the junk. Speaker 3: The deal was amazing. Speaker 1: So the experience for that, so that also becomes experiential, but it also becomes where It's not stuff you could easily find online, right? And so online has definitely had some form of effect where you've had some brands that are going away. For example, as of recent, Big Lots went away. Joann's went away. Rite Aid is in bankruptcy. And you say, when's the last time I went to a Big Lots? When's the last time I went to a Joann's? They never adapted into today's market to be able to do both because really all All retailers should have their retail also being their distribution, right? And so an e-commerce person needs distribution. So now if you can do both, and that's where the smarter retailers have gotten, where they'll ship out of stores. They'll do certain things to create where now they have a, they don't have to do a 150,000 square foot distribution because they got a Best Buy in this part of Wisconsin. That part can ship everywhere. And I think retail has also changed in the fact that you've got more, you know, offices uses now going to retail. You know, you have lawyers and shopping centers, you have insurance people, you have doctors, They're going where the foot traffic is, right? And so and then food has become a big component, right? And the experience of food is what, you know, and you can DoorDash anything you want. But even, you know, the ghost kitchen concept has been tested. DoorDash did ghost kitchens. They closed majority of them. The reason is because people like the experience. They want to pick what they want. And yeah, you can order it from your house. You can go there, your forte, but you can get it. The kitchen has value. And so I think it's the fundamental is that the locate and when we see things, we also see where retails Over 90% lease right now, a very high occupancy. And there's certain parts of retail that are no longer viable. You know, you think about the old town like where I grew up, there was a small town and there was a JC Penney's on one side, right? And then Lowe's, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods all went to the other side of the freeway. Everybody went on the other side, Target, everybody's there. Well, that other side of the retail, it's hurting because it's not in the right location. So location's also another key thing that I didn't really understand when people would tell me when I was younger, location, location, location. Now, yeah, location, location, location. And I think in any real estate, it's important to understand when you're trying to make money in real estate or I would say any business, you really make money on the buy. If you're thinking you're gonna make money on the sale immediately, you're speculating. But if you bought something right, I could buy a car and I know the car's worth $30,000 and I buy it for $28,000, $29,000, whatever that is. I did all right. I made money on the buy, whereas people buy things on speculation and when that speculation doesn't come to fruition, that's when we get hurt. Speaker 2: Exactly. You've done a bunch of all these electric car charging stations and stuff like that, new retail uses that are coming up as well, right? Speaker 1: Electric cars, we do recycle stuff, we're doing fireworks everywhere, anything that we can bring traffic in. We want you to bring your Tesla to the shopping center, because you plug in and you're going to go eat for 20 minutes. You got time to go do something, right? But the number of retailers has reduced over the years because a lot of those concepts were either, you know, the kind of tough part for retailers, there's been a lot of private equity that buys them. They put heavy debt and then when any change in the market happens or they don't adapt to anything, can't survive, right? And that's what happened to like Joann's or, you know, even, you know, Big Lots. Big Lots had the $2 billion in debt and But they also never adapted. Speaker 2: One of the things I always wanted to do was you do, when you own the gyms, you would do these like sales trainings. You do these like motivational talks. You do a lot of these things that, you know, maybe you, I don't know if you like doing them, but like at some point you probably were happy to be done doing it for a little bit. But what would have been the highlights? What were your best bits? Speaker 1: I'd often talk about Kobe Bryant, right? I always loved, you know, Kobe Bryant's analogies where he would say, ah, you know, I look at it like this. I work two hours extra a day, every day. Now you gotta take that times five days, it's 10 hours a week. Take that times four weeks a month, that's 40 hours. Take it times 12, it's 480 hours. Over my 15 year career, I've almost done 8,000 more hours or 10,000 more hours than anyone else. You stack days. So a lot of my motivation was how do you stack days? The other thing that I was always very important on in training My first million was when you're there, be there. What does that mean, right? Well, when you're at work, be at work. When you're at home, be home. Don't be at work thinking about home and at home thinking about work. And people don't get that often because you only get so much time. So when my game face is on, let's go. And when I'm with my kids, let's go. When I'm on my own, that's what I get to do. Let's go. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: For myself. But a lot of people don't understand that. Like when I talk about the commodity of time, right, it's limited. And now, so if you're here thinking about here, you're here thinking about here and you're doing all this stuff like, so that's something I think that every entrepreneur or young person should focus on themselves, right? And then I also would teach them to have a game plan. Make a list. Some people say, oh, I don't need a list. When you write it down, majority of people are visual learners. For me, I'm a visual guy. If I write it down, I'll remember it. You tell me that. There's a good chance I forget it. So what's the way you remember? What's the way that you're going to remember what you're doing? Because you've got to write down your goals and kind of get to the next step of taking that time and really pushing it. Speaker 2: Were you big on that, like kind of writing down a vision or writing down whether it's affirmations or a vision or a goal? Like, were you a big kind of like self motivator in that way? Did you have any habits that served you well? Speaker 1: I never really wrote down affirmations or any of that stuff but I would always ask myself why. Why am I doing this? What is my goal here? And for sometimes it was my goal was to make money because I got to pay bills. You know, I'd be at the gym at 10.30 at night calling someone randomly saying, hey, if you come in with your entire family tonight by 11 o'clock and spend $2,000, we'll give you an extra year for free. Whatever it was, right? Because I needed the $2,000. So at that time, it was money motivated. Other times, it was because I wanted to actually like for my employees or even my kids, I really want to see them succeed. And I wanted them to learn a way. I mean, there was employees that we had come in and never had made more than $8, $10 an hour at that time. And they started making 150, 200 grand a year. And it wasn't just sales, it was also treating people right. It was also understanding, you know, what motivates people. And, you know, I always tell a story, like sometimes I would tell when I was young, my dad used to always do a thing that was pretty, you know, when I say abusive, what does that mean? My dad would take me, you know, he'd have a few drinks, he was an Indian guy, he'd come, he'd be sitting at the table doodling, until he was probably like 12 or 13, he would come and grab you by the neck, and he'd take you to the restroom. And he'd put your head near the toilet, and he'd say, see that? That's what you are. I always tell people that could have affected me in two ways. It could have completely demotivated me or I could have used it as I never want to be that. And so everybody's experience is different from the others. That's why I always tell people you're not competing with someone else. Speaker 2: Yeah, I like your kind of the be there wherever you are, be here now is so I think even more underrated now because in a world of distraction on tap. Speaker 1: I'm bored. Speaker 2: I can solve it right away. I'm half here. I'm tired. I can solve it right away. I'm annoyed. I have this pacifier in my hand. I have a little baby. I have a one-year-old. So I have a paci right here. At any time, I could just suck on this and I'm going to have my problems soothed for a moment. And so being able to just be wherever you are, but be there fully and like there's a my sister had this situation where she was in business school in Indiana. She went to Indiana University for business school. So they're in Bloomington, Indiana. Bloomington, Indiana is not the nicest place. Didn't want to be there. And the next semester they were going to go to Italy. So they had this like next semester we're in Italy. But while they're in Bloomington, they didn't bother going out, making friends. They didn't bother like checking out the area. Speaker 1: They didn't. Speaker 2: You know, they were just kind of going through the motions. And the reason why was they thought, oh, Bloomington's lame. Italy's going to be amazing, though. Can't wait. Do you know how we're going to be when we're there? We're going to be I'm going to be speaking Italian. I'm going to be gelato and cafes. I'm going to be so it's going to be so amazing. I was like, that's great. You're not there yet. And while you're in Bloomington, you wish you were in Italy. Guess what? When you're in Italy, you're probably going to wish you were back in the States, you know, because you're going to miss certain other things. If you're in Bloomington, be in Bloomington. Make this your Italy, right? You can choose to have that Italian experience. You can have whatever experience you want in the place you're at. And I've now seen over time, this has become a superpower where Like you said, you're at work, you're thinking about home, you're at home, you're thinking about work, you're with your kids, but you're half thinking about work. The half in, half out, the dim light versus being able to go off and then shine bright when it's time to shine bright. But if you're always flickering at this sort of dim level on all things, you're just going to feel unsatisfied in all aspects of your life. And so I think that's a great Simple reminder that's in everybody's control. Doesn't take any talent to really do that. It just takes a little bit of awareness. That's the one I'm going to take with me the most out of this whole thing. I think we hit everything. I think we hit the highs, the lows, and the build back up. Dude, I appreciate you doing this. I know you're not a big kind of get out there and go toot your own horn, but I appreciate you doing this. Speaker 1: It's great to be here. And I appreciate it. Unknown Speaker: All right, that's a wrap I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to Let's travel never looking back. Speaker 3: All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit, and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Cameo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators, and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content Is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.