Conquering the Crypto Market: Insights from a Seasoned Miner Pawel Tyrala

In episode 6 of Tru Mentors, Derek Skubisz interviews Pawel Tyrala as they delve into the world of Bitcoin mining. Pawel shares his personal journey and experiences in the industry discussing the ins and outs of Bitcoin mining, the challenges faced, and the lessons learned along the way. 

Tune in to gain insights into the evolving path to success in the dynamic realm of cryptocurrency.

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:44] Bitcoin Mining Journey.

[00:09:27] Mining Cryptocurrency Profitability Trends.

[00:14:09] Electricity Costs and Business Decisions.

[00:23:40] Insurance Premium Insights.

[00:26:05] Property Tax Issues in Illinois.

[00:31:40] Small Acts of Kindness.

[00:33:40] Communication Preferences in Modern Society.

[00:40:13] Investing and Financial Growth.

[00:45:55] Cryptocurrency and World Debt.

[00:49:48] Value of Growing Up Poor.

[00:51:19] The Lost Generation.

[00:53:59] Importance of Meaningful Conversations.

[01:03:04] Role Models and E-Commerce Shifts.

[01:09:03] Taking Risks for Success.

[01:11:05] Investing in Mining Farming.

[01:14:39] Investing in Bitcoin for Profit.

In this episode, Derek Skubisz and Pawel Tyrala discuss the challenges and risks involved in running a business, including navigating fluctuating markets, managing expenses, and making strategic decisions. Despite facing setbacks and periods of losses, Pawel remained resilient, investing time and money into his business. 

Furthermore, Pawel highlights the significance of having a clear vision for the business's future. He shares a strategic decision to move his Bitcoin mining operation to a different state to enhance profitability, showcasing the importance of adaptability and foresight in achieving long-term success.

QUOTES

• “But another thing is people don't even realize like small little things. Like for me, it has helped me out so much in business and stuff. And I wear my company stuff wherever I go.” - Derek Skubisz  
• "A lot of people think that I have an attitude and I'm angry towards them. But it's just the way we talk. And that's how we were raised. Just be direct. Don't waste time. Get to it." - Pawel Tyrala
• “No matter how hard you get hit, you gotta understand that you can make it back up again. You could. If you already got that far once and you fail, you can do it again.” - Pawel Tyrala

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS

Derek Skubisz

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/derek_skubisz/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Derek-Skubisz/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derek-skubisz-b015051a3/

Pawel Tyrala

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pawel.tyrala.1/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asolutionsautoparts/

WEBSITE

Lifetime Restoration Inc.: https://lifetimerestorationinc.com/

A-Solutions Auto: https://www.asolutionsauto.com/

Transcript

Welcome to the True Mentors Podcast. This is the ultimate destination for aspiring entrepreneurs and business enthusiasts alike. Join us as we embark on a thrilling journey into the dynamic realm of business, where we unveil awe-inspiring tales of individuals who have conquered formidable challenges to attain extraordinary success. Get ready to be inspired and empowered. And now, here's your host, Derek Skubis. 

Intro/Outro

All right, awesome. So let's talk about Bitcoin mining. How did you get into Bitcoin mining? 

Derek Skubisz

Well, it's a long story. First, I started getting into mining. I got into buying and basically holding, you know, kind of trying to trade Bitcoin and, you know, make some money here and there. When was that? Oh, this started off in about 2016 and the 2016 and 17. So previous, previous bull market, previous to the one in 21. I got in it, I threw some money in it, you know, I heard about it from a friend of mine or whatever. Yeah, I'm gonna give it a try, see what's gonna happen. And I made decent money. I'm like, oh, this makes sense. But I didn't understand it. Exactly. I didn't know anything about it. I was just like, oh, just a way to make some money and, you know, cash out. Well, you know, I made some money, never really cashed out. You know, I just, I just said, and then I, then it started dropping. So it dropped down, you know, cheap. It was worth very little compared to what I put in it. I was like, ah, well, I learned my lesson. I'm going to move on. But then I left it and then I came back to it a couple of years later and I'm like, After I had some money put in it and it was low and I'm like, at this point I might as well throw a little bit more just to see if it does anything. Well, lo and behold, 21 comes around. And that time I started investing a little bit more and it started booming. And I started, my $2,000 turned into $30,000. And after $30,000, I had a good amount of money. Yeah, it was a good stack. 

SPEAKER_01

So it was like a dream that actually came true. 

Derek Skubisz

Yeah, 100%. It did come true. It's just that at the time, like I said, I didn't do, I guess, my due diligence and research, I guess you could say. I wasn't really into financing. My main business is something completely different than this, right? 

SPEAKER_01

Did that fuck you first?

Oh, 100%. Yeah. Oh, yeah, bro. I don't really want to throw out numbers, but it was a six-digit number at one point, and then it became a very low five-digit number. So yeah, 100%. On the rise, I'm like, oh, I'm making a lot of money. I'm going to turn this into a ton of money. And it was a ton of money. At the end of the day, I didn't know when you should sell, when you shouldn't sell, right?

You didn't know the market, how to feel it out.

Exactly. And that was the hard part. And that was the hard part about, you know, actually taking profits and, you know, pulling money at the time where you already have some, you know, I'm going to call it what it is and everybody experiences sooner or later, greed. You know, you get greedy. You're like, oh man, I'm going to make it. I'm going to make a ton of money. Because you think it's a gambling. Because you keep going up. You keep going up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's got to be a crash somewhere.

So it got high. It was the top. And I had a lot of money sitting on the side. And then there was a point where I was like, I should probably pull some of this out. You know, take some of this money and do something with it, right? Exactly. So I'm like, I think it's still going to go a little higher. And the second I thought that... So you didn't pull anything out? No, I did not. I didn't pull a penny. I started, and then the second I said that, within that two-week, three-week span, it started to just slowly drop, you know? And I'm like, oh, dude, I gotta start getting out of this. So I started selling a little bit here and there, you know? Three weeks after that, or two weeks after that, it starts rising again. But it's already higher than what I already sold it for. But I'm like, if it's going back up, I'm gonna jump back in, you know, I'm gonna make some more money. Yeah, I jumped back in, I made maybe 2%, you know, on the whole thing or whatever. Low profit. And then three weeks later after that, you know, it was basically on a weekly basis. Yeah. Boom, drops 10%. Just lost more than I had lost the first time because I bought back in. So I did that a lot at that time because I just, you know, I just didn't, I couldn't, I couldn't, I couldn't figure it out. You know, I just didn't understand what I was really doing, what I was doing wrong. And I wasn't doing anything right. You know, I had the money in there, but it just, I wasn't doing it the right way.

Did you figure this out yet?

Oh yeah, 100%. Now I know. Now we're good. We're trending in the right direction.

So now it's rising because now I saw it almost at 72.

Oh, it's 73. It set all-time highs last week or two weeks ago, I want to say. That was a really good week for you? It's been a good year this year so far. Like, you know, depending on what aspect we're starting with, I mean, we could talk about the investment part of it or I just, you know, my investing into where I bought into it. And then we could talk about the mining part of it where I got interested in that.

Because what is Bitcoin mining for the people who don't know what that is?

Bitcoin mining is basically running servers to support the Bitcoin network. But the Bitcoin network, you could almost consider like it's like the Internet of websites. That's basically a network that the Internet is held up by networks that run on servers, right? Servers were all around the country, all around the world. Exactly. There's server farms where, you know, you have your websites linked to and all the data transfers in and out of there, right? Bitcoin mining basically does the same thing as servers, but keeps the blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain, operating. So every time, so the way you make money off of that is you will purchase these machines. You could, you know, back in the day used to be graphics cards. Correct. They made, you know, the guys who started Bitcoin back in 2009, 10, They were mining on graphics cards. After a while, companies started popping up and creating machines that basically did just that, but just that, where they didn't need the graphics for video games or whatever. They needed just the machine itself, the computing power. They needed computing power, so they started building these machines called ASICs. They're big, they're like square boxes. Yeah, that's what you had in your shop? Yeah, so they're called ASIC miners. Bitmain makes some. Canan makes some. Watson Miner makes some. There's a couple different companies. Basically what they did is they took the computing power of these machines, which are basically graphics cards without the graphic part, and they started running the algorithms on those machines to support the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin blockchain. It's not a network, it's the blockchain. The blockchain is the original you know, thing that everything's based on. Basically, it's a ledger, online ledger, or a ledger on the exact coin that's a Bitcoin, where once you put information into it, it's there forever. It can never be altered. It can never be removed. It's basically a ledger from A to Z, where once it's in there, it can't be messed with. Nothing.

So nobody could steal anything from you once you have the ASICs?

That isn't steal from me as in I'm not really sure what you mean by that.

Can someone hack into your wallet and steal your coins? Okay, but if you're mining, can somebody hack into that and pull stuff out or no?

No, because the miner...

So you're pretty protected with the miner, right?

With the miners themselves, you can't really get hacked. Someone can log into a miner and change the information that's in there and then mine to their wallet. They can use their machines to mine the coins for Their wallet, you know into their into their wallet, but realistically That's kind of hard to do it's possible, but I haven't really heard anything like that But you don't just run a miner directly to your wallet you run it on a pool So what that means is you link up to a pool. There's a bunch of pools online where they give you the Algorithms to solve the pool does and then that's what your mind that your minor does that work and for that work that you do they pay you out for it in Bitcoin or in whatever coin you're mining, you get what I'm saying? So you're still making money while you're using different... You're going to be making money regardless. How much that money is worth depends on the price of the coin, right? Yeah, exactly. I mine like six to like eight different coins, different algorithms, different blockchains. But, you know, the whole thing is... It's much more in debt than what we're talking about right now. You really got to like, you know, I've been in it for mining itself. I've been in it since about 2020. It's 2024. So it's four years now. Not that long of a time, but the amount of that I did and how much time I invested into it and money invested into it and everything. It's, you know, I kind of got the pretty good perspective on how it works.

Yeah. But if it hits a hundred, Jesus expected it.

I'm thinking, I'm actually more bullish, I'm saying about 150 by the end of the year. I think so. How many miners do you have? I got about 25 miners. I got a couple sitting on a shelf that are not currently worth running because the coins that they mine are just not... profitable yet. Correct. So I have a couple of miners sitting on a shelf, probably like six or seven of them. But my main, the big machines that I have that, you know, that consume a lot of power because what they do, they consume a lot of power. Yeah. They I have about 20, 24 pieces. I actually picked up two more yesterday. So we're going to send those to the farm, you know. So I move my whole operation out of this, you know, out of Illinois into Iowa, where we're kilowatt per hour is much cheaper than what it is here. So.

It is a lot of states. Um, a lot of people don't understand the way electricity works in each state Yeah, every every state is regulated differently 100% and everybody thinks bills are all the same throughout the whole United States.

It's not. Everything's by a kilowatt hour that the... That and then depends on the tax brackets. I mean not tax brackets, but the tax of the state. Exactly. And then it depends on how far you are from a power plant because you have to pay transmission line fees. Yeah, 100%. So everything adds up quickly. Like, you know what you're saying, you're paying realistically on your bill. If you look at your bill, you're getting, I don't know, it depends.

Yeah, because on the back of it, you always have a delivery fee. 100%, which is a big chunk. Massive. Yeah, it's a big chunk. Because when we do solar, when I was really doing solar before, we look at it, well, some people were paying $6 delivery fee, some people are at $45 delivery fee.

So it depends on where you are. Exactly. If you're close to a power plant, you probably have a you may not know it and you know and you may not realize it but there is a there will be a difference is it a big difference depends you know yeah it depends on a power company too and depends if you're really paying attention that i guess right um how much what did the

Your energy bill go up too many.

A lot. My operation, when I was running from my place of business and from my home, I maxed out all my power. This is why I had to move my operation out of state. I was running as much power as I could before I tapped everything. And it's going to go any bigger. My electric bill a month was about 5G. Yeah, it's it's it's you know, and I've been paying that bill monthly for the last four years three years, you know When I started I started in the basically at the end of the bull market Those machines, you know, each of those machines were making 100 bucks 200 bucks a day You know at the time but coins were high the prices of the coins were high So I just used that money to pay off whatever electricity I had to do at the time But then after that after the ever the market dropped, you know, I was losing probably on every single machine that was mining because it wasn't worth selling the coin. It wasn't producing anything. I mean, it was producing. It was producing the entire time. The problem was that the production wasn't enough to cover the cost of the electricity to run those machines. You understand? I get you. So, I was actually running a negative. I was running the negatives for the last I want to say probably two years, like 2022, 2023, I was running in the negatives to the end of 2023. Then the last quarter of 2023 is when it started turning profitable again. Yeah, it started coming up, right? Yeah. But before then it was, I'm going to say probably Probably 24 months of just losses.

Did ComEd ever come back at you and tell you you're using too much power or try to get into it?

No, they never gave me anything about it. I mean, my businesses would use a lot of power for anything, right? My house, it could be questionable, right? You know, you could be doing all kinds of things with a lot of power at your house, you know? But no, and they never did. I mean, if I did, you know, I don't know if they would ever come and ask me, right? I mean, if what I'm really doing, they could.

I mean, the one thing is, because you know how they check everybody's energy through the whole block.

Yeah. Sometimes in my neighborhood, like you have the bars where it feels like you compared to your neighbors. It's like your neighborhood is like this bar and then you. Yes. It's like all the way out here. Yeah. And then, you know, people's are people's bills were like, I just example, like there was there was like 400 kilowatts used per per month. Right. Mine was like forty five thousand kilowatts used per month difference. Oh, yeah.

So well, that's how they could maybe start looking into is because you never know what is that homeowner doing, where the power is going.

We know, you know, Bitcoin mining. I don't know. Using that much power to heat their garage, I guess. I don't know. You could do that, too. Right. spend the day that doesn't really make sense to use power to heat your house or garage or whatever it may be, because it's just too expensive. It doesn't make sense, right? But yeah, no, I never had questions. I mean, I'm pretty sure if I went bigger, I probably would. I probably would get a visit from somebody.

They would probably start asking you just to see what's happening.

Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about expanding that whole operation back here, back at home and back at the shop. But then it's just the cost of getting the bigger connections and whatnot. It just didn't really make sense.

It didn't really make sense. Did you move out of state? Is it just because of how much you were paying for electricity or is it?

That was a good portion of it. That was a big part of why I moved out of state. The cost of electricity was... Your profits are basically based on... I mean, shit, $5,000 a month is massive. Yeah, and I was only making... 60 G's a year. And maybe I was making maybe... Maybe I was making two and a half grand a month off those machines. Yeah. So basically what I was doing is I wasn't... You know, you know, I have another business and, you know, and, you know, assets and whatnot, whatever. I was paying out of pocket. with the intent that when the prices return, and the market- If or when. If or when, yeah, because it's a big if, right? If or when the market returns, I took a huge gamble doing that.

It is, you're taking a massive risk. 100%. Dude, this thing could hit and you're done. 100%. You could literally be out of pocket for, what, a year? Yeah, with nothing back.

Exactly. With nothing back. So I was taking a big gamble. I like to take risks. I'm a risky guy, but- What did your wife say? She don't say much. She understands what I'm doing. She doesn't ask too much questions about it. She's like, I mean, I'm guessing you've got to figure it out, right? Yeah. She's got that trust in you. Well, yeah. But I mean, that's my second operation. My main business is my carve parts business. That's what I do. Asolutions Auto Parts. Where is it located? We're in Chicago Heights, down, you know, close to the Indiana border. That's where, you know, that's my money where I make it. And then side hustles of all sorts, you know, flipping cars and whatnot. That's, you know, you always make some extra cash doing some other stuff. So, you know, not anything, you know, other stuff, but, you know, hustling.

What is a solutions about, well, let's talk about that a little.

A-Solutions is my company. I started in 2013. Yeah, 2013. I actually did the work a couple of years before that, but I incorporated in 2013. Basically, we saw used car parts off of sports cars, Japanese sports cars. We buy these cars, you know, from random places, from auctions, from customers nowadays, from just, you know, wrecked vehicles basically. And we cut them down, not cut them down, but take them apart, you know, cut them up if we need to in terms of like a body part or body panel or something like that. Like you could say it's a legal chop shop. That's literally what it is. Everybody's like, oh, you got a chop shop. I'm like, yeah, I got a chop shop, but it's a legal chop shop. You know, I get, I get inspected by the state. you know, and they show up to my place and they check all my records and check all the cars and everything.

Do they come often?

No, hopefully they don't come often, but you know, but they came last year and they shook us out pretty well. You know, they did their due diligence. We did ours on our end. We had a couple of mistakes made, nothing, nothing, just clerical errors, just books.

Well, they got to check in case if you're not stealing cars and cutting them up, changing vans.

Buying cars off of people with no paperwork. Exactly. I get phone calls all the time. Hey, I'll sell you my car for five grand. What kind of car? It's a nice car. You got paperwork? No. Okay. I'm fast, bro. I mean, like, you know, I just, I got to, the business has got to be clean. It is. You don't want to, you know, you can do it a chop shop or you just, you know, cut it up and sell the parts real quick for cheap and move on. But you need that heat. You know, it's not worth it. Some people some people still do that kind of stuff that that that industry of that sort is still out there But it's very it's so many ways to make money now.

It's not even worth doing anything illegal 100% it's there's so many ways in America an opportunity if you do a legal you can make money quick, right?

Yeah, that's also true Time if you want to make money the right way, it'll take time. Yeah dedicate the time But if you want to make money quick, you can there is other ways you can do it You can sell drugs. You can cut cars you can you know Transport, whatever, you know, whatever. All kinds of stuff. We all know there's all kinds of shady businesses out there and people do shady things. It's just the way it is. But if you want to make it the right way, you have to put the hard work into it, the due diligence of everything, basically, that you got to put into building something out of nothing, right? I mean, I built A-Solutions out of nothing. It came from nothing and I borrowed a thousand bucks from my dad.

Was it from your garage that you started off with?

I started off as a mechanic. I was a mechanic. I went to college, dropped out. It wasn't for me. I was supposed to be a civil engineer. But that didn't work out for me. I was halfway through college and I'm like, dude, I don't like this. This isn't for me. I'm at a desk. I can't sit at a desk. I sit at a desk now because I have to.

But it's different because it's your own desk, you run the whole thing, your profits are so much bigger.

I got a very good group of guys that work for me, work with me, but work for me in a way. I try to treat them as equally as I treat everybody else, right? But they're smart dudes, they know their job and it makes it easier for me and it gives me time to go mess around with other crap, you know, Bitcoin mining and whatnot, you know, whatever. But yeah, dude, it took a long time. It took a lot of work. It took a lot.

So you've already run a business for 11 years now. Yeah. How long do you think it takes for somebody to know that their company is successful and it's going to go far? Cause you know how some companies they blow up, they go to shit, like nothing goes with them. We all know a lot of people, like a lot of people in the solar industry will get really rich their first year. Then they get massive amounts of cancels. Well, now they bought a Lamborghini.

Yeah, and then they're F'd.

Then they're gone.

Yeah, 100%.

You know, so would you say within the first five years?

Yeah, I would say within the first five years. I think so. I think so. I mean, if you have your head on your shoulders and you know what you want to do and you have a vision forward, and what you want to do and how you want to do it. And if it's actually making you money, right? Correct. Yeah. Then I think you'll be all right. You have to dedicate the time. It's just it's the dedication of time and and the hard work. You know, it's you know, I can tell you my whole story of how I built that. It was just it was hard, man. It was. I was a mechanic for five years. I quit my job after I dropped out of college. I started looking into cars. I started fixing up some cars for my buddies and stuff like that in my garage after I stopped being a mechanic. But I'm like, dude, I don't want to keep doing this kind of work. This is like hard labor, like, you know, like swapping out transmissions on the floor in my garage and, you know, get under the car, put it in, install. Yeah, dude, it was, you know, jack stands and stuff like that. It's like, yeah, it's not really safe, A, and then B, it's just hard work. And then I started, you know, and I was already mingling with the car parts. I bought a car for my buddy because he wanted to buy a car, so we bought another one for parts. So we used the parts we needed, and then the car just sat there, and I'm like, I'm just going to take care of it one day. And so it was a G35. And then one day, I had to clear this car out because it was at my friend's yard, and he's like, dude, get this shit out of here, bro. I'm like, damn, I got to do something with it. So I just kind of stripped it down a little bit. I pictured some of the parts, and I posted them, and then I started selling this stuff. There's actually money in this. There's actually money in this. And I was doing this with my friend, who worked with me at the time. We did that together for maybe like half a year, but then he didn't really see the potential in it or the money in it. It just wasn't of interest to him. Yeah, but it was kind of of interest to me. So we bought a couple cars together, and I bought the inventory off of him, basically, whatever was left. And we started with some cheap shit. Scion XBs and regular Civics and stuff like that. That was hard because there wasn't really much margins there. There was some, but there wasn't a lot. But they had a potential, right? Correct. Then one day, I had a friend of mine who opened a business in Indiana, and he helped me a lot by basically giving me an entrance to the auction network. Buy cars on the auction, wrecked cars. So I got into contact with him. Obviously, he made a little bit of money off me in terms of paying the fees and take a cut or whatever of the cars I buy. Not even like of the profits I make, but just for using his... His license or whatever. Yeah, stuff like that. That costs money. And nobody understands that somebody had to put the time to get those licenses. You don't just pay for a license and then just get it.

It's not like that, dude, it takes a few months.

100% and a lot of like, you know, back and forth, you know, get your insurances right and everything. It takes time.

Bro, these insurances cost so much to start any business.

I don't even want to talk about it. I just renewed my insurance last week. It's massive. It's massive. It's massive, you know. And then you get like these stupid articles that pop up like Allstate and State Farm are going to be raising their car insurance this year in the Chicagoland area 12%. And your home insurance is going to be going up by 21%. It's like, dude, like what? But they're not even paying out claims.

I know, which is crazy. State Farm right now is, I mean, that's all I do is I handle claims. It is unbelievable because homeowners don't understand that when hail or wind comes through a zip code, the whole zip code goes up in premiums. Yeah. And if you file a wind or hail claim to your house, your rates do not go up. That's right off the bat. Your rates will not go up. But the zip code will. The whole zip code.

Yeah. So anytime HAL hits every fucking year, you get a raise. Exactly. Which I understand how that works. Right. That makes sense. Right. Because it's a direct loss versus indirect. Everybody's going to, you know, pair their fair share of the raises and the rates that are going up. Right. Exactly. Not really fair, but at the same time, it makes sense. I'm fine with that.

But if you're paying insurance for 30 years and then you get a leak and your roof is bad and there's hail damage and we have proof and they say, no, we don't agree with anything. Go kick rocks. It gets frustrating for the whole hundred percent.

It comes out of your pocket. And then what are you paying insurance for?

Yeah. And then we as PAs, we have to fight a claim that's 20,000 for six months.

I got a buddy who's in the same business that you are and he's been doing it for a couple of years. Yeah. And he's pretty good and he grew up, basically he's a private appraisal. Yeah. Or public. Public adjuster. Public adjuster. Yeah, that's what I am. Yeah, so that's for sure. And he's been doing it for a couple of years already. And he grew his business pretty well, obviously. You know, I know it requires a different kind of skill set to do that kind of stuff. But, you know, so I talked to him once in a while and he turned it into something pretty big. You know, he's got a couple of guys that work for him. It's good stuff. But, at the end of the day, you gotta have to do your duty. He did a claim for me years ago back at the shop. Obviously gotta be paid out a lot more than what the insurance is offering. A lot more. I had a small roof collapse on my dock, my shop. It's an older building.

But they paid out well, right, for everything?

They didn't pay out well in the beginning.

No, no, no, they never do. So they have to open up coverage. For me, I just need coverage opened up. That's it. Pay for one shingle, pay for one vent, I got the rest.

Yeah, so he helped me out a lot with that. I never ended up even fixing that roof because realistically it was still maybe not, it was still not enough to do like a whole teardown and then go back into the masonry work and whatnot. So I'm just like, my situation in my current location is just... The state of Illinois is driving me away. It really is. It's driving everybody away. I'm in Cook County right now, my shop at least is, and it just financially does not make sense for what they're trying to do right now. No, it doesn't. Property taxes are... They're crooks, left and right. I mean, I call it Cook County for a reason. I don't call it Cook County.

It's just, you know... They're such liars. It's unbelievable what they do. Dude, you just can't... The anger that goes through... And then we have people that are like, no, no, no, they're supposed to do that because they're helping us out. How?

Well, I mean, that's what I'm, you know, we're going to switch into politics at that point. Let's just stay out of that. Yeah. Because it could get, you know, get ugly. But, uh, but, uh, it's just, it just, they take the money and then you put it where, you know. Yeah, they improved the roads around my shop finally after 10 years or whatever, right? But the buildings around that area are all falling apart. People are leaving them and they're just empty buildings. And I'm like, you know, what if I buy this building and clean it up and clean up the neighborhood or at least make a deal with me where I'm at right now, I will invest money back into my building and clean up my neighborhood and make it a nicer place. But I need to have some kind of incentive to do so. Give me the support help. Yeah. Well, not even this. I don't need anything from you. Yeah. But what I would need from them would be basically give me a fair tax rate compared to what I currently pay, which is a lot. And that'll help me and take that money from that, you know, putting that money into that and put it into my own business. We're in business, the building. Like I said, I don't mind cleaning up the neighborhood. I don't mind making it nicer. I don't mind, you know, having a new fence put in with a, you know, secure, more secure for me. I do a lot of theft lately. Ain't nobody doing nothing about it. No, you can't do anything about it. No, they can't. They can't. And if I do myself, I'm gonna get in trouble. You know what I mean? It's like, I know who these people are. I have their addresses. I literally, I know. But what am I going to do? Pull up to the house?

Yeah, then they lock you up, dude. You got a family, everything, then they take you.

Yeah, dude, I don't need, you know what I mean? I was literally talking. The problem with that is that, you know, that's, you look at it that way and you're like, I could do something, but I can't do something. I think that's the problem.

Well, the problem is that what's up? I literally thought about this today. Criminals don't have any money, so they don't arrest them or charge them because they don't make profit on them. When you commit a crime, they see you got money that you're going to pay for lawyers and everything. So they get money out of you. Why would they pull a criminal, put him in jail, have them pay for food and laundry or whatever? It doesn't make any sense. So put him back on the street. Let's get the people who have the money to charge it off of them.

I mean, that's looking at it a little bit skewed, right? It's a little skewed if you're thinking of it that way. It's almost, in a way, unfair to say, but that's what's happening in a way. 100%. You know what I mean? It's like, where do you draw the line? Like, how do you fix it? How do you... We the people gotta stand up. Yeah. All of us. 100%. 100%.

It's not one, oh, I don't do this. No. Everybody needs to stop their shit. and get together.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you just had, you know, uh, voting earlier this week. Some people are like, Oh, I didn't go vote. Cause there's nothing important. Remember the change starts at the bottom. You got to start at the bottom. You got to go vote local elections. You know, if you got kids in school or whatever, that's where it starts. A hundred percent. That's where it starts. And so you say that your vote may not matter, you know, in a bigger thing, you know, think of things you could say, Oh, my vote doesn't matter. They're going to, you know, they're going to send it elsewhere or it's that kind of counters, whatever. At least you did, at least you went and you did it. At least in the back of your mind, at least I put my vote in.

But if you had a mindset like that, and you go about everything in life, I don't matter? Well, you're not going to get anywhere very far. We're never going to do anything as a country. Because if everybody had a mindset like that, I mean, it'd be a chaos. You can't think in a way like that, I don't matter at all, because what if we're at 599 and the other one's at 599 and you came in, you just made a massive difference.

You just made us win. People just gotta realize that they can make a difference. No matter if you think you're big or small or whatever, you can make a difference by just going to vote.

Every human being can.

In every aspect of life. You can do, if you put your willpower to it, you can build a business. You can support your family. Or you can go out on the street and be a bum and do nothing. You know what I mean?

But another thing is people don't even realize like small little things. Like for me, it has helped me out so much in business and stuff. And I wear my company stuff wherever I go.

Everything everywhere. Sweater here somewhere.

And I was helping out a old lady because I was at a grocery store and every time I see old people putting groceries in like let me help you and I'm putting it in and they saw my t-shirt and I actually got business from it.

There you go.

Right? And it's like you literally come and open the door for them. 100%.

For anybody that's walking in. Whenever when anybody, when you're walking out of a place, any place, store, whatever, do you ever hold the door for anybody? Yes. Yeah. See, so do I. 100%. No matter who you are, what you look like, how fast you're going, I will wait there and open that door for you. And I'll smile. And I'll say, have a good day. You know what I mean? And then once in a while, you'll get a person who'll just look at you like, whatever, dude. Fuck him. I don't care. I mean, at the end of the day, I'm just doing it for me. I'm doing it for, I mean, for me in terms of like the back of my mind, I'm like, I think I'm doing a good thing, right? Respect. Respect. Yeah. You don't respect me for doing that? Well, That's your choice. That's your choice, you know. I probably know what kind of person you are. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm not gonna go out and call you out about it. I don't really care.

But it's extremely just the small things lead up to massive big things.

That was a big thing back in the day. Like, you know, back in the day, everybody held the door for everybody. You know what I mean? Or hello or goodbye or whatever, right? Nowadays, some people call you on the phone. I get this on my shop all the time. Call on the phone. I need this piece. Oh, sorry, sir. Hung up. No buy, no nothing. It's like, dude, all right. It's part of the business, I guess. Right. But a little bit of respect.

People don't understand. phone service, when they call, your speaking is extremely attractive. So when you call a company, introduce yourself, ask them how their day's going. I answer my phone every single time. That's how it goes. Hope you're having the best time of your life. This is Derek with Lifetime. Every single phone call. That's a good way to do it. Another thing is you have my name. I just said I have a good day and you know my company. If you call me, I have people calling me, they're like, you guys do estimates? Dude, what's your name? Yeah. How am I doing? I don't know your name. Yeah. So I can't call you by your name.

But that's that's that's today's time and age. Yeah. Same thing when I get phone calls from people. Not, I can't say all. No, no, no. But, but, but certain people just call you like, Hey, I'm looking for this part. Yeah. I'm like, I answer if I'm like, Hey, this is a solutions. I don't, you know, you're looking for, are you looking for some or some part or something like that? Like, yeah, I'm looking for this and this and this. I'm like, Oh yeah, sorry. I don't have that kind of car here on my lot. You know, we do specify and you know, Japanese sports cars. Uh, you know, I could send you somewhere else if anything, or I just don't know where you can get something like that because I'm not that big into the field. Right. And then you get it. Okay. Thank you very much. You know, have a good day. I'm like, you have a good day as regular people. Awesome. Right. Then you, like I said, then you have those guys who, Hey, I need this piece for this and this. I'm like, all right. Hey, let me, uh, I don't, I don't, I don't deal with those kinds of boom hangs up the phone. Like, all right, that's fine. Whatever. I mean, that's what it is.

Don't call around, you know, and then they'll call you back five minutes later.

And they'll be like, Hey, I'm looking for this part that you just called. You just called.

Let me finish the conversation, but it's happening more.

That's because people don't want to see, they don't want to talk face-to-face. No. That's just... They're terrified. That's just society nowadays. People are afraid to talk face-to-face. It is, 100%. They'd rather email you. Or they'll text you. I'd rather talk to you on the phone than be texting. Most people prefer texting. I mean, I'll text once in a while, obviously, everybody does, but if I can get you on the phone and talk on the phone, that's better. You get a better sense of communication when you're talking on somebody's phone. It is, because the tone, the voice. Yeah, 100%. You want to laugh, you can laugh, right? Exactly. You say something funny, you can laugh right there on the spot, not LOL, LOL, LOL.

A lot of the times when you're texting about business, what I don't like about is, and we're both European.

Yeah, 100%.

The way we express thing is massively different than people do in America or different nations.

I just had this conversation.

A lot of people think that I have an attitude and I'm angry towards them. But it's just the way we talk. And that's how we were raised. Just be direct. Don't waste time. Get to it. And that's why I tell my homeowners, I don't like to text about stuff. Let's get on a call. I will come to your house. I don't care if I have to go to your house four or five, six times. I will come here. That's my job. That's what I got to do. But I'd rather talk to you in person.

Can I check this? Yeah. Because wife is close, close to, you know, so I don't want to. She might be calling me for a certain reason.

No, but there's so many ways of... Sorry, let me just... I'm sorry, guys.

I don't usually like to do this kind of stuff, but business is business at the end of the day, right?

Yeah, that's how it is. When you got a business, people don't understand you need to be on that phone all the time. It's funny, sometimes I'm in the shower, and my phone's ringing, and I pick it up, and one time I was on a phone call with State Farm, and she's like, are you in the shower? I was like, yeah, I'm in the shower. I was like, sorry, I answer my phone no matter where I'm at, what I'm doing, I will answer my phone.

Yeah, you know, I got a, this is for my business currently, so it's, you know, I got a, I got a guy, I gotta drop it off a car and we're already, it's way past hours, but one of my guys is supposed to meet him there, so it's like, somebody needs to meet him there, you know, so. And I'm the middleman, obviously, so.

People don't understand that if you don't get up and don't do it, that could be a big loss.

100%. Well, I mean, listen, just in this situation right now, it wasn't my wife. Thankfully, I'd be gone already. But in this situation, I have a driver dropping off a car. He did me a favor by picking up a car in Oregon, which is a really shitty place to pick up a car from from an auction. What is that? It's in the middle of nowhere. Eugene, Oregon, there's one road through it, one main highway, and it's far away from everything. So they gotta do a detour, basically. So it costs a good amount of money to get a car from there. But he did me a favor, he picked it up for me, he moved it from one transport to another transport to get it to me. Obviously it costs money to do so, but saves me storage, saves me a headache, saves me a drive out to Oregon to pick up a car, you know what I mean? I gotta do good by him and have somebody over there at my shop to receive that car. Even though he's coming late, well, you did me a favor, I'll return it in the same way, you know what I mean? Correct, 100%. So that's just the way it is. So I might have to jump on here and there once in a while on this, but overall, we're good.

How was the auction? Because I've been hearing that it's...

COVID changed things a lot. The used car market went up, skyrocketed in COVID. Now it came back down a bit, quite a bit. Not the same prices as before COVID. Auction prices also shot up because used cars shot up, so auction prices shot up as well. They came down, but not as much as the used market itself came down. And I don't know if that's going to change in the near future. I don't think the cars are going to drop that much lower. Now that they're cheap, they're actually pretty expensive to buy. So at the end of the day, you have to pay more to get the car, which means that you're gonna have to pay more for the parts that you need for it.

Which then in the end, you're kind of coming out even.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, because I honestly, I don't see the real estate market or car market going down.

Yeah, I, you know, people say I'm going to wave to buy a house down the road. And I'm like, I don't know if you're going to get the opportunity to buy that low. No, you know, I mean, people are waiting for a crash. Yeah, but I don't know if that crash is going to go.

No, I don't see unless there was a war.

I don't know if that would even really make a difference.

Another thing is everybody keeps bitching about the 6%. Dude, we were at 10, 14%, just like 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah. I mean, it was higher than that in the eighties. It was almost close to 20%.

And now they got 2% and everybody's like, no, I want that. And now you're a big shot. Yeah.

Dude, you're 4% higher. What are you?

You're not going to buy a house because you're 4% higher.

There was a time where everybody had this. I mean, you know, there was a time. I can't say it that way, but there was a time that if you had the money to buy the house and the rates were low, yeah, the houses were more expensive, but you had to let it settle at a low rate, which at the end of the day works out for you because the interest isn't that high. Now you buy a house the same price that you would have probably bought it at the time before. Yeah. And the rate is six, seven percent. You're paying a lot more interest. It's costing you a lot more to have that house.

But then you could always refinance later on.

You can 100 percent. And that's what I'm saying. That's so much better. It's still not a bad thing. No. Still not a bad thing. They're not 10 percent. Exactly. They could be. You know what I mean? So, yeah, no, I'm not saying that, you know, that you shouldn't buy right now if you have a hundred percent, just buy it. Take the pain of the next couple of years if that's what it takes to pay the higher interest rate, but have something that you possess.

Dude, too many people are just nonstop. No, dude, you just got to pull the trigger. And I always say that if you're starting a business, if you're buying a car, just fucking do it.

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Dude, go to the dealership, buy that car, go and buy a new car next week.

You know what it is?

I mean, dude, what if tomorrow you could walk out of here, get hit by a bus?

Yeah. I mean, life is short, dude. You worked for how old are you? I'm 30 going to be 36, 36 years.

Well, you got hit by a trip, but you saved your money.

I already got hit by a bus or a car once, so I'm good, dude. I don't need another one.

But think about it, like our parents are Polish, you know, they would always be like, save your money, don't spend, don't buy cars, don't buy this. What am I going to do with this money sitting in the bank?

But they also say, put the money in the bank and keep it in the bank. Dude, you lose the money, the money in the bank, especially today.

It loses so much value.

People don't understand. Like today's day, you lose that dollar is literally losing value by the week. Yeah. Because the amount of money there's, I mean, you know, again, dude, I get money off to the side.

I do get that a hundred percent because everybody should have money off to the side just in case if shit goes downhill and stuff, but you shouldn't have any and not having any investments or not having any growth.

Exactly. How do you get growth if you don't invest? Yeah. You're not going to get it from the bank. I mean, that's just slavery. 5% CD. Yeah. If you get that, what is that? What's 5%? I mean, 5% on a million dollars is a good amount. All right, that's okay. The thing is, do you have a million dollars to start off with? I mean, literally in cash, right? Do you have that? Because if you don't, well, then that return is not that great. And I'm not saying that, you know, from like a perspective of, you know, you got to be a millionaire to earn that 500 grand will get you a good amount of money as well. But it's just the lower the amount, the lower the payout, right?

But there's mutual funds. There's so much stuff that

I mean, you know, you have mutual funds, you have stocks, you have real estate, you have real estate even. Real estate's really good for investing. Yeah, real estate, you can invest in specific, you can invest in... Companies. But you can also invest in commodities, gold, silver. You can invest in cars. I have some investment in my cars. I have cars that are gaining value by just sitting there. 100%. So that's probably not the best. way to increase your value of what you have.

But there's a way. So how many did you just count? Because you were counting.

I wasn't even counting. I was just kind of going through my fingers.

But that was, I think that was about eight different opportunities that you can do. Yeah, a hundred percent. You know, and it's like, if you're a nine to five and you have at least five to 10K, you could flip that five to 10K within a year to two years and you could be at a hundred K.

A hundred percent. I agree with the right investments, with the right, with the right approach. It's also a manageable risk, right? You got to remember that a hundred percent, everything is a risk. You invest in stock market. It's a risk. You know, you invest in, you know, Bitcoin. It's a risk. I know it's, it's a risk. Everything is a risk. There's, you know, safer risk. And then there's really like, you know, off the freaking, you know, jump off the diving board risk. I mean, so, um, does risk hype you up? I don't know, sometimes. Dude, it like gives me this feeling. I'm going to casino tomorrow, so I'm going to get risky.

Oh, I don't go to the casinos. I don't gamble at all. I was just talking.

I like to like, not that I, you know, that's not something I, back in the day when I used to, when I started my business, if I was bored, I would go to casino with my buddies. We'd go hang out, you know. I wouldn't, you know, we bill a hundred bucks or whatever. That's not really a lot of money, but it's still money, right? A hundred bucks will get you through a week, at least buy all your lunch and everything. At least back then. Yeah. Before 2019. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, I haven't been to the casino in years, years. I got a family. I got, you know, I probably haven't been to the casino since I got married. Yeah. 16. So me and my buddies finally decided.

I mean, that's good for, for, for me, a risk, like doing, I kind of started doing way too much at once because when my company blew up last year in like November, December. I was like, dude, I'm starting the podcast, I'm starting this, I'm starting that, I'm starting the team. And then my fiance is like, dude, like maybe chill out a little bit because it's way too much at once. And for me, it's like that risk where I'm just like, dude, I get like so high on it. Like I get this feeling in my body where I'm just like, I need it more, I need to do more. Then I have these people asking me if you want to do this.

Go invest in cryptocurrency, you'll get all the risk you want. So at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, it's... Yeah, I guess I feel the same way, but it's just you really need to also know how to manage it. I've been to that place where I'm like, I think I'm doing too many things at one time and I might, if one thing really takes a shit, I might be in a bad place. You know what I mean? I never get to a bad place where I'm going to go jump off a bridge or some shit. what I have invested, the time I spent doing it or whatever. Exactly. It would be a waste, right? Yeah. No matter how hard you get hit, you gotta understand that you can make it back up again. You could. If you already got that far once and you fail, you can do it again.

Your second time is gonna be bigger and better.

Well, you'll actually take a different approach. You will. You won't take the same approach because you'll learn from your mistakes. That's like me and, like I said, me and cryptocurrency. I learned from my mistake four years ago. Now I'm like, no matter what the market does, when I'm ready to cash out is when I'm going to cash. I ain't buying, I ain't selling. I've been buying. I'm not going to say I've not been buying. I've been investing into crypto, but I've also been mining, right? But I don't just like, you know, the second there's a $10,000 drop on Bitcoin, I'm like, oh, I'm going to sell because it's going to lose all of it. No, I learned my lesson. I ain't doing that again. You don't ever want to panic. Yeah. Well, panic selling is the worst part, right? Panic. But that's where you lose. And that's what I did a couple of years ago. There's panic. It was just panic. I was panicking. I'm like, I have a stack and I'm going to lose it because, you know, because because I'm making the wrong moves or whatever, whatever it was at the time. It is what it is. I mean, like I said, I learned. Right. I learned.

Do you see cryptocurrency being our next currency and taking the dollar out?

Oh bro, 100% but not anytime soon. What do you think, 20, 30 years? More? They might try to ban it before that happens.

Why do you think that?

Because the US dollar is the dominant force on the planet, currently. You know what I mean? The US dollar backs... Everything is run on the US dollar, currently.

Well yeah, because you have credit cards, visas, and they can run the whole world.

World debt is on US dollars, is in US dollars.

Oh, no shit.

Yeah. World debt. The U.S. U.S. dollar is the world reserve currency, which means that at the end of the day, the U.S. dollar is the king and everything is backed by it.

So if the U.S. dollar crushed, the whole world was crushed.

It would be an apocalypse. Economically wise, I'm talking. Yeah. It would take down everybody. No shit. It would take down everybody. Yeah. Specifically, the United States would take a huge, huge hit. I mean, The reason why we can have so much debt, like the U.S. has like $34 trillion in debt, is because we're the world currency.

So I don't understand that. Dude, how are we in debt?

By just borrowing against the future? Like, yeah, we need $100,000 today. We'll pay it back. We'll pay back $200,000 in 20 years with interest, right? What's going to happen in 20 years? If you're going to have the same approach for the next 20 years and you're going to borrow money every other day or whatever, right? Or every other week, every other month, whatever. Whatever the timeline may be. And you're just going to push it down the road like, I'm going to pay it back later. Every time you borrow money, there's more interest to be paid on top of it. I mean, I don't know what the numbers are now. I don't know exactly remember, but I'm pretty sure the interest a day now or as daily daily interest, I think on the US that is a billion dollars. Holy shit. I don't, I'm not a hundred percent sure on that, but it's something big. It's huge. It's huge. It makes no sense. And how long, how much further are we going to pull this? I mean, somebody's got to step in and change that. We got to cut spending somewhere. I mean, people say like, oh, some people are just like, you know, oh, we could just print more. I mean, a hundred percent we could print more, but then five bucks that you got today is going to be worth the 250 tomorrow. You know what I mean? And that's what people don't understand.

If you print more money, it loses value.

Yes, 100%. It's just paper.

Right now, if you go on, you have a hundred bucks. I was just talking to my fiance about that. A hundred bucks isn't shit anymore. It's like having 10 bucks as a kid.

Go to the grocery store, shop for three people. You, your wife, and your kid. I mean, I- 500 bucks? If you really want to, if you want to, you know, if you don't go shopping often, if you go shopping once every two, three weeks, three, three to 400 bucks, 500 bucks, depending on what you were buying. Right. I mean, if you really want to stock up, you know, then it's going to cost more. Yeah. For a hundred bucks, you go to the store. You're not really getting much. Yeah. For a hundred bucks, you can get yourself four cases of toilet paper.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Twenty five bucks each.

Like 10 years ago, you could buy the same box of toilet paper for like $8.

I remember when we came to America, my mom raised all five of us. So she would go with $100, she would buy groceries for a whole week. That was 2005.

I came the same thing, five siblings, and I'm the oldest. I remember the day when we went back in the day where my parents didn't have much money. They had enough to get us here, thanks to my grandma. But when we got here, it was rough. My parents didn't have a high-paying job. They had the cheapest job they could get at the time. They supported five kids. We used to go to Aldi, where they had sugar on sale. And we were literally, you know, the limit was like two bags per person, whatever. We would stand in line with two dollars, like 10 cents per tax or whatever. And each of us would buy two bags of salt, of salt or sugar, you know, like 10 pound bags or whatever. And, you know, the lady at the register is like, you know. You know, I'm like, dude, it's cheap. We've got to buy it now. We're also going to buy it. She's like, you guys all look the same standing in line with two boxes, two bags of sugar with two dollars and ten cents for each, each one of us. You know, I mean, those were the times that was hard. That was those those hard being read. I mean, Aldi was always. But that teaches you a lot.

It does. It's because people don't understand. Like I always say, I'm dude, I am so thankful. And I think on every single day for this. It's not that we grew up poor or tough, but I'm so glad the way I grew up.

A hundred percent. I agree.

Like I would not be here today. I want to have a podcast. I want to have a company. I want to have these houses, cars, everything. It would not be here. I look at some of the people who had both parents, they were rich, they were well off. They had all the clothes and everything. And they don't have much. Their dad, drug addicts, nothing.

Or very little. Yeah. Right.

I mean, they can't, they're raised to not be able to live by themselves in the future.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I feel like that generation still of like our generation that did actually like not only the generation that like emigrated to the United States, that generation overall, I feel like it was still a good portion of it was let's let's build something, let's work and let's do hard work and it will pay off in the end. It is today's generation is in my in my view is kind of lost. I mean, that's just it is. They are realistically, you know, how

Nobody wants to own a home. Nobody wants to own a car. Just rent, rent, rent, lease, lease, leases. Don't have anything to your name.

You rent and you own what? Nothing. Nothing. At least with the rent, if you buy a house, yeah, it's an upfront cost because you have to pay for it, maintain it, pay the other bills with it. So it does come with a lot more costs, but you own it.

I mean, that's a really good point that you're saying that they're lost because they're extremely lost.

I mean, maybe they're not lost. Maybe, you know... In a way they are. In a way they are. I feel like in public society they're kind of lost, you know what I mean? We got dudes walking around with VRs on their head and they're on the street, you know what I mean? What the hell's going on, dude? You know, like, and they're, you know, I don't know how it works from my understanding. You can still see through them, right, and see what's going on, but it's like, dude, I'm not coming up to talk to you, dude. I have no idea what you're doing. Like I'm talking to you, you might be looking at your screen or whatever the hell you're doing.

I mean, we are losing that. The whole eye contact, the handshake.

That's very important. I mean, that was the main way to communicate back in the day. I mean, for cell phones, right? Today, yeah, you rarely get people who, I mean, Eye contact? Yeah, 100%. Even I do it. I mean, I do it myself. Literally, yesterday I met up with my friend of mine in the Bitcoin mining industry, whatever. And we're sitting across the table and I literally had a hard time giving eye contact with him. I'm like, dude, why can't I focus and look him in the eyes? And then I kind of caught myself and I started paying attention. But it was hard right in the beginning. I'm like, dude, I don't know. This isn't usually me.

Dude, I got into that, um, why I, I, I always had it, but it wasn't like right now. Cause it took like, I think a year ago is where I started taking that pretty serious.

Yeah. Because you have, because you work with, with people, with clients. Yeah.

But it intimidates Pete, the living shit out of people. Like people literally, when I go into a homeowner's homes or I'm closing a deal and stuff, it intimidates them. Yeah. A hundred percent. Not to the point where they're like scared he's going to hurt me or anything, but it's more of like, Hey, he's serious. He watches me nonstop. He sees everything that I'm doing and stuff like that.

That's for sure. For sure. Um, it's, it's an important thing that's missing in today's, uh, today's time. Uh, the handshake, the eye contact, uh, the verbal, you know, communication between people like me and you are talking right now. I mean, podcast, podcast, but at the same time, you know, on the street, even just, you know, seeing some random person is like, Hey, what's going on? What's up?

When I was at your house, I think we were there for two hours.

Yeah. You met up for a consultation and then we're sitting there for two hours, you know, talking random stuff, you know what I mean? So yeah, at the end of the day, it's like, and that's good, that's kind of necessary at the end of the day, right? So that people can still know how to communicate and know what to expect when they talk to each other. I don't know, it's just not, it's not the, society has changed. Especially after COVID, people have lost their minds.

I mean, it's really good to bullshit around. It's good to like the conversation that me and you had at your house. Yeah. That's really important in life to get away from the life that you do. Yeah. And go and bullshit talk with somebody.

Yeah. And that's what we did. We talked about a lot of stuff at that time. We literally didn't know each other. Yeah. You know, you, I know you, I was sent to, you know, you were sent to me through my brother or vice versa, whatever it was. But we didn't really know each other and then we started talking business and then the property, where I live and what I do and then the mining business and then the automotive business and then the cars and just random stuff and it just turned into a conversation of a lot of stuff, you know what I mean? You asked me what farm animals I have in my house or whatever.

Do you think, damn, do you think people are losing that because they don't really have anything to talk about. Like you have a lot because like you have like in a way the farm, you have the land, you have the house, you have the cars. And now people are just blend. Yeah, it's very basic. They're like, I don't want anything. And so there's nothing that people don't really want.

I don't know if people just really don't want possessions anymore. I don't know if that's what it is.

Well, if you're a regular nine to five, you don't really have much. And you don't have any have what's a passion or any hobbies. Or drive for something. What are you gonna talk about?

That's true. Well, you could talk about all kinds of things, right but Realistically a lot of stuff is based on actual things you do. Yeah, you know with your hands or what you're What you talk to or what physical body exactly like you got to be doing something nine to five job I get it some some jobs that are nine to five are well-paying, you know, you can get make good money You don't really have to do anything else But then there's 95 jobs where they pay you the minimum wage and you don't really want more than what you have. So that's just the way you're gonna live, right? At the end of the day, it's like, I don't really, a lot of, I don't know. It just depends on a person, I guess. It really does. You want something, you gotta go get it. You gotta go do something. You can't just sit at home and expect for something to come to you. You can't hope to go to the liquor store or to the store and buy a scratch off and that you're gonna win a million bucks. I mean, I still try it. I know I'm not going to win, but I might as well just give it a try. You know what I mean? Once in a while I'll go to the store and I'll just grab a scratch off.

Sometimes you might hit something, even if you hit 500 bucks and you get it.

The risk and the thrill is what it is. That's what it is. But, you know, I'm not going to go spend 100, you know, 100, 200 bucks at the machine. I'll spend 20 bucks once every month.

Massive thing. And I see this in men a lot. And when I went to the doctor, Cause now they state that a man's testosterone at two to 300 is regular. That's bullshit. It's nonsense. Women's aren't a hundred a woman because women produce testosterone as well. People don't think that they do, but women actually produce testosterone as well. Interesting. A man with 200, Oh, testosterone has zero drive, zero passion, brain fog, tired, never wants to do anything. Look at the testosterone from 1930, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 compared to 2024. Dude, you'll go from 1930 average was 1700, 1960, 1600, 1990 for like 1200. early 2000s they said 900 now they're saying two to three hundred well let's see so if you have zero testosterone what's gonna happen

You're not going to do anything. Dude, you might become a woman. I'm not sure.

Who knows, you know? Transgender, whatever shit that they have now, you know, no gender.

I don't even want to talk about it, bro, because it just makes me mad. So it is what it is.

I mean, it's insane.

But that's because the people, the drive is missing, right? It is. You know, you're not really doing anything else with your time, right?

But the thing is, where is this happening that the testosterone drops?

A lot of stuff. Massive. The water, the food. That's what I was going to say. The water, the food, the supplements that you may take that supposedly raise it. They may help you in one aspect, but may not be so good in another aspect. Did you know that you know what improves testosterone?

smoking smoking yeah did you know that you're smoking cigarettes it improves your testosterone i was like i just found this out not too long i'm like i'm gonna probably start smoking again man who would smoke cigarette but it's cigarettes cigarettes yes yeah not not vape because vapes kill your tobacco tobacco yeah because vapes um kill your sperm

Yeah, not surprising, you know what I mean?

Yeah, so what's up, cigarettes do, but one massive thing is onions, white onions.

I love onions. I eat onion all the time.

They will literally, huge, because going back to where you're saying supplement, people don't understand, if you take supplements for just your testosterone, so let's say a small testosterone in a pill bottle, right? Of course it's going to increase it 100%, no doubt that it won't. But is it natural? Is it going to stay? But is it natural? Exactly. Now will it stay for another 10 years if you eat well? Yeah. It's not. It's going to drive it up and then bam, go back down.

That's how it works, I guess. Right.

You know what I mean? But if like me and you, we ate homemade food nonstop. Yeah. Did you guys ever have takeouts all day?

Back in the day? No, today a little bit more often, but at the end of the day I still, I have my own little farm, I grow my own fruit, not fruit, but vegetables. I have meat that I get from local farmers. So do I, yeah. Eggs, milk. Yeah, exactly, 100%. So at the end of the day, I'm kind of trying to do that. Sometimes it's hard, because time is an aspect of it. So sometimes you'll get takeout or whatever, but you have the potential to do it at home.

and it is a hundred percent and it's a different kind of nutrition compared to what you buy at the store well another thing is like dude the best way to look at it look at the men that were in the 70s yeah those were some bulky ass men and now you look at the kids that are born out dude he's 13 i'm like dude he looks like he's

Yeah, 100%. It's just, well, I mean, I guess that age is still, you're still not really sure how that person is going to develop. Or 18 year olds looking like they're 12. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. More like that. You know, so it's insane. Well, I mean, you know, at 18 back in the day, you know, 40 or 50 years ago, they were already working hard. Dude. You know what I mean? So. Forums like the Redwoods. Yeah, I mean, whatever, you're doing all kinds of jobs. You know, there wasn't any internet jobs.

Yeah, nothing.

It was always another desk all day. No, you're outside doing your manual labor. Yeah. You know, or, you know, or I guess I don't know, sitting behind a desk, it's not a stature, whatever.

I mean, dude, literally talking about all the food, like people don't understand what all the depression and anxiety. I do believe it's there, right? Because people do have anxiety. They have depression. It's difficult to fight it and it sucks, but there's help out there. Gym and food will kill that shit. A hundred percent.

the right nutrition and then go in the gym. Probably I don't go to the gym. I do my, I do my 40 pushups a day in the morning and that's it. I'm at work.

So the thing is around, you know, that's my gym. I'm not saying that it's going to kill it a hundred percent. It will decrease the living shit out of it.

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

You know, because it's like, you're moving your muscles, they're not stuck and you're eating proper food. That's like boosting it. It's like thinking about driving a Ferrari and putting 87 in it.

I mean, you'll feel a difference, but not much, you know, not... Eventually, it's going to hit the ground, it's not going to fucking drive. Yeah. But yeah, I agree. That's, you know, that's food and just overall well-being, right, is a big factor in it. And also, I feel like a lot of that, you know, the depression and the anxiety and stuff is also a lot because of current technology. social media you know yeah i could see that bro i i feel like comparison of other people's life i i like social media i would i'm not against like banging social media or anything like that but at the same time bro it's just sometimes that it's it drives people crazy like you know it'll show like you know people will like do like a i don't know conspiracy theories and shit Yeah, I've been there. All right. Yeah, I'm still there. But I'm just saying overall, like, you know, people like to show like on, let's say, like a like a tic tac, whatever. I have this and I've been here and I've been that. How do you know how much of that is real?

Well, you don't because now they could rent out all these cars, make fake money, rent out the houses.

Some random kid who's watching these things like, oh, this guy is so awesome. He's got this and he's got that. And I'm such a lowlife because I don't have any of this. How do you know any of that is real?

You don't. because then now this kid's comparing himself to him.

The only way you know it's real is if you do it yourself or literally know a person that is like that. Yeah. And they might give you the direction into maybe a direction at least somewhat kind of a life direction like do this you might have this but do this you won't have anything. 100% yeah. So you need role models now they are gone. There's not really many role models. I mean, there are role models, you just gotta point them out, right? But a lot of people just don't have role models. They don't know, you know, who's your role model? A superhero? In a movie? They got superpowers, great. But in real life, we don't have superpowers.

Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's crazy because, you know, the whole e-commerce stuff, where's that? It's gone.

Yeah.

You don't see all this advertising because before they were advertising like, here's my course, you're going to make a hundred grand a month and everything. Look at the Lambo that I have. Well, they were renting out the Lambos. They were renting out the houses, flexing fake money.

Ponzi scheme. Yeah. That's what it is. Ponzi scheme. And that's Bitcoin's Ponzi scheme. A lot of people, you know what I mean? I can see why they can say that. But at the same time, I understand it a lot better than most people who just say, it's a Ponzi scheme. Well, not really. You've got to understand the technology behind it. You've got to understand what it actually means. You've got to understand that it's a store of value, but in a different kind of way. I mean, originally, that's what we started the conversation on. And we went way off tangent talking about random stuff, right? And we could sit here all day and talk about random stuff. I mean, it's life experience, dude.

People literally tell me like, dude, they're like roofing such a scam. Like what you guys do is a scam. How? Why? Because you have a policy that you pay for. That's an agreement with you and the homeowner and the insurance company. And we're just doing what your contract says with your insurance company. Exactly. Well, the insurance pays for everything. No shit, dipshit. You're paying for it. That's what you're paying for.

Yeah. You're paying for that coverage. You know, you may never use it, but when you need it, you have it. Right. A hundred percent. Like, do you have insurance? And then when she hits the fan, you're like, oh, damn, I gotta replace the roof. It costs 30k. I don't have 30k to spend on the roof today. You know, I have to do installment payments or whatever. And then you get jacked with an interest rate that's, you know, sky high. And then you're like, I don't know how this makes any sense, bro. Dude, come on. Wake the hell up and think about it. I listen to all kinds of podcasts and stuff like that. Credit card debt is probably one of the largest, it's the largest it's ever been. It's gotten over a trillion dollars. I think in 1.2, 1.3 trillion, just in the US. The next thing after that, you know what the next thing after that is? The buy now pay later. That is a scam. Literally it's a scam. You have, they'll give you, we'll give you three months to pay it off. You do the first payment, uh, in the month or whatever right now, or like, you know, we split it up into three payments. You do it now. The next payment is due. But in case you miss that payment, I think the interest is like 25 or 30%. on the whole thing, not what you already paid, but on the whole thing. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? And so you don't pay that. And then you're like, do I'm in debt, like, like stupidly based off of a purchase I made, like, you know, Black Friday last year, a lot of that was that. People are just not now, now the payments come and do and people are like, I don't have the money to pay it.

Yeah.

What do you do next? Yeah. Bankruptcy. Take the house away. Take the cars away.

Yeah. I mean, but get bankrupt for something stupid like that. I mean, most, you know, not, not most, but you know, some people don't have anything to even bankrupt. No. I mean, at the end of the day, so you have a bad credit score for the next seven years. I've been there already as well. Back in the day when I first started when I was still in school and college put myself in a lot of debt unnecessarily, but it is what it is. I learned my lesson, but I built, you know, a solutions I built out of cash in hand, no loans, because I couldn't get anything.

Yeah. But I think building a business, you don't need to go take out cash. People don't you don't need to. Everybody's like, oh, I need this much money. Go work your first five deals. Take a deposit, depending on which one, because yours is different.

Yeah, a hundred percent. My business is different.

Like in my industry, what I went is I signed up five people. They gave me 50% down. I paid off material. I paid off the labor. I did all the houses together in a week. And then I pulled all that profit. I made all that profit. I used that profit to do it again.

Yeah, exactly. But for me, it was a little bit different. Mine, it was based on sales of small stuff. You know, I couldn't do like those kinds of numbers. I was doing like, 300 bucks here, and 500 bucks here, and 200 bucks here, and 50 bucks there, and stuff like that. So when I was building that, and I was, like I said, I was starting off from scratch, from 1,000 bucks, apart from my dad. And that was hard. That was really hard, because I literally had no credit of any sort available to me. No credit cards, no loans, no nothing. Everything was based off of what I had in hand. That's it. So that was hard. In the beginning that was hard. When I bought my building that I'm in right now, I bought that for cash. It wasn't a lot, it was in the neighborhood and whatever, but I bought it for cash on the spot and I owned it. I owned it, owned it, owned it. Conspiracy theory right now. Yeah Yeah, there's a lot. Yeah, but what's called but uh, but yeah, so That's a dedication a lot of work a lot a lot and then at the same time I was dealing with paying off School loans that I took at the time and debt that I cured when I was buying books and you know stuff like that. That shit gets you 100% I wasn't a lot of that when I started doing this. I mean I was probably like 30 40 K at that just to start this business. And it wasn't even really into the business. It was really just to my personal side. So I've been there. I paid off what I had to pay off. I did it in the only way I could do it. I took a credit score hit on that. Learned my lesson. And after that, now I know. You learn on your mistakes. It takes time.

But it teaches you so much in life.

Oh, 100%. It teaches you everything that you need to know going forward. Yeah, at the end of the day, it's been a ride. I hope to continue this ride for a while, try different things, try new things. Hope my investment in cryptocurrency and the mining, hopefully that all works out. I'm hoping this year is going to be a good year. We'll see. That's good. We'll see. It's already been kind of rough the last two weeks, but it got better yesterday, but we'll see again what happens tomorrow.

Exactly.

I mean, you can be whatever you want to be and do however you want to do it. You just got to put the time and the effort into it. And take some of that risk. You have to take some risk. With no risk, there's no reward. I mean, there's just no, there's nothing. I mean, if you don't risk something, you got to risk it for the biscuit, dude. I mean, like, you know, you got to do something, you know, if you don't, you're not going to get much. You're not going to have much. You can't go far. You can go far. But how far can whatever you're just doing take you without maybe trying something different, trying something new, trying something that will make you maybe more? I don't know, I guess how you would look at it, it's just... You have to have at least the drive to at least think about it. You have to at least... The drive and the vision. have a vision. You have to at least be able to put pen to paper and make something happen. It doesn't have to be a physical job or whatever. You can try day trading stocks or whatever. Risky, 100%. Potential, yes there is, but you can't just jump into it and think I'm going to make 100 bucks tomorrow or 100 grand tomorrow. You'll probably lose that money that you invested today. It'll be gone by tomorrow if you don't know what you're doing. So, tried it, been there, lost money. I'm good. I'm just going to try some other stuff. I've tried so many different things. I've learned so many different lessons and so many different aspects of investments and assets and stuff like that. Like I said, I like risk. like to risk a lot more before. I've kind of calmed it down on the risk now. You got families expanding, you know, I got plans in the future. I, you know, I would like to, you know, expand my operation of my parts business and everything. So, you know,

different all over and stuff, that would be really good.

Yeah, so there's different aspects of business that I would like to improve. One day, if I have the money, I would like to build my own mining farm, you know what I mean? I actually opened a business for that particular kind of industry. It's called EMP Farming. Nothing big, just for myself. But basically, I talked to a couple people who are interested in what mining is, how it works, is there potential in it. Technically, it's considered passive income because you're not really doing anything. You throw that investment up front and then you just reap the rewards if the rewards are there at the end of the day. That there you just you just you know, you got to know when to make the right move and you really got to kind of study You can't just be like I'm just gonna throw 100k at it and then it's gonna be 200k tomorrow It doesn't work like that. You know, there's a lot of moving parts Yeah, so a lot of work a lot of work a lot of thinking, you know, like I said, it's it's uh, it's Really got it you really got a put your mind to it is one thing, but you really got to do your own research.

That's the part that sucks the most, but that's the part that gets you the most.

A hundred percent. I mean, I don't mind sitting down with somebody and talking about how it works and everything and give you an idea of what it does and whatnot. But at the end of the day, you know, it's like, you still got to decide, do you want to take that risk or you don't? Right. Do you want to try something different? Do you want to believe in it? Do you not want to believe in it? If you don't believe in it now, I don't know if there's a point in you trying something like, you know, like mining without first realizing what it really is. You know, so. I get you.

There's a lot to it.

There's a lot to it. A hundred percent. We can sit here for a long time talking about it.

Well, awesome. What we're going to do is we're for sure going to do a second episode.

I agree.

That's cool. To talk more about that once all of that is figured out. But how can people find you for the mining or the A-Solutions?

A-Solutions is already a decent size. Asolutionsauto.com is the website where we have our parts listed. Facebook a solutions auto parts Instagram a solutions auto That's for the parts business EMP farming and mining and whatnot. That's not really something I'm promoting at the time yet, you know make it big Yeah, I got a Twitter handle, you know EMP farming. That's not really much on there But it's just once we get that up and running. I mean, maybe we'll see I mean people, you know people are interested, you know, they say Right now, especially in the crypto, they say that nobody's interested in them until the price is already super high. They're saying like, you know, retail doesn't get involved until it's already close to the top. When people are talking on the streets about Bitcoin, then you're getting close to the top. Things have changed a little bit since that talk because ETFs got approved, BlackRock's buying Bitcoin, Fidelity's buying Bitcoin, countries are buying Bitcoin. I mean, it's getting up there. So eventually it'll become something more. It will become a valuable asset, I believe. It will for sure, 100%. Not everybody has the same commitment to it like I do, but I believe there is a future for it in the future. And I think that I would say for anybody who's out there who's interested in it, just put a small allocation into it. It doesn't have to be much. 5%, even 1%, just to see what it does. You put in a hundred bucks and the market goes up 2x from today. That's 200 bucks. 200 bucks isn't much, but it's something, right? It shows you that it can do it. Or it could drop to 50 bucks and you can be like, damn, I lost 50 bucks. Yeah, if you sell for 50 bucks, you're going to only have 50 bucks. But if you hold it more long-term, you'll probably get a better return on that. You know what I mean? It's a long-term investment. Short-term, but long-term at the same time. Short-term, you can make some money. Long-term, I think it's bigger than that.

Well, it's much, yeah. It's like me and him, we were talking about, um, I should have stopped fucking around when I was five years old and bought Bitcoin.

I wish I wouldn't have sold the 10 Bitcoin I bought when I was 20, 20, 17. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I, the tiny Bitcoin today is what? 10 times to 600 G's. Yeah, you know, but I sold it bought some other coins that sold it out of panic became less, you know Became less and less and less and like I said, I learned my lesson That's I ain't selling now until I'm ready to sell. Yeah, I'm still when you get dips like Today's Thursday March 20th 21st 21st. You had a big dip in the crypto market about a couple days ago I'm just like grand here, you know, not a grand in one thing, but like a hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there, a hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there on this, this, this, and this project. And let's see what happens. I might, in the short term, it might drop some more and lose value, but in the long term, I think it's a good investment. That short term was probably lasted maybe two days because that investment I did two, a couple of days ago, just basically even went basically two times just to date. You know, the market or yesterday, within a week, within a week. Yeah. So for now, I'm already in a profits on what I invested a couple of days ago. That will change. If the market dips, then we'll be back into either zero or negative. But if it keeps going up, which I believe it will. then that $100 today investment could be worth a grand by the end of the year. And I did, you know, a hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there, like potential for, you know, 10 G's on a grand. So, you know, it's there, you know, it's just risk. You just got to manage it. I mean, managing risk in crypto is kind of hard, but, you know, and then you get, you know, if you get somebody like me who likes, you know, taking risks and it's like, I'm going to try this one. If I can afford to buy it, I'll buy it. If I can't, you know, stay put. I want to cash out today. I'll cash out today. I'll pay off all my debts. I'll be good. You know, all my debts, pay off my house, pay off all my debts. But I think it'll be worth more than that. At least I hope so. Yeah. You know, I'm pretty convinced of this.

Oh, it's for sure. It's going to hit some numbers. Awesome, guys. Thank you so much for listening to True Mentors. Tune in. Thank you so much.

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