Episode 5: Big Lil Bro Moves (April 23, 2026)

What up? What up? Let's see that thing again. Let's see this thing. What? This thing? Yeah, that thing. What is that? Tell me about that. This thing is uh something I earned from Pokemon Go. I went to enough Pokétops that they gave me a ring. Wow. No, just kidding. This is the ring I'm gonna get down on one knee to ask JD to be my lawfully witted wife with. Oh my gosh, dude. That thing's gorgeous. Where'd you get it? It's a pretty funny story. So, I went and looked because Jade really wanted a vintage ruby. So, I went and looked at this place and they had a ton of great vintage ruby rings. And so, then I looked about it. Yeah, we've talked about it, but kind of like nothing of like it's going to happen now. It was kind of just like, yeah, when it happens, like we're not going to plan anything, but when it does, this is like kind of what I'm thinking. And anyway, then I went to this place and I found like these cool ruby ones. I was like, "Okay, I think Jade will love one of these." So, I was like, "I'm going to bring my girlfriend back, but you don't know me, and so we're gonna just we're going to be strangers. you're going to ask all the questions that I can't ask without raising suspicion. And so then we went and got lunch. And then as we were walking out, I was like, "Oh, like this place has old estate rings. We should go look. We should go check it out." And so we walk in there and this girl is like, "Yep." And then we start looking at rings and she's trying all the all the ones that I think that she would like. And then she Jade finds this one and is like, "Oh, I never thought I'd go for something that's not ruby, but this one." And then she just like kept trying it on and trying it on in between like every other ring. So this girl was just like asking all the questions like, "Well, what do you think? Would you want this or this?" And then like having her rank them. And then Jade was like, "No, like I think of all of these, this is the one that I like the most." and like this is if you chose this one, I would be stoked. But then it was funny cuz as it was happening, she kept looking at me like I'm so sorry. Like this this crazy lady behind the counter just is like keeps asking me questions like I I don't mean to like make you feel uncomfortable or anything like we're ringing shopping. Not knowing that I had like totally planned it. So she fell right in my trap and then was like looking at me and being like, "Sorry, like I I worked here way longer than I thought. I'm sorry." I was like, "No." So, it worked out perfect. But then I went back today. That was like a week ago. Dang, dude. That is awesome. It's exciting. Yeah. Way to go, dude. Super happy for you. That's That's news that you only hear once hopefully in your life. And I only have one brother. So, that like that was a special moment. I will always remember where I was when you when you told me that. And it looks like you're at like an interior design firm. I am in Charleston. I am at the Hilton. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I got the background going, but it's good. No. So, run me through your trip. You started in Atlanta, ended in Charleston. You've just been meeting with clients. Let's jump into the outline a little if you don't mind. No, let's do I think we got our we got our small talk out of the way. So, typically with these episodes, what do we what do we start with? Word of the week. What's what's this week been to you in a word? Or what's a word that you liked from this week? Voiced. I heard a good word. Voiced. Voiced. Is that like how somebody from Jersey says that you got a whole fist? No. No. Well, yes, it could be. Foisted is the past tense of foist, which means to force or impose something onto someone, especially when they didn't ask for it or didn't necessarily want it. Often something low quality. The word of your week. Well, no. I just I heard it today and we we had an interesting discussion on it. Tristan gave me a a suitcase worth of books that he wanted me to take home that I could send out to new hires and whatnot. And he said, "I'm kind of foisting this on you, but I was like, "What an interesting word." I was like, "Tell me more about that word." And then he's like, "Maybe like forcing or imposing something on someone that is unwanted." And I was like, "No, dude. I want this." Like voice is the wrong word. He's got a really good vocabulary, which is fun to be around. I feel like it's he embodies like you you're the you are the people you spend the you're the five people you spend the most time with and so excited to be growing as fast as I I am. So nice. And are you going to be doing like the onboarding for new hires? Yeah. Well, yeah, I'll be I'll be part of like the customer success but also like handling I mean it's a startup so I'll be wearing a lot of hats. I'll be handling our merch. I'll be doing like when we hire a new guy, I'll send them books. I'll send them all our onboarding gear, stuff like that. So, nice. Good gig. You're going to run the book club. Yeah, they have a huge They have a huge book club. Keeping me very busy. What books have you read that you've liked from it so far? What's your uh What's your word of the week, though, before we move on? probably ring. Yes, that's probably my word of the It's probably the biggest event that'll happen to This is probably one of the biggest events that will happen in my life. Yeah, the engagement is you gotta Have you thought about what you're going to do? Because you got to have a good story of like how did he do it? You know, I don't want to go like the whole like we have a photographer waiting around the corner in the bushes type vibe, right? I think it's just going to be her and I I want there to be a level of spontaneity to it of like I'm going to keep this thing on me on like big trips and like big moments and then when it just feels right, do it. But my gut is telling me we'll just be completely outside alone. Part of me thinks like sometime in Jackson on like the lake. I think that is an option because well if you if you want me to like hide out somewhere with my camera if you know and work together and you do want a photo after or something let me know because I would travel up for that or or do something for that. Okay. Baller. Yeah. No, I I will let you know. That would be fun. Maybe I think I my ideal is like we're in the canoe or on the paddle board or something and it's not so much like get down on one knee as it is just like hey what's that over there kind of vibe but we'll see. I'll be if you've got any ideas let me know. I'm going to be brainstorming for a while. Yeah. Yeah. No, that is great. That this is such a fun episode already. I can't believe that, dude. I'm like my mind is just exploding with joy. Okay. Accountability. Last episode's commitments. Did we do that? Keep Did we do anything like what did we talk about? I can't. You were so bad at the week to week. At least I am. Do you remember what our weekly goal was? I remember my weekly goal. I don't remember yours unfortunately, but I had kind of a lot of weekly goals. And we're midweek still cuz we recorded on Sunday. So I'm in the midst of it. I made the batches unpressed for wild sleep, wild calm, wild energy, wild focus. And yeah, and you screwed your finger up, too. Yeah, I was setting up the machine. But yeah, we're I'm going to press those tomorrow and then two of them tomorrow. And then I've got this like kind of little stand thing that I'm doing on Sunday. So, I am the website is at a point where it stands alone and it's good, but I definitely think it's going to be a continuous improvement thing. Jade is shooting the ads that I'm going to send Lupo tomorrow. She couldn't get to those today because she's also going to be at this little standin yard sale market. And so, we're we're making progress towards all our goals, but none of them are completed yet. Interesting. But they will. That's good. You You got a little more time. So, you you have been pressing tablets? Not today. I got the tablet pressed all prepped and ready to just jump into it tomorrow. But I mixed all the batches today. So, I've got like five I've got like three five gallon buckets that are about a quarter to a half full that'll be pressed. And then I've got two And then I've got three bags of of stuff. Gotcha. I think one thing that we should do actually let's just do this right now. What do you want the structure of these episodes to be to get like maximum value kind of what we have right now trying to follow the pattern over the past couple weeks is basically we open we have like an opener conversation. We start with the word of the week. We have our accountability like what what did we remember from last week? What were our goals last week? We kind of follow up there and then basically ask like what did you learn last week? What's your goal this week? We both answer that question and then we kind of have our our main topic that we're going to talk about and then we like to close out I think we do our content diet. We talk a little bit about our content diet and then we close out. That doesn't feel super organized right now. I feel like we need to clean that up just to be like, "Okay, we're going to hit today's episode and like I I have already been thinking about this, you know? I feel like the disorganization of it is making it harder to like focus on and be committed to." Does that make sense? Yeah. No, I feel like we have just kind of been having the same conversation every week of like, "What do you want to talk about? What's up?" Yeah. And I think it would be good if we brought something new to the table each time. I do however like the structure of we're both just super busy and I don't know if I am gonna be able to commit myself to like learning something new every week for this but I think in my learnings of the week it's fun to present on them. So we could do like what was your learning of the week but like present it instead of just be like I love that. Yeah. And I think for both of us, we need to get better at storytelling. And so instead of like what did you learn this week, we could either tell that in a story or another thing we could incorporate is like what's a good story that you heard this week? And that's something like you hear so many stories throughout the week about this or that and being able to relay them and tell them in a convincing way. Like I I think that would be a good thing to add as well. I agree. I think that would be good. I know that because I agree with you. I don't want you I don't want to be like preparing for this. But I think if we had a structure that we followed each week, our minds would naturally start to like put things into place, you know? And then when we see it in our day-to-day, I could shoot you a text be like, don't let me forget about this. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Cool. Like that. Yeah. Anything else on that structure that you want to change like open one word accountability? What' you learn? What were your goals? main content diet and then close out. Yeah. I don't know if we need to open with a word. I don't know if we need to do that either. I don't know if we need to do that. I feel like that's been I think if we opened with like maybe like the same question or like something that was cool from the week or curiosity or Yeah, maybe if we just open with however we want to open. We don't have to do it any I think I think the best way to open a conversation is by asking a question. So maybe maybe every other week one of us asks the first question and that's how it starts. I like that. Let's do that. Okay. My question last week was what was the best question you asked this week? It's so meta. Just the most meta question. What's the best question that ever any question has ever been questioned about? Most questioned question out in the universe of questions. Question me this. I like that, dude. I think I think that level of organization will help this like I think it'll help with us being as busy as we are. We can like hop in, create value, knock out a good episode, and like cover a lot of stuff and then move on, you know? And then maybe instead of just going straight into filming, we spend five minutes on the call and we're like, "All right, here's the structure. We're going to go through it." Kind of do a fivem minute deliberation and find some like our notes from the week. Come up with some examples. think on the fly as far as storytelling. Cool. So, what's your goal this week? My goal this week is a continuation of the last goals just because we're still midweek. But for next week, I really want to get ads up and running with Lupo. I'm going to send him the ads and just try to get that going because I gotta make some money to this thing. And you got to get this thing going, dude. I gotta get this thing going. I feel very confident in the foundation, especially with like the new website and everything. I think one thing that I'm going to set up then I want to get your opinion on this is first month free when you subscribe. So yeah, you subscribe, I send you three tubes or whatever, two tubes. So 14 days, 28 days worth of tablets and then even like free tube subscribe, you get a free tube and then you could like take I I don't know if I would just be giving your product away because I feel like your product is a product that lasts people a long time unless they're using it every day. Yeah. So, I would maybe say like subscribe, give them a free two, but then you get you have to buy the other two, you know? Yeah. Or well, whatever you think. I just I think the only thing that benefits from if I give you like a month free is you use it for that month and then you're just I'm getting a residual income from you via it every 3 weeks you get or every two weeks you get another tube. And then I just continuously steam out. You don't have to think about it. I think that would be a better incentive to get people to subscribe, but I do think that that could get tricky quick. I think we build in Third Life into the podcast. I think we build in a bullet point that's like that we hit third life and we follow up on specific branches of where you're at with stuff as well. like, okay, get a little bit more specific into our lives of like what really matters, you know, because what what are we doing here? We're basically recording a journal that for us or to help us get better conversation or whatever. Like if we're doing a journal for ourselves, like let's really get into the details of it, you know? Yeah, I agree. Okay. Yeah. Cool. So like third life should be a question that I'm asking every week, you know? Yeah, I'm down I'm down for a work question. Okay. Or just like question relate into it. Yeah, I like that too. That's we spend so much time doing that. One thing, one thing that I would say too, like after working with a like really really smart entrepreneur who started a company that's doing like 1.3 and ARR right now, you've got to learn how to sell, dude. You have to learn how to sell. And yeah, and you you can sell a product that people don't want. Like if you get good enough at sales, you can literally just sell people. You have to come up with a formula where you create a problem for them in their head and then you give them the solution. And and however you do that with Third Life, whether it's you drink coffee but it makes you feel like and you don't want to feel like anymore or do you you are more focused at work but you haven't found the right thing and you don't want to kill your body by drinking energy drinks and like have a heart attack when you're 35 or do you do you hate the jitters that you get from caffeine? You know like you got to create something create a problem for people and let them solve it for you. Totally. You have to put them in the shoes of the people experiencing the pro problem. I want to do this by bringing value to their lives via humor. I think that is where my strength is going to be and I'm really trying to refine my social media presence in I want these to be really funny. So, I've got like a bunch of skits and like small campaigns that I think given consistency, they could really take off, but I do have to figure out how to sell to like supply or to like wholesalers and stuff, which I think is going to be one of my goals for next week, too, is to just reach out to the only like literally Yeah. The only way to do that is like just do it. Just reach out to them, call them, leave a voicemail, talk to people, go meet them for lunch. like you have to just do it. One thing that was interesting that I was talking to Tristan about this week was I was like give me the full story like how did it start? How did you get started with Edge Manta? How did you know you want to start a company? All this stuff. And basically his family some his family company got sold and he was like I knew I wanted to do something in estimating. I didn't know what to do. I always love technology. He's like, "So what I did, he's like, I called the 10 smartest people in the industry in estimating and I I set lunches up with all of them." And he said, "Not a lot of them answered. Not a lot of them called me back right away, but eventually I met with every single one of those people. I figured out what the biggest pain points were in the industry, and I started building a platform that was going to help like solve some of these problems." Like, "Oh my gosh, dude." Yeah, dude. That's a great That is a that is a bold move. But the clients that we have now are the best in the world at what they do at heavy civil and the market like the strategy there is insane because all the top guys are doing it and that opens the market up to everyone else who wants to do it like the best. Totally. So yeah, just really interesting. Yeah. Maybe with the that care package that I set you up with for the people that you want to get it to, I'll have like a little QR code that they can scan for like a I don't know, some sort of gift. I don't know. And and just even just Dude, I I don't even know if I'd do like a gift. I would just do like a handwritten note. Yeah. Like, hey, for sure. I've given a handwritten note with everything I've delivered so far. You two had a huge impact on or Mason and like whatever. Here's some to like keep you going. Yeah. Here's your uppers, downers, sidewaysers. Can't wait for your downers, dude. Yeah, dude. I got them made. So, we've got two downers. We've got effer calm or wild calm which is like ashwagandha D3 magnesium glycinate but magnesium glycinate in a lower dose so you don't get sleepy and then our sleep is the same things but magnesium glycinate in a big dose so you do get sleepy and you have your non- stems non- stems dude actually so I had this big batch of non- stem that I had made a while back that I had just hadn't pressed And I opened it up and it just tasted like electric in all the wrong way. Oh. So, I made a new batch. But we've pretty much got unlimited personal stock of non steam, you and I. Now, perfect. It doesn't taste bad, but there it doesn't taste like it I I It's not something that I'm going to be like, "Oh, try this one." Yeah. Send them my way, dude. I love the Don stems. Yeah. And I took one today and I felt good all day. I felt focused. I've been a little bit overwhelmed. So, I've been like a little bit spacey. Well, dude, makes sense. A million different things. Yeah. But how do you how do you afford the ring loan? No. No. I just I could afford it. I have enough in my bank account, but it's definitely going to bite into what I'll I'll be How much How much was the ring? That is not for you to know, big guy. Okay. I I don't know. I don't know what a ring cost. Yeah, Jade. Luckily, Jade wanted like a vintage ring. Nice. So, that was hype. So, it was a little bit cheaper. But yeah, that's Dude, I I wish I wish that It was like cool to get a $500 ring. Yeah, sir. Because where I'm at right now, like I can't even afford tile in my house, you know? And you expect me to pay like a couple grand on a ring and it's an engagement ring, dude. Like, you don't wear that around. Yeah. You know, Jade Jade did say that she doesn't want an engagement and wedding ring, which is like hell yeah. She just wants this to be it. So, she'll just take it off on the wedding day. But that'll probably change because we'll probably get married in like two years and I'll get her another ring just because I think that would be fun. It's fun to get more stuff. Yeah. Life kicks off, you'll just be in a mansion rolling in it. Dude, that's honestly kind of like a good timeline to plan on is like by the time Jay and I get married, I should be like someone that you want your daughter to get married to. Dude, you gotta grind. I know that for a fact. Like, you gotta grind or you get really lucky, which you might or both. Dude, I already have been so lucky. And I This is one of the things that I told Jade on our first date is I was like, I'll have you know I am the luckiest guy alive. And so, I'm I'm I'm going to I'm going to keep that going. Not much of a story there other than if you have the mentality that you're the luckiest guy live, you get really lucky. And so I'm super lucky. Okay, real quick. Content diet and then I got to sign off here. Content diet. This week I have been listening to the Lord of the Rings book. It's like for some reason just what I listen to when I'm setting up the machine and pressing tablets because I need to be focused on like the pressing of tablets, but I also want to be entertained. And so it's like just good enough. I've seen the movies and I've I've never like really been a the biggest fan like so it it works out great. You must have been in a real good part when you pinched your finger there. Oh, serious dude. You want to hear how that happened? Yeah, I was loading in the die and there's like this it's like on a rotator, right? But then there's like this little cutout and I literally just rolled it and then just and I just heard it snap and my my fingernail just broke right down the gut. Jeez, it's gonna suck. Dang. Okay, dude. Well, just to recap, I feel like we we we got the word of the week foisted in ring. We we went over our structure stuff. Obviously, the biggest news of the week is the ring. Obviously. Yeah, that's huge. We got some good We got some good content on what we want this to look like going forward. I think incorporating work into it. Also, just having a little bit more like structure to create value and like really get to the meat of what we're learning and where where we're going, where we want to be going. I think I think like using it as kind of like an accountability coach, too, of like we're coaching each other. We're helping each other get better. That's always nice. Like I know this like an early version of this podcast was Earl Accountability where we were basically just trying to hold each other accountable. I do like I do like that component of it and I think it will get better like we'll get more skilled at talking about complex stuff and building stories like when we really get into the meat of what we're doing in our day-to-day anyway like let's let's start structuring it that way and then what's your content before before we Dude I have been I have been absorbing from the best estimators in heavy civil in the world this week like I met with the Michael Jordan of estimating this week. Really? Guy named Mike. He works with CW Matthews. He bids they bid like a billion 1.2 billion a year in Yo asphalt. They're doing the highways all over the country, dude. I met with a guy who runs that team. Wild. Wild. And then and then we went to Palmetto and I met with the VP of estimating for Palmetto. Wild. They do like 800 and I've just been absorbing from them. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. It's a little intimidating, but it's The girl at Palmetto is great, dude. The other guy, the Michael Jordan of Besting. Holy smokes. He's dialed in. Dialed in. Yeah. Yeah, dude. Yeah. This is an audience that I'm gonna I'm gonna be try to re be trying to reach with Third Life, too. Dope. Absolutely. These guys these guys need it, dude. They work hard and long hours. So, a lot of these people could use use Third's Life. You got to give me like a cool t-shirt that I can wear too. Some of the stuff be like, "What's Third Life?" I'm like, "Oh, it's my brother's company. You want to be more productive when you're estimating? Check it out." Hell yeah. I will have to get you a t-shirt. Well, hell yeah, dude. Yeah. No, I think I I think we made some good adjustments to structure and I think the biggest thing that I want to do next week is just a five minute before where we get on the same page so that when we're like when we start talking it's concentrated and united. Congratulations my man. Super proud of you. Super happy for you and Jade. I will make sure that Emma knows not to spill any beans. Okay. Thank you. Love you, dude. Hope the finger healed up nice. Thank you. All right, dude. Love you. You around tomorrow? Yeah, I'm gonna be pressing tablets. Okay. I might need a ride to the dojo. Okay. I'll come see you. Come see me. I'll see you soon. I'll see you tomorrow. All right, dude. Love you. Sleep tight. Bye.