Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, and improve yourself overall, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating, and a review. Now I've already had a great time with my new guest today, Anthony Amunategui. who is the CEO and founder of CDO Group Construction, an entrepreneur and the host of the podcast. He is here today to talk about so many things and I won't even bother mentioning them as yet. Just stay seated, fasten your seatbelt and let me introduce you to Anthony. Hi, Anthony. Roberta, great afternoon. I am so honored to be on your show. The work you do is amazing. Your podcast, I'd love listening to it. It's amazing podcast and I'm honored to be here today. So thanks for having me. I appreciate you saying that. Thank you so much. And thank you for being here, for taking your time. You're a very busy guy. You host a podcast, you run businesses, you do a whole ton of things. And also obviously leading your very exciting, crazy family. But before we get into all of that, please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more. Sure. So my name is Anthony Montetegui. I'm the founder of CDO group. Uh, as one of the companies that I own, it's a construction company that's around the country. We build brands like McDonald's and Starbucks and Hertz and all kinds of great rollout construction, all commercial. Uh, I have also a Syrian entrepreneur. I've got things like a TV show called Family Style where My family and I go around the world, do these great adventures and learn about religions and cultures and styles and really do great adventures and some public good. And then we've got some other companies like real estate companies that I own with different real estate ventures throughout the country and a waffle business in Europe. So it's a lot of fun. I kind of love being a serial entrepreneur. Roberta, that's really the whole thing about me is love to grow new businesses. Quick question. Speaking of serial entrepreneur, is that for everybody? Look. Anybody can be it. There's no magic. No one's born an entrepreneur. I was born a poor kid in Pompano Beach, Florida. You know, my mother worked at Denny's. I didn't have an Ivy league school. I spell like a third grader and people laugh at me all the time. I'm like, yeah, you want me to spell that? Could you please spell that out letter for letter? Because I'm going to mess it up. And sometimes you can make up these stories about, well, I wasn't from here. I didn't have an Ivy league education and my parents didn't give me anything. But the truth is entrepreneurs are all about one thing. Literally the same science for no matter what you're building, it's expand and organize. And people make it out that there's some sort of secret weapon. There's some sort of secret thing. Maybe the only thing that goes along with that is tenacity, right? Maybe that you expand and organize. And what I find true about most people who lose out in business is they gave up five minutes before the magic happened. And all businesses are relentless behavior. You know, Elon Musk says it best. It's chewing glass. on a daily basis and looking over the abyss and then keep doing it. Right. You got to be willing to go through that experience of it's not easy. The ultimate experience as a human, right. Is we want to conquer things. You know, why do we climb mountains? Why do we do these great adventures? What's it all about? I thought the whole purpose of life was to get to a place where you coast. And I could retired several times. You know, you get up after your 10th day of doing nothing. Being in Thailand on a beach. Yeah. Thailand on a beach or wherever you are doing nothing and somewhere you start getting island fever. You start feeling disconnected. You spend time in Hawaii and you're sitting out there going, I wonder what the rest of the world is. And your friends are doing things and achieving things. And that sense of phobos, your fear of missing out, right? Ultimately, it sounds like good, like I want to do nothing. And when you're tired, hey, when I'm tired, that's what I want to do every morning. I want to get up, I'm like, I want to do nothing today. But the truth is when I get up and I put my sneakers on and I make it to the gym, which I never want to go. My brain never goes, great, you're going to go to the gym today, it's going to be great. And no, it's like, all right, I'm going to go to the gym. But as soon as I get there and I get on that treadmill and that first minute sucks, it's terrible. There's people who love running. I'm not that guy. And I get out there for a minute or two and all of a sudden you're like, okay. And I make it through the five minute mark and then somewhere at eight minute mark, I'm like, okay, I'm feeling a little better. 12 minutes. And right about 15 minutes, I can't wait till that 20 minute mark hits because I do 20 minutes. That's it. You know, those TikTokers who walk on it all day while doing their work at home. No, no, I do 20 minutes on that. And then I go hit some weights, some of the machines and you know, I'm almost 55 years old today. I gotta be kinder to the. Right. I'm not a bodybuilder. Yeah. So I don't think it's a matter of having in you. I think it's just a matter of just keep relentlessly doing it and somewhere becomes kind of habitual, you know, that's what makes an entrepreneur is just, you keep trying. So it's expanding, organizing and having tenacity to just keep going. When you talk about your family, the family style, I saw a clip of the family style video, I'm a South African who lived in South Korea for almost a decade and now I'm in America. And I always say. Travel, it's the best education. It teaches you so much that school hasn't fully covered. Would you say that you are giving your children a similar experience? My parents did. My mother was a waitress at Denny's. She would take me to Italy, where she was from, summertime, she would save all of her money and her parents would help her. And my father died young. She would take two kids to Sicily in the summertime. She would drop me off there. I would hang out with my grandparents. I would fly home at the end of summer. I would say to you, that's one of the best experience I had. One, I got to be involved with my extended family. Right. And then I learned a lot about our culture and our history and the foods and, and then learned to play soccer with the kids there. And ultimately by playing there, it was great. I spent a wonderful time with my grandfather, who was this old, you know, very stoic Sicilian man. And I got to go work in the fields with him and grow tomatoes and fava beans and vineyards. And it was great working with my hands in the dirt. There's something really, really vibrant about working with your hands in the dirt, right? Just throwing something fresh. Today, I think one of the things we're really missing is that we were tribal for many, many years, for thousands of years. You know, you and I might have been part of a tribe and I might have been part of a… I still am, yeah, Zulu tribe. Oh yeah, that's right, that's right, that's right. You're actually from my tribe, right? And I would have been part of a tribe and in that tribe, everybody has a task, right? There's different responsibilities of who you are in the tribe, right? Talk a little bit about that. Tell me some of the stuff you have in your tribe and how it operates. I don't know if you've heard of King Shaka Zulu. He was very well known, yes. I remember, so my surname is Dlela. Apparently my one ancestor, who was in Dlela, of course, when King Shaka's mother died, he said they're gonna go on a hunger strike to mourn his mom. And obviously everybody loved him. All the Zulu nation, he was very revered because he was always serving the nation. My ancestor went to him, I think he was one of the right-hand men, and he said, my beloved king, we all loved your mother and we are mourning, but... If you keep this hunger strike going, you're not going to have an army because your soldiers are going to be weak. And he's like, I like you, you think, you don't just accept everything. Just because I'm a leader and a king, you don't just accept everything I say. And he made him his first right-hand man. He said, I like people who think. That's just one example because it's connected to me, obviously. But yes, to me, having a tribe that come from where you had elders, walked with your elders and they said, walk like this or hunt like that or sharpen your spear like this or catch food like this or cook like this, right? Someone who guided you in the way you cook and there was a feedback loop, right? And then all of a sudden the industrial revolution came by and we got those, those homes, those tribes, those groups got split up and our families went to work and they did the right thing, right? They wanted to do the right thing. They, they learned to go work. And by the time they came home, they were exhausted. I know for me, my mother worked tirelessly. She worked three jobs. support two great kids and I would wake up in the morning and I would find her asleep at the sewing machine. She would sew zippers on pants for customers at night. She would get a dollar a pair of pants for each zipper and there'd be piles of them. My sister and I would jump from pile to pile in the living room and she would zip those, you know, until her fingers were so tired. She falls asleep at the machine and I would get up and I'd have to make breakfast for my sister. She worked her butt off to give us what we had, right? You had to do what you had to do to survive, but there wasn't a lot of guidance. So as a man, I felt like there was a lot of left open to figuring things out. And I don't know that I figured things out well. Friends in the streets, some of the places we grew up were poor, so those neighborhoods were really tough. And the men I looked up to didn't do some of the great things that I know that men can do, right? Some of the behaviors I learned weren't necessarily great. So some of the people who trained me weren't there. So I spent a lot of my life having to untrain some of those behaviors. Can you relate to that? Some of our families carried with them lots of fears. Even my mother. Her biggest desire for me was... be a butcher. Oh, interesting. Why is that? She said if I was a butcher, she had got me a job working at this little meat market as a kid. And I was a clean up kid. And she was like, if you're a butcher, you could always cut meat and bring meat home for your family. And no matter where you go, you can work. That makes sense. It was safety, right? For her, it was safety. It was just like a safe place to be. And like when you come from being really poor and having two kids, safety is a pretty big concern. So now to pick up some of that characteristics, you're like, Hmm, I'm not sure that that's what I want to do. to start to learn how to unwind some of that stuff. You and I were talking to Prisho about, you know, guys like Tony Robbins and some of those Zig Ziglar. Yes, Brian Tracy. Oh, when I was in my twenties, we were to see Jim Rohn in Cape Town, the late Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins' mentor. Yes, that's right. One of the best personal trainers ever. And I really started hearing what possibilities were. And I remember when I was 18 years old, a friend of mine said, I am gonna take you out to dinner. He goes, I'm going to take you out to this fancy dinner, but you have to bring 50 bucks. I'm like, wait a minute, hold on. You're taking me out to dinner. I got to bring 50 bucks. It's not like a scam, right? So we walk into some hotel and it was that in Miami. He walks me in and all these people are like over happy. They're like, oh, smiling. And they're looking at you in the eye and they're like, all right. And he takes me into what was called landmark education. They were having a introduction night and he walks me up to a table and he goes, give me that 50 bucks. I give him 50 bucks. And he goes, he's signing up for this course. And I'm like, what? He goes, yeah, you're signed up for this course. You trust me? I go, yeah, I trust you. He goes, yeah, you owe her 240 more bucks. And I'm like, what? You know, I'm 18 years old. Dude, it never ends. I'm like, this is it. But it was wonderful, right? The Landmark Forum. I don't know if you've ever heard of Landmark Education, but it's a great course on development around the world, right? So that's its course. It's around the world. You know, in there, I found what it was like to find possibility. They had some great distinctions, right? In that course, they had six or nine different distinctions you learn. One of the distinctions was what happened and my interpretation of what happened, what actually happened and then my story, right? To start to learn that I've created a story about my life to fit what's going on, to fit my ego, to fill the stuff and to really identify that it's just a story. It means nothing. It's really of no value that your story's your limiting factor. Yeah. We call it BS. There you go. That's right. Your own BS. That's exactly right. Your own BS. That's exactly right. Your own belief system that is that. That's funny. And then choices, finding ways to get into choices, right. And, and figure out I can make choices outside of reasons, right. I can make a choice and live into that choice. And how could I divorce myself from all the reasons in life and go, all right, I want to make a choice and live into that choice. And that was another one that lit me up. I could see that there was another possibility other than the story that I carried. That was invigorating. Cause then you started noticing that, Hmm, I'm malleable. Right. And ultimately today, I believe that we're as malleable as we want to be. There's nothing, nothing that we have to hold onto. All the things that we think are gravity to us, or the things that we believe are things we can't change, they're all changeable. This is literally our matrix and we can believe and think and create all that we want. The question is, what can you think about? What can you create? How far are you willing to go? That's the game today to play for me. Uh huh. That's why we throw around the word mindset a lot lately. Do you think it's being overused? Imagine this back in the thirties, we didn't have the language we have today around understanding our ways of being. And then the 1800s, we didn't have what they had in the thirties. What's really fun about this time in life is that we're revolving faster because we're starting to learn language that describes our characteristics and the things that we're starting to understand, and we're starting to notice a lot more about. ourselves, right? And that mindset, right? It's just one of the things that affects what the outcome of our life is. Like I've made up a story and you know, I can have a small little mindset and say, well, life is terrible. And here I can get as high on news as any alcoholic can get on drinking, right? Surely if you're wise enough, you switch off your TV when the news pops up. I stop. I watch no news. To me, news is a drug. Right. It's a drug. It's fear and anxiety are just as much a drug as heroin and scotch. Right. To me, those are the things that check me out. They take me places that have really no value. When I really look at my family and the kids and the life that I want to live, a life that's worth living, a life where I question myself, am I more of a giver than a taker, am I giving more to this world than I'm taking, it has nothing to do with the news. In fact, the news has me judge and compare to people and and ultimately separate from others. And they're just dealers of drugs. As I get watching that during COVID, my wife would laugh at me. She, I was working through COVID and we kept working right through it. And every once in a while I'd go back to the house and I'd turn on the news and watch it and I'd get all pumped up like, Oh my God, we're all dying. The world's ending. Oh my God. And I'd come back and I would, you get high on all the fear. And I walked back in the office and my wife's like, would you stop? You're going to freak the rest of the people out. And the truth was. Let's get safe. Right. There's a virus going on. Let's do, we got to do to be careful. Right. Let's stay away from the drama story, right? The story that has us really check into checking out, right? Cause as I check out, I have no capacity, right? And if you want to be leader of a group, great leadership is about the ability to bring ideas to the table that didn't exist. Yes. Great managers follow other people's ideas. Yeah. They test givers. They say, okay, you have to make sure this is done by the end of the day. Great leaders find solutions to problems using all of the possibilities of the world. Right. Having the ability to take all the infinite ideas on the planet, just billions of ideas that we could bring to any given task. When I have clarity of mind and vision, right. I stand detached from my fears and anxieties. You ever watch Santa Claus? He's got that big red bag of toys. Of course. I've carried that big red bag around for most of my life. Inside there's not toys. There's anxieties and fears and frustrations and resentments. And as I've looked at that, I've carried those things. And you wonder why I'm so tired in life. As I carry those resentments and anxieties and fears, and I walk around with no life or no energy or no will to do something, it's all because of that bag. And as I open that bag up and I look inside and go, Hmm, I was resentful at my mom for working at Denny's. I wish she was rich. You know what? I could probably let her off the hook for that. She did the best she could. There's a big one down the bottom was my dad dying. He was a gangster and he died. How could he leave his son? I was so mad. Like I didn't realize how mad I was. Right. How could you leave your son, your kids, right? You left me alone. I didn't even realize how mad I was at that. And I opened that up. I'm like, Hmm, maybe I took some therapy, but I heard by the way, it's $10,000 worth of therapy right here. It was, Oh, maybe he did the best he could with what he knew. Maybe that's how he thought to survive. That's all he knew how to survive. Maybe there was other ways, but he didn't know that him in the group that people. didn't know that at the time. He didn't have a friend who took him to a gym room seminar. That's right. He didn't have a guy who did that. And all of a sudden you look at those rocks and I start to take it, get rid of them, and one by one lessen that bag. Now I'm not going to say that bag ever gets empty because I think that we're always carrying some bag of BS as you call it. There's a bag of story that's there and even if we empty it out completely, we're feeling great and free, somewhere one creeps in, another one will creep in. The world collective likes to creep in. But as I let go of those... I have clarity of vision, clarity of thought, right? Definitely. And when you talk about how the news tells us what to think about other people, back to traveling as well, since you travel with your family so much, if you travel, you get to learn about people and their cultures yourself, rather than have the news tell you what to think about my tribe. You'd rather go to South Africa and experience it for yourself. And you find that it's a totally different scenario than what was shown on TV when you were in America. Robert, I've never been anywhere in the world where I've really, truly found evil people. Wow. Say that again. I've never been anywhere in the world where I've truly found evil people. I've never. I've been around this world multiple times, right? And I've been on all the continents and I've never ever met evil people. Now, have I met some people who are angry? Yeah. I've met people who are in fear. Yeah. People who think they need to do something to protect themselves. Yeah. Do I think they're angry? You know, I was in Columbia once and I was with the United States Embassy there. And there was this big warning at the time, this was about 30 years ago. And they had taken all the Americans, we go into the embassy and they said, look, you got to be careful right now. They're hijacking and they're capturing Americans and they're using for ransom. And you got to be really careful. All of a sudden, if you really look at what was going on was the people were poorer than dirt, right? When you look at a culture, a lot of them make less than a few bucks a day. And all of a sudden they see an American come by who blows that every five minutes. On a drink. On a drink or on a night. Their watch is worth more than their family will make this year. And you're thinking, wow, if I get that guy and I could do that, I could feed my family. I start to look at their behavior and it's not really out of their evil, but maybe they're just hungry. If I look my kids in the eye and they're hungry, I'm not sure what I will do next. Right? Cause when I'm in fear or I'm scared for my kids or scared for myself, my behaviors don't look normal to people who aren't scared. Right? Today, I've got lots of money and I look at the world and when I'm scared about losing it, I can look at employees who are like, you're a raving lunatic. The behaviors I can have when I'm in fear, right? Where I shut down my ability to think, when my body gets scared. It happens at every level of human. It doesn't matter if you're a waitress at Denny's, who by the way, are amazing, or you're Elon Musk. Fear exists in all humans at every level. No one gets out of this thing without some reason. Yeah. Right? We're all going to have it. Now the question is, how much does it rule us? Am I able to see that about myself and notice that? Can I notice, you know, there's a group of people called the Conscious Leadership Group by CLG. There's a great book called 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. They talk about this magic line. And when I'm below the line, I'm in this place of fear, anxiety. They call it the drama triangle, right? I'm a victim, a villain or a hero, right? I'm one of those three behaviors when I'm below the line, right? And when I'm a victim to the world, the world happens to me, right? My life isn't good because my mother worked at Denny's. Now I'm a victim to the world. There's no agency there. There's nothing I can do. You are so not in control of anything. Yeah. Right. And then when I'm a villain to the world, right? When I'm out there because I'm scared and I start to act up on those behaviors, I can villainize that. But as opposed to when I go above the line, I can get to creator, right? I can be in this positive mind spaces. I live below the line most of the time, right? I have lots of fear. I'm ruled by a thousand forms of fears and anxieties. Now, when I'm lucky enough to get above the line, And see that there's not tigers and lions coming to eat me every day. And there's no guns and bullets. The biggest problem I have is top eating donuts. You know, I'm worried about P and L sheep. One of the companies I have not made what I wanted to be. And like, oh my God, I can't believe those people didn't do that. Oh my God. And the truth, they're growing and expanding, right? Cause remember we're expanding, organized. That's what a company is. That's all a company is. You get an idea and you expand and you organize it. Well, what's between the two of those? In between the two, expand and organize is confusing as shit. It's frustration, anxiety, not doing things right, messing things up. And how many of us have given up? During that confusing phase. Yeah. Come on and have grace for people that give up. That's it. I'm out. I can't walk into another budget meeting. I can't mess up another deal. Or I didn't make any money on that and realize there's some of the best learning curves. One of the first companies I owned was a painting company. This old Italian guy took me for some good money. And he just saw that I was a young guy and he took advantage of me to paint his house. You know, the house was probably worth about $25,000 to paint. It was this big giant mansion in Florida. And, you know, I was young and I think I charged him like $7,000, maybe he was $8,000, something like that. And I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but the truth was I learned more for working for that old man, the thing else I did, and I had tenacity and I stuck to it and I told him, Hey, look, I'm broken. I'm still doing this. At the end, he had some grace for me. And he's like, he didn't give me much. It wasn't much. But maybe enough just not to be bankrupt. So almost break even because you should have charged the 25. Yeah. Right. And he knew what he was doing, but the truth was through that experience, I learned how to pay attention and maybe read the instructions of the paint. They wanted to use maybe how to write contracts. So through some of the pain that we're going to go through, if we can look at it as it's not happening to me, it's happening for me, right? When I start to look at life, not being a victim to it, right. To be the victims that old man. And I can look at it and go, how was that glorious, right? How was that experience with that guy really a great learning lesson? Well, I learned how to write contracts. I learned how to get insurance. I learned how to hire people and go to work and, you know, have employees. It was just a great learning experience. And that was probably when I was 17 or 18 years old. Yeah. So a lot of us, you know, in the last three years, especially there's so much change, not comfortable change, most of it. So we have this anxiety or worry about the future. We don't know what's going to happen. And I know your podcast is called Future. Future Factory. I love you guys all to come check it out. It's called Future Factory Podcast. Future Factory Podcast. So you want to talk to us about the future, what to expect and how to get ourselves ready. I'm building a school in India with a great Krishna leader. And he and I have become really good friends in this process. My wife and I just celebrated an anniversary and we had a big anniversary party in Greece. And we invited a bunch of friends. from around the world to meet us in Greece. And we had this big party and he and I were sitting in the pool. I find him a great leader. He's a leader of the Christian church. And, and I said to him, his name is Rupa. I said, Rupa, I feel like all the work I've done, I should be better at this fear stuff. I wake up every day looking for the dinosaurs in my room. Right? You know what I mean by dinosaurs? I'm looking for the things that are going wrong. What about this? What about that? What about this? What about that? My brain starts off that way. Before I even get out of bed, it's already working me, wondering what deal is going bad, what's happening wrong. I'm run by a hundred forms of fear. And he said, Anthony, that's why you're here. You would have died a million lifetimes ago. You would not be here. That brain is what keeps you alive. That's what kept you from getting eaten by dinosaurs. Have some grace for it. Find some ways of communicating in a way that you can really help reel it in. And today I have some great practices for that, right? So maybe I start my day off with a meditation practice, right? So first thing out of the door, I call the voice in my head, I've named them. You have a name for yours? Somebody gave me, instead of Sigmund, Sigmund fraud. Fraud, there you go. Because it lies. Mine's Fred, I call Fred. Oh, Fred, okay. Fred in my head, and Fred's kind of a jerk. Fred starts off coming at me, right? Fred starts at me, oh, okay, what about this? That guy over there, and what about this? And they're supposed to do that thing. Can you believe I can do this? Oh my God, and my wife, oh my God, how could she? It sounds like that. So I start off every morning finding something positive to listen to. I go on a YouTube and I find a Eddie Panera or Perino or Tony Robbins or, uh, you know, a great motivational speaker or somebody that can feel my mind with something positive. And that turns Fred off for a second. If some people meditate and they can sit and meditate, that wasn't my thing. I would sit there. They can do it. Some people don't know how to be silent. Like I would sit there and those asteroids would go through my brain. It was never very comfortable. The best I've found for meditation is reading. Right. So at night I find reading to be the best I can do. Right. If I sit down with a book and I can get 10 to 50 pages done, I'm about the best I can get my brain to one thought at a time and I can slow it down. I've tried meditating and it wasn't my thing. And maybe other people do and I honor you for those, but in the morning I would listen to somebody else and listening can be a great form of meditation and hear them and to start my morning off with that rather than Fred. Every morning I was six 30 meeting with a group of people. We talk about getting more spiritual and whatever your spiritual practice is, you know, for your group and however that is. And we have a 6 30 AM meeting and that kind of gets me tuned in a little bit. And by 7. It doesn't mean religion just so we clear. That's right. That's exactly. I mean religion. Mine's non-religious. It has no religion, but we do talk a little bit about spirituality. If you choose that too, that's okay. Yes. They asked us for sure. And then that tunes me in by 7 30 in the morning. I'm fit for human consumption right now. I've. of tuned in and maybe by then I've also worked out when I was listening to tapes, I get a good workout in. So getting the mind, body, soul moving and I can tune in to others. Right now, how can I be of service to them rather than what can I get from them? How can I be of service to people that are in my life? The people who run the companies that I have. I had a business consultant came in a couple of years ago and her name is Lola Wright, one of the most beautiful human beings on the planet. I don't know if you've ever heard of Lola Wright, the Wright Foundation or Bode Institute here in Chicago. just a great leader, great spiritual leader. She's a wonderful, she came in and did some coaching with me and one day she comes in my office, she goes, all right, she's tall and red hair and she's kind of very vibrant. When she talks, she's like, she gets your attention. And she goes, all right, Anthony, today we're gonna lock your door. I'm like, what? She goes, yeah, I go, great, great. I can focus, I can get my work done, I can focus. At the time I was really working on not being the president of CDO group anymore. I changed my title from president to being the founder and my wife became the president of the company. It was time to change and evolve the way I'd let it was a little bit different. I led the company like a Spartan war camp. It was like a militant camp. Go get them in a rod, go get them and hunt them down and eat them and kill them. It was very run that way and it was exhausting. And she walked in a whole other level of leadership. Her leadership is family oriented and cultural building. And she brings in another way of looking at the people that work for us and really it's all about them. And quick question on that. Does that mean your company makes less money now? We made more money than we ever did. Exactly. She turned the company around to make more money than it ever did. At first, that was a little bit hard for me because I got a lot of significance. Remember I'm a little poor kid from Papua Beach, Florida. And as I transitioned from the guy who built CDO group, when I introduced myself, right, I'm the president of CDO group to I'm now the founder and my wife's the president. I had a little nick on my- Identity crisis. Yeah, for sure. There was a little bit of that and Lola was like, all right, so like today we're going to lock you in the office. Okay, great. What does that mean? She goes, well, you have this S on your chest and you'd love to run out in the office and show everybody your S on your chest and you get some significance from that. Oh yeah, I get a lot of significance. I can see that helping people and I think I'm helping. She goes, nope, you're getting in the way. You hired great people. Let them lead the company. She goes, we're going to give you six hours a week. You have six one hour meetings with six people a week and that's all you get to talk to anybody in the company. Other than saying hello and good morning or having a coffee with somebody. But when it comes to work, you get six hours a week. I'm like, wow. So I started thinking, all right, those first means we're all going to be about lists, but I'm going to meet with Kevin and when I meet with Kevin, he's going to do, all right. Where's our budget? How's our forecast? What's the, what are you putting? And what I found out was none of that happened. I said, that was Kevin. I want to know about him. I started to learn about him. And it, at first did this, I thought it was all about making sure they did the lists when I realized they understood their list way better than I ever did. They knew what they were doing way better. Now, if I just check in with them. and figure out where they're doing and how I can support them as human beings and their leadership and their growth and things we can work on together. And if I could impart some of the wisdom that I've gained by some of the trainings I've done, those meetings happen way different than I ever imagined. I never would have imagined leading people from a place where I don't make lists and tell them these are tasks to do and trusting that they understand the tasks. We have some leadership meetings where we go together and we create kind of the hierarchy of what we're looking to achieve and our marching orders are and everybody kind of points their compass in that direction and trust the people that you've hired can execute on what they need to do. And that took the most amount of change from me ever. She goes, well, look, you're, you're going to have a tough time with this. I just promise you, cause look, you've gotten all your significance from this. Never graduated college. Everything you are is because of this company. All the money you were made was because of this company. You're going to have to find something different. She goes, what do you want to do? I want you got a couple of days here. I need you to come back with some other ideas because you're going to need to find some other significance and doing something. And that's where the future factory podcast came from. And all of that came from sitting down with Lola and going, I love interviewing people. I love being a thought leader. I love meeting thought leaders. I love meeting great trainers and writers. And I love spiritual leaders and gurus. I love hearing the recipes. And that's where the Future Factory came from. You have just literally summed up every single thing we've ever talked about when it comes to leadership development and leadership executive coaching, because that's all that is. It's not me. It's amazing leaders like Lola Wright, who took me through some amazing stuff. Or Eric Therese, who taught me more about being a man, how I can be a better man. Right. And the work we do today with other men, right. And how to give that back and train others. You know, it's the people that have been in my life that have guided me through the landmark forum or men's living or a mankind project. There's all kinds of great organizations that are all helping us get through this. How many of us are all feel like we're drinking off a fire hose? If you really slow down. Especially in the last three years. majority of the population of course. Roberta, let's think about this. What was your great-great-grandfather, what did he do? But I know my grandpa used to work for a farm back home. He worked at a farm, right? Yeah, he worked at a farm, yes. So if I went to your great-grandfather today, just imagine we're there, we teleport ourselves back. We're 80 years, 80 years back, we're back there with your great-grandfather and we're sitting on the farm with him and we walk into his wherever his office is or wherever he's working on or And we say, Hey, what do you remember his name? If we said it's a lullaby, I'm going to give you this phone. Hey, by the way, watch this. I can call your family around the world. To him, that would have been what the gods could do. That would be some sort of voodoo, some sort of, to him, 80 years ago, that would have been magic. Here, hit a couple of buttons and a car would show up. That would have been crazy. First of all, they didn't have cars. I think when he was growing up, they didn't even have the dial phone on the wall. That's right. To turn on a YouTube video and watch people farm on the other side of the world or how to grow tomatoes and stuff. All of that would have been crazy. Right? I mean, some of them never even saw writing before. To have that happen to them would have been crazy to see. And today in this now time, we're changing so fast. Right? We have inventions like the phone that come out every single day. I mean, the iBot robot, the Tesla car. thousand apps a day that come out. I mean, if you go to Apple, you can get an app to find a boyfriend, to find groceries, to get your hair done. Where's the closest place to buy dirt? Here's the latest one that's trending right now. Chet's GPT, an AI tool that literally writes everything for you. There you go. I saw AI artist. You say cowboys, boots, trucks, and American flag, and all of a sudden they can make some painting for you. You're like, what? What's coming at us We talk about a future factory all the time. What's coming at us with artificial intelligence and machine learning. It's amazing. The world will be more abundant than ever. And when I get scared, I'm like, well, what happens to my job? I mean, that's the first thing everybody's thinking. Yes. Cause I'm not trained in chat GPT. So what am I going to do? That's right. I mean, if it does my job, you know, but one of the most amazing parts about it, uh, we were doing a lot of stuff on construction job sites, right? So where construction workers now can wear a helmet. and they can drop down their glasses and they can see the prints in 3D on site. So they can see where the wall is and they can pull back that layer and they can see where the stud is and they can see right on the job site, right where they need to dub down. You know, now with the invention of LIDAR, right, they can take the digital world and the physical world and they can combine the two of them. So you can tell where you are on a job site digitally, right? So you can see the plans in live action. And what's coming with this for Metaverse, I was at McDonald's convention last year and you and I will be able to order McDonald's. from our space together and you'll have it delivered to your house and I'll have it delivered to my house, wherever I'm at, those spaces will be combined. We'll be able to see each other and look each other in the eyes like we're standing right next to each other. And what's coming at us is going to be even more overwhelming. And what there is to know is just have grace for each other, right? We're all about to go through the most abundant part of the world. By the way, whenever things change, I can get scary about it. I'm like, oh my God, that's bad. The AI is going to take over. It's the uncertainty. It's gets all of us. Yeah. You know what? That one time there was someone who answered the phone like this, 555 Chicago, and those people had jobs, right? And they don't have those anymore. Right. And then phones that did this, my extra neighbor, Mr. funky was a worker for the phone company. Those guys have jobs. And today we answer our phones like this. They're in our pocket. Yeah. And what's coming next will be embedded in us and what's next will be faster and more connected and. We could also say as we learn these things, it's overwhelming. And if we could just remember to have a, just a little bit of grace for where we are in the now time, that the world is changing fast. It's a little overwhelming, but there is some abundance and amazement. I mean, more people today die from sugar than bullets. In your country, not too long ago, apartheid was crazy a mess, right? And how many people died from bullets every year around the world where, you know, as we went through all of the changes we go through and those are all changes that are frustrating for each other. As we learned about, you know, behaviors that some people liked and some people didn't, you know, religious wars, the family style TV show that we do to get my family that does. We go, we study religions and you can really see the joy of every religion you're with, but they do feel a little bit like two year olds. All of them have good in them. All of them have to me when I watch them, they all have something great, but they also have a sense that they're a little bit like two year olds describing algebra, right? When I try to describe God, There's a little bit of like, I'm a two-year-old trying to describe this ultimate being that creates all that is. And I have grace for each and every one of them and their cultures and where they're built and you can see that, you know, I just got done reading the Quran and you can really see where the culture is and where the Quran was written. Religion might have been the first form of artificial intelligence. Right. If you think about it. Some of us accuse it of brainwashing. Is that the artificial intelligence part? Just imagine you're a little farmer and you're in, let's pick Italy. You're a Sicilian farmer and you got the olive trees and the plants and you decide you're going to go to Rome for a vacation, which takes you three weeks to get there from Sicily. You know, you roll your ass over to the mainland and then you go up to Rome and all of a sudden you get to Rome and they have these churches. And in those churches, they've got the word of God. Imagine being a Sicilian farmer. Your family never even had a written text, right? In your home, you maybe never even had that. Now you walk into a place where they've got... So it's a wow moment for you. Yeah, right. Because I mean, look, even them as humans at the time, they're not sure what to do. We're not the first people to be confused. They were just as confused back then. Right. All of a sudden, God's telling you what to do. And I go, that sounds great. I want to know what to do. Oh, here's the commandments. Don't do this and don't do that. Great. That sounds wonderful. I'm dying to find out what I'm supposed to do because I'm confused. And today we look at that and we go, all right, that worked. And there's a lot of stuff we have around religion and the actual part of it, you know, just separate it from the spirituality part of it and the business end of it. And there's a little bit of mistrust because what's happened in churches lately. Have a second and realize that those help guide like, hey, don't kill your neighbor. That's necessary. I feel like we are always in eras where we are looking for answers. Where can we look for answers now? Is everything on the interwebs, future preparation? Hasn't it always been in the same spot? It's always been inside. The answers have nothing to do with outside. All these fancy, shiny lights coming at me and I had bells and whistles and computers and internet and Teslas and road signs and Costco. I came to Costco and I could walk out with three dozen rolls of toilet paper. When I get overwhelmed by all these outside things that take me away from hearing there's always been a part of me as a kid that knew what right and wrong was. When I get out of the fear and I stay away from my scary thoughts in my brain about sparsity and there's not enough and I'm scared, usually I can go to a place that involves me having great thought that is really intuitive. And ultimately when I have physical sobriety, like I don't get drunk and check out today, hey, just have smoke or joint more people are checking out. Cause they just can't take it. If, and by the way, governments have always wanted that, right? Hey, shut up, go to work, pay your taxes, smoke some dope and watch TV. They did it with bread and Coliseum and wine. It's been thousands of years, which in the matrix, they talk about it. Right. Maybe being comfortably numb is what some people want. But for the others that want to really be alive. and feel and be inspired and find those real intuitions that have us live vibrantly on this planet, right? When I let go of those and I can really be present, right? And I can be here with you in the moment and separate out all those other things that are chasing me. I could be with you and you could be with me. There's something about that we all want, that relatedness to others, a safe place that knows that I'm doing my best. Like I said, every place in the world I've ever gone, when I meet another man or woman, I know something. They're just trying to grow their family. Like I'm trying to grow my family. It may not seem that way when you read in the news, cause they want to show me all the bad stuff. Here's a shooting today. That's another thing about different cultures. Don't you realize that if we're looking for the same thing and we want the same things in life, no matter what language country we come from, we all want the same. Anthony, I've taken so much of your time. Thank you so much for being here today. Roberta, I love your show. I love what you're up to. You are changing this planet. The work that you do is inspiring. You shine great lights on those corners of the world that need to be shined. You are just magical. You're easy to talk to. And I'm grateful that you've chosen me to be on your show. And I'm grateful for that. So thank you for letting me be here. That is so beautiful, Anthony. I really appreciate those kind words. Thank you so much. I've had such a blast and you can see that we could have continued to talk a lot more another hour. But before you go, please tell us first of all, details of your podcast, your website. everything. Yep. If you want to find me, I'm Anthony Amanategui. I am available on all the social media platforms. You can come to the futurefactorypodcast.com is our website. Future Factory Podcast, all one word is our website or CDO Group is the construction site I work for. And you can email me at Anthony at CDOgroup.com. And Roberta, I am so grateful to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you so much, Anthony. And please know that you're always welcome to come back because there's so much more that we can talk about. And I really enjoy talking to you today. I loved our conversation. Thank you very much. Thanks. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review. That was Anthony Amunategui, CEO and founder of CDO Group, entrepreneur and a podcast host. We will be with you next time.