From EdTech to Food Tech: Jon McCarty's Entrepreneurial Journey: Rondi Lambeth interviews Jon McCarty, founder of the innovative food-tech startup Death Row Meals and the successful EdTech company Odyssey Test Prep. Learn how Jon leverages AI, manages a nationwide network of contractors, and utilizes cutting-edge tax strategies to build and scale his businesses. Discover the secrets to his success and get inspired to create your own entrepreneurial journey.
Connect with Jon:
Facebook: facebook.com/odysseytestprep
Instagram: instagram.com/odysseytestprep
LinkedIn : linkedin.com/in/mccarty-jonathan
odysseytestprep: odysseytestprep.com
Tiktok: tiktok.com/@jonmccarty_odyssey
YT: youtube.com/@Jon_McCarty
website: https://deathrowmeal.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
76% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and according to
Forbes, 93% of business owners pay more than legally required
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(00:21):
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(00:42):
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abundance, then you're in the right place.
Welcome to the School of Wealth.Hey John, welcome to the show.
(01:04):
Hey, Ronnie, how are you? Good.
In studio today, I'm John McCarty with Death Row Meals.
Not to be confused with Death Row Records.
Correct. Yes, absolutely.
So yeah, we've got an app that we're launching here shortly
that connects people with reallygreat meals, meals that are
worthy of being your last on earth.
And we're also trying to reduce food waste while we do it.
(01:26):
Cool. How was your drive all the way
out here to the farm? It was shorter than I thought it
was going to be. Yeah.
Is it? Yeah.
But once I got here, it's it's acool area.
I haven't been out here before. Yeah, I, I had a guest the other
day and they were a little late.They're like, I didn't know you
lived so far out into the boonies.
Yeah. Well, when I plugged it into
Google Maps, yeah, it it just said like the Township or
(01:46):
something like that. And I was like, oh, OK, excuse.
Me, I'm just getting over a horrible cold, so I apologize
for the coughing. John, I did not want to cancel
on you because I think I had to cancel on you before or
reschedule or. Yeah, no worries.
So. I was like, I woke up this
morning and was like, I think you need to call John and
postpone. I'm like, I'm going to power
(02:06):
through. So I've been sucking down cough
syrup all day hoping to get through this whole thing.
All right. Well, I appreciate.
It so hopefully I don't cough too much.
Yeah, no worries. So, so this is a new company for
you Death row meals, right? So we're still in the start up
phase. We are pre launch right now but
we should be launching in the next couple of weeks where
(02:26):
people can go and submit their death row meal and start to
browse other people's. This is not your first company
though. Correct.
Yeah. So over a decade ago I started
an edtech company and grew that over the course of thirteen
years. I still own 100% of that company
and it still does very well. But shifting focus from that,
the team is really handling a lot of the heavy lifting on that
(02:49):
company now and looking to focuson a new venture.
So you said something that really scares me.
When people say that you own 100%, that's super scary for me.
Yeah. I, I live by the life of own
nothing, control everything, OK.When you own something, people
can take it away from you. Sure.
And the, the world that we live in, the litigious world that we
(03:10):
live in, there are bad people out there.
Just want to take your stuff. You know, the Bernie Sanders of
the world that they hate the rich.
They're not there to help the poor.
They just hate the rich. So, but with the Ed tech, what
is what's your Ed tech? Yeah.
So we help people to prepare forthe Law School Admission test,
the GRE, standardized tests for Graduate School.
(03:30):
So when people want to go to lawschool, they want to go on and
get an advanced degree. That's the kind of the
gatekeeper is that test. And we prep them up for that.
Typically we focus on one-on-onein person prep.
And you know, post COVID, we're about the only people left who
want to do that. So we've got a pretty good
foothold in in that particular niche.
(03:51):
Is that nationwide then? It is, yeah.
Yeah. And it's it's still one-on-one
on one. Yep.
We still primarily focus on one-on-one.
We do have a few classes that we're starting to launch and
that are gaining some traction, but most of our effort and most
of our customers come to us for that one-on-one in person.
How many people have gone through your your program in the
(04:13):
last 10 years? Thousands.
How do you manage thousands of students, clients, customers
with one-on-one, I mean. We hire really great tutors, OK,
Yeah. So we hire tutors in each of the
locations in which we serve, andwe just hire phenomenal people.
You know, so you hire a bunch oftutors.
(04:35):
Like here in Boise, you would hire a tutor and then if I
wanted to apply for law school, I would go and meet with that
person one-on-one. And then you keep them fairly
busy and booked up. Yep, yeah.
And so we do all the training, we provide all the resources.
We've got books and things like that that all the students will
get. We've got our perfect fit
guarantee. We make sure we get you to the
right tutor. If that's not the right fit,
(04:56):
we'll get you to somebody who is.
So we do that matching process and get everybody together.
We train the tutors and then we really rely on them to just go
out and crush it. And they do.
I was just thinking of a, there's a guy I follow on
Instagram. It's probably inappropriate for
this conversation, but I've already brought it up.
So, and he, he is a jet broker. So he arranges private travel.
(05:22):
And there was this very wealthy.Well, she's not wealthy.
Her dad's a billionaire, but she, it was 1 where she had
hired a tutor from Spain and she's in England and she was
ordering a jet. And he goes, well, is it
overnight? And she goes, well, he's really
cute. So it might be overnight.
So that's not the kind of tutories that you have, right?
Not typically. Sorry for that, the coughing.
(05:46):
No worries. So you've been doing that now 10
years? Yep.
Do you have, are these tutors, are they 1099 contractors?
Are they? How does that?
Work Yep, 1099 contractors and they set their own schedules
they teach the way they want to teach we and and that's part of
our matching process too we wantto have different tutors with
different styles because we get a lot of different students with
(06:06):
different styles and we want to individualize it so.
Different learning styles. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And that's the hardest thing is
just getting that match correct.Once you have it, it's like
magic. So that's what we've spent 10
years perfecting. What's your with that?
What's your pass rate pre pre your coaching tutoring versus
after year? Yeah.
(06:27):
So the LSAT and similar tests are not pass fail.
Even students who are coming to us, they're like, I want to pass
the LSAT and we're like, well, that's it's not really something
you can do. But our students usually go up
about 20 points on the LSAT. So if you start at A-150, you're
kind of below the median. If you add 20 points to that,
you're in the top 3%. I got you my middle child, my
(06:47):
daughter who's a nurse, it was like an 85% failure rate on the,
I think it's called the NCOLEX, something like that.
And one of my one of my friends who's also a nurse went and
started a similar like school, but it's all online and he
teaches nurse or he teaches students how to pass.
Now it's like 99% pass rate. That's phenomenal, yeah.
(07:09):
So she went through that and shewas telling me that that once
you hit a certain percentage, it's kind of like the DMV test.
You know, if there's 1000 questions, as soon as you hit
your 70%, the test just shuts off and you don't have to go
through the whole thing. Yeah.
So yeah, with the LSAT they makeyou sit through the whole thing.
Yeah. So there's no pass fail.
It's it's a a score then. Right.
(07:30):
How good of a school will you will you be able to get into
what kinds of scholarships will those schools offer you?
The higher the score, the betterthe result.
I got you. Yeah.
Very cool. Yeah, there's I.
Think a lot of people asked I I went to college to get my
certificate in Emergency Management.
I never got any degree or anything, OK, And I've never
(07:53):
been a big proponent of going toschool unless it's like for a
purpose. Sure, like law.
Yeah, doctor and medical for. Sure.
And I had one of my nephews the other day asked me, he's like,
how do I, I want to be a millionaire?
Like what do I got to do? I'm like, you can do one of a
couple things. Become a plumber, a welder,
(08:14):
electrician, an HVAC person, learn how to do drywall and
that's that's the fact in my opinion, that's like the fastest
way to become a millionaire right now 'cause you skip the
four to eight years of school my.
And all the expense? My neighbor behind me has, he's
(08:34):
a welder. And then to the left of him, you
can't quite see it. On the other side of that, my
big pond back there, he's a plumber with Beacon Plumbing,
which stop freaking call Beacon.That's a great line and.
And then the one to the left of him is a roofer and then left of
him is a electrician. So if if you want to be a
(08:57):
millionaire, that's I think one of the fastest way to get there
is and. It's AI, the trade.
And it's AI proof. For now, for now, it's going to
be a while till I think we get like autonomous robots and come,
come out and fix your roof or doyour plumbing.
I did see, AI did see a robot roofing a building the other
day. Wow.
On social media. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
(09:18):
That's why it was literally going.
They put this robot up there. Like a humanoid robot or.
No, it was. It wasn't like a humanoid robot.
It was like a big machine, like what you'd see building cars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was stripping the roofing
tiles off and then putting the new ones down.
As it. Was stripping as it was
stripping. It was so.
Fast. That's cool, yeah.
(09:39):
But I think that's going to be along ways away.
Yeah. And I think it is AI proof.
I don't know about robot proof, but for a while, for a while.
And I don't see how the robots are going to go in and do
plumbing and electrical for a while.
It's hard. Yeah.
We had a leak today and we had the plumber out and you know,
it's drip, drip, drip down out of the light fixture in the
basement and we're just like OK,guy comes out, he does his
(10:00):
thing. You.
Know how long was he there? He was there three hours.
Yeah, how much you pay? Him, I didn't get the bill.
My wife looked at it, but you know, it's definitely a few 100
bucks if not getting him to 1000plus, you know, but the value's
there, you know, for us to not have a leak in the house is very
valuable. Yeah, very valuable.
And then, you know, you got to fix it.
(10:21):
You can't do the leak and then the mold and all that other
stuff. And he came out quick, too.
Oh good. Yeah.
What was the, what was the reason that you started this
business? Is this your first business that
you had? The.
Educational one. Yeah, yeah, it is.
So I was right out of college when I started it and I had
taken the LSAT and that's how itkind of all got started.
(10:43):
I did pretty well on the LSAT. I was a couple points away from
perfect and started teaching just like kind of putting up
Craigslist ads. This is back in, in 2010, right?
And you know, I was tutoring andit kind of got built up my book
of business and I wanted to launch classes, but my wife
(11:03):
decided to go to medical school in Ireland.
At the time we were living in Atlanta and that's where I was
trying to build the business outof.
So I moved to Ireland and started my company in 2013
officially and then built a remote team from there.
So like we were one of the firstcompanies to be fully remote.
Everything we as far as like ouradmin team was fully remote and
then we would have contractors in each individual city to, you
(11:26):
know, meet with the students anddo in person tutoring.
So you saw a need, Is that something that you went to
college Forest like to learn business or would you go to
college? Yeah, I did business management
as my undergrad with a certificate and
entrepreneurship, so running my own business was always the path
for me. I don't know, it's just always
(11:48):
has been what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to run my
own law firm, but instead, you know, helping people to get into
law school and now helping people find really great food
and, you know. Yeah.
I want to talk about that a little bit more.
I just, I, I'd like to kind of get the background of how you
got into entrepreneurship. Yeah.
I don't think everybody should be an entrepreneur.
(12:09):
I don't think so either. It's.
It's it's a brutal there's. Some tough moments, yeah.
There's some tough months even where you're not sure there's.
Some tough years. There's some tough years.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And I took a little bit and not a pit stop, but maybe a detour
and maybe 5-6, seven years in and started investing in real
(12:31):
estate. And so that's also been a
passion of mine is investing in real estate and building that
portfolio, as you know, to make sure that like financially we
have another source of income incase one of the business
ventures falls through. What was your what's your
favorite thing to invest in realestate?
Do you have like a niche that you pick or is it just anything
(12:52):
that makes money? I like so the niche that we're
in right now and it's probably because we're maybe an
experienced, we only have, you know, like 7 or 8 doors.
But I like really, I like big houses that we then either
convert to smaller, smaller units and run and do Airbnb.
(13:14):
So we have a, a big house near the Whitewater park and it's got
an Adu and then a unit above theAdu.
And so we've kind of split that up and we've got 4 units running
out of there on Airbnb. Been super profitable been and
it's great. It's appreciating like crazy.
And you manage that yourself. So my wife managed it for a
(13:35):
while, but we've transitioned into having our outsourced team
out of the Philippines manage it.
So they do a great job. I've been working with the same
team for years and years and years out of Philippines.
They help me run my primary business as well and they're
helping me launch this new business.
But there's. People, there's a, I'm not going
to call it a loophole because I don't like that term loopholes.
(13:56):
There is a part of our Internal Revenue Code that says that if
you manage your own short term rental and you do 7 days or
less, that you can qualify as a real estate professional without
doing 750 hours a year. You only have to do 100.
So the advantage of you managingit yourself and if you're using
(14:19):
Filipinos, that still qualifies as you managing yourself.
Right, she manages. Yes, so she could qualify and
your CPA probably already does this, but she can qualify as the
real estate professional, which then allows you to depreciate
that short term rental against your W2 income.
And then because if you're, I'm assuming that one of your other
(14:41):
companies either an S selection,it's not just the LSE.
Yeah. So you probably have a salary,
W2 salary. Yeah.
So the only way to offset your payroll taxes on your W2 is the
short term rental business. If your wife qualifies as a real
estate professional, now you canoffset all of that.
Right. And she does, Yeah.
So we came across this when we first purchased that property,
(15:03):
there was a lot of improvements that needed to be done.
So I popped on a bunch of real estate podcast and I would
listen to them while I'm over there working for, you know,
hundreds of hours and learned a lot of things.
So we do the cost aggregation analysis, we accelerate the
depreciation. She qualifies as real estate
professional from from running them and she keeps the log and
has 750 hours every year, so we're meticulous about that.
(15:26):
And that's, that's all about document.
I I call it my triple DS, you know, document.
So you can defend it and then you can deduct it.
Yeah. Did she?
Did she finish medical school? She did, yeah.
And she was practicing Dr. in the hospitals in Ireland.
They do kind of a general rotation.
First we had our first daughter and we kind of re evaluated life
(15:49):
at that point. She wanted to spend more time
with the kids and she decided towalk away from medicine and
raise the kids. And now the kids are getting
older. My youngest is entering
kindergarten, so we've got kind of like the whole day is now
open. So she's starting to shift her
focus to writing. So she's got 2 fantasy books
that are coming out here shortlyand she's in the final stages of
(16:13):
putting out the finishing touches.
You know, the cover, the gettingthe feedback from the beta
readers and things like that. So.
Is she in? What's your wife's name?
Neve. Is I don't think she's in my
girlfriend's SOP with Amanda andGina.
No, but I know they spent some time together at that recent SOP
(16:33):
event. So yeah, 'cause she was telling
me about somebody had the Airbnbdown there with the AD unit.
We we had brunch down there lastweekend by the surf park.
Yeah, it's great down there. It really is.
It's cool. I was telling my daughter that
my daughter's boyfriend's son lives with them, and once I
think he's 17, so once he moves out on his own, telling her
(16:56):
because she loves the Greenbelt,I was like, there's a really
nice luxury apartment complex now right on the river, yes.
Is it that West of you, that newone, that huge one that kind of
they just put in and. That's like the terrace goes
back and it's got all the restaurants.
And bars. And that looks sweet.
Yeah, that would be really cool to live right there.
Yeah, right on the green for sure.
(17:16):
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and get registered today. So how many kids you have?
(18:22):
Two. Two.
Five and 75. And seven, boy and girl, both
girls, both girls. Yeah, you're going to have more.
No, we're done. Yeah, so we got 2 girls.
We decided to not chance it any further and so our youngest is
five, turning 6 and yes, starting kindergarten.
So we're excited for that. Very cool.
(18:43):
So you have the the 10 year old business and then you're
starting the new one, which is death row meals.
Yep. And the way you explained it to
me when we had the coffee the other day was if you were going,
if you're on death row, you get to pick your own meal, right?
And you you have this app that it will use AI with your
(19:07):
preferences and then it will create your death row meal sort.
Of yeah, so it's yeah, it's, it's more of a matching process
because actually having this conversation with you, it's the
first time that I've put this together that like maybe one of
my core skills is like matching people together and preferences
together. That's what we built the
education business on and that'swhat this app is a lot about.
(19:30):
South. People will submit into the app
what their death row meal would be, which we have defined as,
you know, a meal from a restaurant that's local to you.
So if I was going to die tomorrow, I would get the fiery
seafood from Nam tonight. That's what I would eat.
So I said, I put that into the app and everybody puts their
(19:50):
meals in. And then So what the AI does is
it comes in when I now when I'm hungry and I want to go out to
eat, but maybe I don't want to have my death row meal.
I want to get something a littlebit different.
It will recommend to me your death row meal because it knows
that you and I have similar tastes to each other given my
taste profile and your taste profile.
And then so you can, it'll matchyou up with various different
people's death row meals to for you to then discover great meals
(20:14):
that you may not have otherwise.You know the the this AI thing
in ChatGPT and all of it in Gronk and all of it it's it is
fascinating and scary at the same time.
Sure, I was. So I've been in five states over
the last week and it's the little cough and cold that I got
from traveling so much. But an event I spoke at a credit
(20:36):
repair event in Houston last week and one of the girls said,
hey, what's your ChatGPT avatar look like?
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
She goes ask log into your ChatGPT and ask what you look
like and have it describe you. And it sent me back a
description on me that other than having a shaved head, the
(20:58):
rest of it was like spot on including the beard.
Like how do you know I have a beard?
And how does it know that I, I, I wear suits and ties and that
like it literally it was about on the phone, it was probably
like 5 screens of describing me and what kind of personality I
(21:20):
had and how I interact with people, how I carry myself, how
I speak. It was fascinating.
And I don't spend that much timeon it.
Yeah, it's it is going to be really the next 10 years is
going to be 1 hell of a ride. It is going to be 1 hell of a
ride and I want to be on, you know, on the surfboard riding
(21:41):
the wave and not someone who gets crashed over by it.
I use it almost daily now and mydaughter uses it.
My daughter runs. She's producer of the podcast.
She also does all of the social media and I know she uses it
constantly. Yep, for all the social media.
It's great for content, yeah. It is and and I use it mainly
for my tax, the tax business, just checking on stuff, you
(22:04):
know, Internal Revenue Code and stuff because it's 40,000 pages.
Yeah, it's very difficult to read all of that.
But ChatGPT you can you can typesomething in and almost
instantly you get back a a response.
How much do you trust it that the response is accurate?
So here's what I learned about the ChatGPT is it wants to make
you happy. Yeah, so you got to be really
(22:24):
careful with that. And so I've started using Gronk
to where it's just factual. OK, so I will double check it.
I will too. Yeah.
And So what I'll do is I'll put in my question and it'll give me
a part of the the Internal Revenue Code.
Then you know where to go. And then I go and look at it and
then I read it because I've found a couple mistakes.
(22:47):
But what's interesting on the tax side is Forbes did a study a
while back. It said 93% of business owners
pay more than legally required to pay in taxes.
I'm sure that. They do almost $12,000 more and
then they took 1000 tax returns that the eight largest CPA firms
had filed, ran it through an AI and 100% of them had 10,000 plus
(23:13):
that they overpaid using their CPA.
So it's just, it's fascinating how you can use that in pretty
much any of your businesses. And that seems like a great use
case for it too, right? You're digging through volumes
of text, through the IRS code and figuring out how does that
apply to these very specific like numbers and tables that we
(23:35):
have here? Well, 99% of the tax code, the
40,000 pages, 99% is how to legally not pay taxes.
We're the only country in the world that's a voluntary tax
system, and people will sometimes confuse that with you
don't have to pay income taxes. Yeah.
That, that's not what it says is, but it's voluntary, how much
(23:58):
you pay, that our code allows you to go out and do things to
where you don't have to pay. Yeah, I filed my taxes.
I signed it on Sunday and I paid.
I paid a whopping $356 last year.
In taxes. So I think this year I'll end up
paying about 500 bucks because I'm going to have a little bit
better year than I did last year.
(24:20):
And primarily I was showing you the field where I keep my cows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Primarily the 356 bucks was the
the tax on the like the aggregate on the cows?
Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't, it technically
wasn't income tax. It was in order to get the AG
reduction on my property taxes, I got to show some profit.
(24:40):
I can't just deduct everything otherwise I can't get the the
$9000 discount on my property tax so I'd rather pay 356 bucks
to save 9 grand. Yeah.
So yeah, for sure. So back to death row meals.
That's still in beta. It is, yeah.
Do you have any restaurants yet that have picked up on this?
So we don't. Right now we're working on
(25:02):
getting the the MVP, the minimumviable product, the beta version
of the app out and into the hands of users.
And then as we start to gather those, we're going to approach
restaurants. And because one thing we'll need
is to get some images of the meals, We won't have to be very
image forward and, and then talkto them about what their pain
(25:24):
points are as far as food waste,food management and seeing how
we can change consumer behavior to alleviate some of that food
waste. Because I mean, it, it causes,
you know, it's just waste in general.
Nobody wants that, but causes a ton of greenhouse gases.
The economic impact of wasting food for restaurants is huge.
(25:45):
So we've got like all the incentives aligned.
We just need to find solutions. Be interesting to see how things
start to change. Last week when I was travelling
I went to the largest regenerative beef cattle ranch.
Beef largest regenerative cattleranch in in the world, and it's
in Georgia, a town called Bluffton, GA.
(26:09):
Is that like North Georgia? South Georgia.
Yeah, 2/2 and 1/2 hour drive from Panama City, FL.
It's the poorest county in the United States.
Really. Yeah, and I met Will Harris.
He's the owner. It's been in his family since
1866. And it was really cool.
(26:30):
I actually, we spent the night in one of his cabins and the
next morning I got up and I, I said to Amanda, I said, let's go
have breakfast at the, the general store, which is a store.
And then they have a. Yeah.
A restaurant with a food truck outside that makes all the food,
Yeah. Yeah.
Because this thing's been, this building's been there since
1866, so it doesn't have a kitchen in it.
(26:52):
Right. Yeah.
So when I walked in, there was aolder gentleman standing there
and I had my service animal Sawyer with me and he just said
something like, that's a really well behaved dog because
Sawyer's rarely ever on a leash.And he started, we started
talking about a dog and the guy actually owned the whole ranch
(27:12):
that we were staying on the 3800acres.
So he's like, what are you here for?
And I said, oh, we're here to see the ranching.
And we start talking and he's like, well, how about I show
you? So then he took the next 4 1/2
hours just driving us around in his Jeep, showing how he raises
the capital. So he's got 10 different types
(27:33):
of animals, sheep and goats and pigs and cows and chickens and
rabbits. Horses, I don't know what the
other ones are, but what they dois they, instead of just keeping
all of the cows in a feed lot, feeding them grain, the cows
will be in one area for a month.So they're there for a day and
(27:53):
they eat it and then they leave.And then they bring the sheep in
and then they bring the pigs in.And what that does is with all
the different types of manure, he's taking it from an
industrial farm to a very to what they call a regenerative
farm. And he was showing us samples of
his side of the fence versus theindustrial side of the fence
(28:16):
where the other ranchers are. And his dirt has 10 1/2 times
more carbon in it. So it was 5.5 whatever parts per
million carbon where the neighbors like half.
Which means things don't grow right and it doesn't absorb the
water. And he was showing videos like
(28:36):
when it rains, the difference inthe pollution.
I saw some runoff videos that were wild.
Yeah, when and he's got like that YouTube where the runoff
and you can see the different colors.
So he was on Joe Rogan's podcasttwice now and that's kind of how
we found out about him. We have a blockchain.
Sure. So we were going there to meet
with his daughter, not with him.And I just happened to run into
(28:56):
him. But they have no waste.
So they have, they slaughter 2525 cows a day.
They take the skin, they make leather out of it, they take all
the bones that grind them up andthey put them in compost piles.
And then over A7 year period, they mix the peanut shells from
(29:18):
the peanut farms. And then when they trim the
trees, they run that through wood chipper.
They mix the mulch in it and then they make this compost and
then that's what they spread on the ground.
They'd use no fertilizers, no hormones, no antibiotics in
their cows, their pigs or their sheep or their chickens.
(29:39):
So it was just really cool seeing.
And So what made me think of that is when you were saying how
much waste these restaurants do that it's a real a shame.
I've been to many of them because I showed you my chickens
and I've gone to these restaurants and asked if I could
have like their food waste. And they'll say stuff like, no,
it's against county code or citycode, and it's a shame they're
(30:02):
just throwing that in the landfill.
And they're paying to throw thatin the landfill, too.
Where they could literally have like a side bucket if you will,
or dumpster for farmers, people like me that could go in and
feed that waste to the chickens which then poop all over the
ground. And what Will was telling me was
when he was an industrial farmer, rancher, every day he
(30:25):
looked for something he could kill on his land, like weeds.
And he said now he doesn't put anything down on it because what
happens when you have cows and pigs and chickens and goats and
sheep, The cows will just eat it.
And if the cow doesn't eat, the sheep eat it, and the sheep
don't want to eat. That pigs eat it and.
(30:46):
He's like, I don't have to, I don't have the control for any
of this waste. So it was really fascinating
just seeing how I think hopefully we can start doing
more regenerative farming because it's it is really
detrimental to the environment. And you can I watch this Netflix
documentary on climate change and pollution.
(31:08):
And you can see it happening right around April when the
farmers go in and start telling the ground and all the dust goes
up and you see like this cloud cover the United States of just
pollution. It's not pollution, but it's,
it's fine particles, fine particles.
My girlfriend could tell you theexact name of it, but it's it's
dust basically. And then we breathe that in and
(31:28):
then that's our topsoil and. Yeah.
I mean, there's the topsoil crisis going on where we're just
depleting it, depleting it, depleting it, Yeah, basically as
fast as we possibly can. What Will said that is in 60
years, if we do not stop in 60 years, we won't have enough
topsoil in the United States to grow anything.
So they have to reverse it. And it's fascinating with what
(31:52):
with AI, what they're able to figure out now.
They just released a study that showed 1 LB of vegan burger, the
Impossible Burger produces 10 times the amount of pollution is
1 LB of beef. So it's the opposite of what
(32:13):
Bill Gates is saying about the cow's methane gas.
Plus, I just the the highly processed nature of those
artificial meats seems to me to be pretty gross territory.
It seems to. See how that stuff is made?
Like I saw a video the other daywith chicken Nuggets, how they
were just like grinding it all up and it's just gross.
(32:34):
But. Any sort of chicken nugget,
whether it's real meat or fake meat, I don't think you'd want
to watch the process. No, no, yeah, it's pretty gross.
But, you know, it's fascinating though.
I, I'm, I'm excited about the future in the next, next 10
years to see what AI will do. So what your app is, it's going
to kind of you'll go find restaurants and then my
daughter's a big foodie. Yeah.
(32:56):
For me, I look for a couple things.
Does it have steak? Fish.
Sure. Or steak.
Yeah. Or eggs, you know, my death row
meal would be probably a flay with poached eggs.
Great. So my daughter though, she, she
loves all kind of foods. So the AI would then learn her
(33:19):
preferences, and then she could go on and say, hey, I don't want
to go have my death row meal tonight, but I want to.
Where should I go tonight? Yeah.
What should I have? What should I have?
And it'll pull up the meal. So for you, as you're swiping
through the app, it's going to be steak after steak, you know,
like, but. Is it going to be a swipe Rev
right, You swipe left, yeah. Yeah.
So it'll be super quick to, if you like the meal that's in
(33:43):
front of you, go for it. If you don't, you can, you know,
swipe, swipe until you find something that that kind of hits
you in the moment because. How are you going to manage the
photography of the food? Because I I watched this thing
on either TikTok or Instagram. I can't remember which one but
but they were showing how they actually do the photography.
(34:03):
Like they were using motor oil on pancakes for Denny's instead
of actual syrup. And how they?
They use all kind of different things to make it look really
good, or they'll put like cardboard in a hamburger to make
it. To fluff it up, yeah.
My daughter tells me all the time you need to do better job
taking your pictures for Instagram, 'cause she takes
(34:25):
these beautiful pictures of foodand I'm just not much of a
person to take pictures of my food to share with the world
when I eat. Sometimes I do, but yeah, 'cause
most of them are tax deduct, especially when it's a really
good meal and I'm like tax deductible meal.
Let's document this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And some people are some, some people aren't as far as taking
pictures of their meals. I'm not really a person who does
(34:45):
that. I did it for my death row meal
and I felt really awkward about it 'cause it's not something
that I typically do. So we don't want to ask people
to have to do that. Right now we have a photography
team that will go out and actually take an image of that
meal, like a professional photograph of the meal.
And that's also like our intro to the owners of the
(35:07):
restaurants, the chefs. And then we get into that
conversation of, you know, how can we help serve you guys and
reduce your food waste and get people in here ordering the this
amazing meal that you have. And then we start driving, you
know, traffic to them. Very cool.
So how how far out are you to launching it with your first
restaurant you think? I would say three weeks, 3
(35:32):
weeks. Oh wow, yeah, it's coming.
It's going to come up here. Quick and you're going to launch
here in Boise. Yep.
So that's the plan. Start locally.
We'll have a big launch party and have everybody that we know
over and we can all hang out, have a good time and everyone
can upload, you know, load theirmeals into the app so that we
get a nice big list of people's death row meals so that we have
a nice variety of meals to startwith.
(35:53):
And then have them start using the app and we'll be talking
with them, seeing what's workingand see what where they're
finding value, where they're not, what features they may need
or what problems they need solved.
And we'll continue to iterate the product until we feel like
we have something super strong and then push more nationally.
Have you been to Pig Latin yet? I've not.
Eagle in State Street. Is that the barbecue joint?
(36:15):
No, it's like a a Mexican steakhouse fusion.
No, it's it's been open for maybe two months now.
It's right on the river. Ohio.
Cool. State Street and Eagle.
It's it's really good. Have you been to KOA?
The new KOA? Yeah, Yeah.
And then just down the street from my house is a new breakfast
place with a line out the door. You know, every there was a
(36:39):
Dick's in there that couldn't stay in business and they're
like, it's a bad location. And now the the breakfast place
is just packed. So it's not really a location.
Yeah. Well, that's that fascinating
that'll make your all of your, your research and development,
(36:59):
all of it tax deductible for you, you and your wife and.
Kids to go. I know it's going to be really
hard R&D going out and eating all those phenomenal meals.
Yeah. Exactly.
So what's your favorite as a business owner?
Because this this show, I try tohelp.
I do three things on the show, teach people how to maximize
their credit, minimize their debt and taxes and then multiply
(37:21):
their assets. And that that's essentially what
I've been doing. That's what you've been doing
with your real estate. And you know, there's, there's
so many experts on social media that it's like most of them
don't know anything about anything.
I was at this, this credit event.
There's over 5000 registered credit repair people there or
5000 credit repair companies in America and like 300 at this
(37:46):
event. And it for the last 18 years has
fascinated me. All of these gurus, I've never
seen any of them at one of theseevents.
And these events are put on and we have speakers like Experian,
Equifax, TransUnion, the FederalTrade Commission, the CFPB,
that's who's there educating, teaching us, right.
So it fascinates me that all of the so-called social media
(38:11):
experts never go to any of the they just keep regurgitating the
same garbage over and over again.
Yeah, and one of those things they say all the time is stuff
like the average millionaire hasfive streams of income.
I don't know if you've ever heard that.
I've, I've heard stuff like thatand diversifying your income
streams. I mean, a lot of it comes down
to where in your career are you?Where in your life are you?
(38:33):
If you're young, go all in on one thing, is what I think.
Exactly. And as you get older and as you
invest and your money is coming from investments, start to
diversify a little bit and protect the those.
Yeah, you can't. That you built.
It's going to be extremely difficult to become wealthy on
five different income streams. Because you can't become an
expert in five different. Areas you focus on one and then
(38:55):
you invest your passive, you invest your extra income in
other things. And that's what you're doing
with your real estate for sure. And then if you needed that, you
can live off of it. But if you don't need it, you
just keep rolling it and just keep reinvesting it and
reinvesting it so. Yeah, my wife and I call it say
that we're building a money machine in our minds.
(39:17):
So we so it gets makes it a little more tactile and we're
like, OK, so we invest into the this real estate.
So the way that we started though I think may be
interesting to some of your viewers is we, you know, I was
running my business. I was solely focused on that.
We were raising kids. We had little kids, and we had
moved to Boise and we didn't know what to do with the extra
money that the company was producing.
(39:39):
And so we had, you know, listened to some Dave Ramsey
stuff and we were like, all right, we're going to pay off
the house. That's what we're going to do.
Horrible idea. Horrible.
OK. So I would argue that, yeah, I
mean, it depends how you look atit.
So we just started throwing money in the house because we
weren't really looking to make broader investments at that
point now. Interest rates hit 2% and we've
(40:03):
got all this equity in the house.
And at that point we decided like, OK, I don't think that.
I don't think this seems like the slowest way to get there.
Now that we've kind of talked tosome people, we've found some
people in real estate in our lives and they kind of told us
what they were doing. And we're like, oh, that seems
like a lot faster to get to where we want to go.
So then we rolled that out of the house and into that property
(40:24):
over by the Whitewater Park. So you got a loan on your on?
Your we refined, yeah, we did a cash out refi.
And we have debt on the House you live in at 2 percent, 3%.
2%, yeah, yeah, which is nothing.
That's way. Smarter.
Way smarter, yeah. But like, if you don't know what
to do, stack cash up somewhere, Yeah.
So that when you learn what to do, that you have something to
(40:45):
deploy, right. Because we could have just
tried, you know, we could have bought fancy cars.
Yeah. For instance, a lot of people do
some. Cars and watches and houses and
right boats and just garbage. But we didn't do anything.
We were just like, we're just going to pay up.
I mean, we did the 5.9 accounts for the kids.
Education was super important, so we did that first 1st and
then we just started plowing money into the house and it was
appreciating at the time too. So we, you know, got a lot of
(41:06):
money out of that to go do the next venture.
Yeah, I, the reason I say it's ahorrible idea to pay off a
mortgage is even at 6%. I, I could do the math, but I, I
don't have the calculator to do it.
But essentially at 6%, it's freemoney.
It's free because you get to deduct it if, if it's under
(41:29):
$750,000 and it's more than $15,000 in interest, which at 6%
it probably is. At two 3%, it might not be.
But the other part with inflation and with leverage, you
know the stock guys always say well the stock market over the
last 100 years has done 10% a year and the average real estate
does 5%. But the.
Times. Five, yeah, but real estate is
(41:51):
leveraged once. You leverage it, yeah.
It's 20% down, right? So it's not $100,000 of you buy
$100,000 of stock, you have to put down 100,000, right?
If you take 100,000, you buy a $500,000 house and now you're.
10% of 100,000 or 5%. Of 500,000.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, Yeah.
(42:12):
And that's what we realized onceonce our wheels started going,
we wanted to get into investing more because we were really just
building our income at that point, which I think is a great
thing to do when you're young for sure, like.
The other part of it that a lot of people don't realize is we
live in such a litigious society.
In 2019, actually it was 2020, my girlfriend came from Loya to
(42:38):
visit me. And we, I, I have this fetish.
I I like clean like. OK.
So I grew up not too far from here in Parma, which is about 45
minutes away. I've been there and no running
water, no electricity in a shack.
My we raised fighting Roosters and then we, we broke primarily
Mustangs. So we can buy these Mustangs,
(43:01):
the wild horses from the Hawaii's for like 20-30 bucks
and then we could break them andthen sell them for $3000.
So but the other thing was we raised fighting Roosters and we
would ship them to Arizona and they would do the illegal cock
fights and that thing. But we raised these roofs wild
and but we are poor so we didn'thave food to feed the chickens,
(43:26):
but we needed to raise like really strong chickens.
So what my stepdad would do is everybody in Parma knew that if
you had a dead animal, cow, horse, goat, whatever, you'd
have to pay someone. It's so quite a bit of money to
pay someone to come out with a tractor, pick it up, put it in a
trailer, take it to the dump. So he would take it for free and
(43:49):
then he would bring it to our house and leave it in our front
yard or our backyard or our sideyard.
And then the flies would show up, the maggots would show up
and it would be a rotten cow in the front yard and the chickens
eat all the rotten meat and theyeat the the maggots and all that
stuff. In the winter time we would burn
(44:13):
tires because the man that ownedthe property would go to the
tire places and they would pay him to take the tires away and
he would take it to his 80 acre farm out in Parma and just stack
it up. And there was just huge piles of
tires with no foresight or no like what's going to happen to
(44:36):
the end game, right? There's no end game.
So that's what we burnt for winter for fuel.
He would like literally cut up these tires so they.
Burn hot too. Don't.
They they burn really hot and really black, sooty.
And so I was The Dirty kid because of the winter.
So anyway, so I have this fetishwhere I like things really,
really clean. OK.
(44:57):
Makes sense. So I will take my my vehicles to
the car wash once or twice or three or sometimes seven days a
week. Pretty much every day.
I go out for coffee because I work from home and I'll take my
car to the car wash because I like super clean.
So my girlfriend is with me and I said, hey, I'll go inside and
(45:18):
get a Starbucks if you want. If you take the car through the
car wash, because I had to pay with my phone.
She didn't have her purse with her so she went into the car
wash at Linder and Ustick or whatever the road is up there.
I didn't know she'd never been through a car wash before.
Apparently in San Diego the way it works is you drive in and you
(45:38):
put it in park and they're like it sprays around you.
She'd never been in one where you drive in and it drags you
through a tunnel. So she got in there and did not
put it in neutral. So ultimately she bumped into
the brush, which bumped into thecar, shut the whole thing down.
(45:59):
When I come over, you know, they're looking at the guy's
bumper. He's got a little scratch on it.
I don't see any scratch on my truck at all because she
actually never hit him. But the brush hit him.
And because two cars touched thebrush, it shut it down.
So back to litigious. Next thing I know, he sued me
for $100,000 for whiplash, a broken wrist chiropractic, like
(46:23):
all of this stuff. And this is inside a car wash
tunnel where it's dragging you so you're not even doing one
mile an hour. And there was a little tiny
scratch on his car. Nothing on mine.
Yeah, so he, when I'm talking tohim, he figures out I'm a
business owner and so he comes after me for $100,000.
(46:47):
And because we both had GEICO, GEICO, that's how I found out he
was claiming whiplash because they they interviewed me.
Like, were you driving down the road when you hit him in a car
wash? So back to your house.
The reason it scares me, and I say it's a horrible idea to pay
off your house, is there are people out there like him that
(47:08):
if they can take something from you.
So the house that I live in has five times the amount of debt on
it that it's worth. So one of the things that I do
for my clients is in addition toreducing their taxes to nothing
is we will put their businesses so far in debt through other
(47:30):
businesses that we set up through UCC 1 liens.
So I have a one of my 4 mates, I'm meeting with him tomorrow
and he just bought a house and when it's done he'll be $10
million in debt on that house. So what happens with that is
someone goes to sue you and theypull up and it's like a a
$2,000,000 home but you got $10 million of liens against it.
(47:54):
Those ambulance chasers go away.The frivolous lawsuits go away.
The attorneys won't take. It, the attorneys won't take it
because when they see that or they see your business and
they're like, oh, your employee did something and now we're
going to come after you 'cause you're the rich business owner
and your business is $100 million in debt and you're doing
$3,000,000 a year in revenue. And they just go away because
(48:17):
it's, they're never going to getanything because there's part of
it's called first in line, firstin time, which means the first
lien filed. So anybody listening, if you
have a pass paid off or even don't have it, I, I always
recommend my clients put a lot of debt against that file a lot
of liens and there's a proper way to do it.
(48:38):
You can't just go make up stuff.You have to actually create a
line of credit from a business and then put on the on the House
because it just keeps the ambulance chasers away.
So anyway, I'm glad to hear thatyou refinanced that, pulled it
out because now look at you, yougot 7-8 doors and you're it's a
cash cow. It's a money machine, right?
(48:58):
And if that money was sitting inthe house, it's not.
A house is not an asset, it's a liability.
Because if you look at the definition of liability or
asset, a liability takes money from you.
An asset puts money in your pocket.
The house you live in does not put money in your pocket.
But your investment properties, I would argue, are assets, but
your primary is a liability. Yeah, I would agree.
(49:19):
With that, and eventually you know you're going to sell it
because the only way to get money out of your house is to
sell it or refinance it. And the problem is if, if
something happened to your credit or you lose your income,
you can't get money out of your house.
If you have a 400 credit score, no job, even if you have 100%
equity, banks will not, they, they can't, their systems or
(49:43):
guidelines are not going to giveyou, you know, if you have
$1,000,000 house free and clear and, and you need $400,000,
they're not going to give you a loan if you have no way to pay
it back. So I, I always tell people get
a, a mortgage and then always get a line of credit on that
house and keep that line of credit because that's a, that's
an ATM machine. If you use it properly.
Yeah. You know, versus going out and
(50:05):
buying watchers and watches. Yeah.
Do you have collections, charge offs, even repos on your credit
report? Let me tell you what not to do.
Don't ignore it and don't overpay it.
See, most people either panic orthey pay full price, or they
bury their head in the sand and let their credit rot until they
get sued. At Fortress, we help you
(50:26):
restructure your debt, settle itfor a fraction of what you owe.
And because of the way we negotiate with the banks and the
collection companies, we often can get it removed from your
credit report as well. Now, a lot of the time, the
creditor will agree to delete itupfront.
This isn't a trick, it's a strategy.
(50:48):
So click the link in the bio to learn more or go to
fortressu.com. So what's your when you started
the first business and even withthe the new business now, are
you, did you bootstrap it or didyou go out and get business
loans and leverage credit to make everything work?
(51:09):
Yeah. So the first business I just
saved up $20,000. That was my big business plan.
I said if I think if I have $20,000, I think I could make a
business go. And so we did the, what we did
there is we, I made this huge Excel spreadsheet of all the
happy hours around because we like to go out and have a good
time. And we would just hit the happy
(51:31):
hours. We'd be a dollar slice of pizza,
dollar beer and hanging out. Same lifestyle.
Nothing changed. Just the bank account was just
going up, up, up. Got the $20,000 and and I was
like, all right, I'm ready to go.
Started it and bootstrapped it from there.
So that was the first business. This next business will probably
be venture backed to grow it to the scale that I wanted to go
(51:53):
to. Yeah, just a lot of the
technology we're, I think we're funded as of right now.
So my blockchain company, we were looking for $5,000,000 and,
and we have many people offeringthe money.
We just don't want to be in business with them.
But I, I think we're, I think wegot funded today.
But yeah, yeah, it's going to begood.
(52:14):
I'll find out when we get done with it.
The, you know, with technology companies, I, I think it'd be
very difficult to bootstrap that, you know, because what's
the term or something that something of scale where if you
go so long with bootstrapping, someone else going to beat you
(52:34):
to it. You know, there's no such thing
as an original idea. Yeah.
And it's the pace of which you get there, the pace of which you
can get market saturation and the the primary player in the
market, it is a race. It is a race because if you
don't, if you come out with the idea and you start it, someone
(52:55):
else has got it. Yeah.
And you got to beat them there. We have an idea that you and I
were talking about a coffee thatonce we get our blockchain with
tracking rare earth minerals andcarbon credits and methane gas
and that stuff. Amanda and I have this pet
project that has to do with withrestaurants and resorts that I
(53:17):
think it's going to be a gangbusters.
So it's going to be really cool.I just can't say what it's
called because as soon as I say it, someone else is going to be
listening and go I'm going to godo that.
Sure. Now with AI, it doesn't take
much to do anything. I was talking to someone the
other day and they're like, I'm going to go to college and learn
how to build websites and do this.
I'm like, that is such a stupid idea.
Today, yeah. It was a great idea a decade ago
(53:39):
though. I you can just go on a ChatGPT
and within, you know, if you understand it, it'll build your
website. And I mean it does a lot if you
can figure out how to use. AI Yeah, I built a whole whole
demo of of the Death Row meal app just with AI.
Yeah, no technical skills whatsoever.
Yeah, and and you now you have to go out and get some people to
(54:00):
make everything work. But you can get.
I can get a lot of working prototype, yeah with 0 technical
skills. And it looks good too.
Like the design is great. I'm like, I was very impressed.
And then you go and get, then you can take it to an engineer
and say versus here's an idea, this is what I want to do.
And now you got to try to get anengineer to be creative.
(54:21):
You know where with AI you were able to create it?
Get the basic. Just give it to him and say make
this work, make this functional,Yeah.
So another question for you. What's your favorite tax
strategy? I probably should have gave you
these questions upfront, but I kind of like to see what people
say. Sure.
Yeah. I mean, my favorite has been
cost segregation analysis and accelerated depreciation.
(54:42):
And I had a question for you. Do you think 100% bonus
depreciation is coming back thisyear?
I think it is. I think.
It might be. I think, I think the big
beautiful bill will be approved by July and it'll be backdated
and then things are going to go crazy.
Yeah, because it was going to bebackdated to January 20th, is
that correct? I January 1st January 20th.
(55:05):
I don't know if the. I think it was Inauguration Day
was the symbolic probably piece of it.
Yeah, yeah, I think we, there's bipartisan support for it and I,
the administration obviously hasan appetite for it.
So I'm hopeful that it does as well without the bonus
depreciation. Like right now it's down at 40%.
I don't know that that's my favorite tax strategy at 100%.
I really like it though. Are your kids on salary?
(55:28):
They are not. So that's $30,000 of income that
you could take out of your S selection, your S Corp and put
it in your kids bank accounts and pay no income tax.
So with your income bracket outside of the cost segregation,
you and your wife are. So we live in Idaho which is 5%,
(55:49):
federal's 37%. So that's 42% plus
self-employment tax, 57% tax bracket on your 1st 200,042%
after that. So that 30 grand, that's $12,000
of tax that you don't have to pay if you put your kids on
salary. And the way you would do that is
(56:09):
you hire your children to be models, right?
And so a little bit you can't doit through your S corporation,
whether it's an LLC taxes and S or an actual corporation taxes.
You'd have to have a sole proprietor business or another
sole member LLC because S corporations have to pay payroll
(56:30):
taxes where sole proprietors don't.
So you could, your S Corp could hire your sole member LLC for
advertising, marketing expenses,transfer 30 grand to your LLC.
Your LLC now can pay your kids 15,000 each and now that's 100%
tax deductible for your S Corp, tax free for your children.
(56:54):
And now you can take that 15 grand and go do whatever you
want. You can go buy another Airbnb,
you can start Roth Iras for yourkids.
You can pay for a vacation or goto Disney World if you want.
So that's another 12 grand that you could be wiping out, which a
lot of people, they know of it, but they don't do it.
(57:14):
And it's, it's primarily becausemost people trust their Cpas to
tell them what they can do. And Cpas are great, and they're
great at filing taxes, looking at the past and creating a
Ledger and filing it. Cpas are forbidden by the IRS to
(57:35):
create tax strategies, which most people don't know that.
And so I relate it as if you were playing football and you're
down 14 to 0. You call time out as a
quarterback, You don't run over to the referee and ask the
referee what's the next play to score.
You go to your coach. But what most people do is they
(57:58):
run to the referee that AKA the CPA.
And the CPA cannot tell you. They can only tell you what the
rules are. They can't tell you what to do.
Whereas if you hire someone likeme as a tax strategist, I'm
going to give you the strategy and then you go to your CPA and
say, hey, I want to do this. And because you brought them the
(58:19):
strategy, now they're legally allowed to implement the
strategy, but they can't give you the strategy unless you
bring it to them. So kids is the big one.
You know, my kids, when they were little, I used to own a
construction company. I paid them $0.25 to pick up
after the job site was done. I built high end custom decks.
(58:40):
And so we, you know, we're sometimes 2030 feet up in the
ground above the ground buildingthese multi story outdoor living
rooms. And if you dropped a couple
screws, you did not go down the ladder 30 feet to get a screw.
So we'd clean up. And I paid my kids to do it
because I didn't want to pay my,my, my skilled carpenters to do
it. And I remember the one of the
(59:03):
first times that my daughter started showing her entrepreneur
spirit is back in like 2004. So she would have been 14 ish
somewhere in there. 2004, 2003, 2004 when the real estate market
was going absolute crazy. I was putting out the signs.
I'd buy homes, you know, the yellow signs.
(59:26):
And instead of paying for the signs to be pre printed, I paid
my 1314 year old daughter to write.
I buy signs and my phone number on it and I was paying her like
a dollar a sign or something. And then one day I came home and
there's like 10 kids in the living room drawing signs and
she's paying them 1/4 a sign. Yeah, that's great.
(59:47):
So but I'd hired my kids all through elementary school and
high school where I never boughtmy kids clothes, I never got my
kids food, I never paid for their movie tickets.
I'd never sent them to cheerleading camp.
I never paid for it. I made them pay for it.
And that sounds bad on the on the face of it, but what I did
(01:00:07):
is I would pay them from the business and then I would use
their bank account to pay for the food, to pay for the
clothes, pay for cheerleading camps, modeling schools or
whatever. So it's a way that the the code
is 99%. The way it's set up is how to
legally not pay taxes. And if you can just understand
(01:00:27):
that you can eliminate 40% of you can eliminate 100% of your
taxes, but you're basically saving 40% of your income.
And with business owners, you know, that's our business.
Our many times that's our biggest expense is taxes.
And you got to work twice as hard to make the same amount of
(01:00:49):
money. And it all started when I was
17. I went to work for this very
wealthy man and he, he taught me, she says not as important.
How much money you make. It matters how much you keep
'cause if you can keep 4050% more, you can now scale so much
faster. So that's one of my favorite is
the kids. Yeah, yeah.
(01:01:11):
So that's something to think about, putting the kids on
salary. And then with your food app,
it's really something the next time you get that value pack,
you know, the coupons that you, I, I know, I look through it and
I usually throw it away. But, but next time you get that,
open it up and you'll see that 10 to 15% of the ads will have a
kid on it. And like, what is a kid standing
(01:01:33):
in front of a garage door? But it's because it's the
owner's kid. And so now it's a modeling and
they're paying for their likeness to be on this value
pack. So it's a way to leverage,
leverage your kids because, you know, 15 grand once they go to
college, it goes to $35,000. So now the business can
(01:01:56):
technically write off sending your kids to college, still do
your 529, still do your four O 1KS and all that.
But yeah, just a way throw some more money out there.
Yeah, yeah, I'll. Definitely have to start
considering that because it's not something that we had
considered very strongly up until this date.
We try to. Our goal is to buy a property a
year and do the cost segregationanalysis and just keep rolling
(01:02:18):
that way. So pay no taxes instead of what
we would have paid the taxes. That's a down payment on another
property and just keep doing that.
Now at 40% bonus depreciation doesn't work anymore.
Right. But if it goes back to 100%,
we're back. In business on that, well that's
an extra 30 grand now you have for down payment.
Yeah, yeah. And it's, well, it's, you know,
it's technically an extra 12 grand because you're, you're
(01:02:40):
saving 12,000 on the taxes, but still it's 12 grand.
You know, that's a it's worth the one page document that you
have to create and put together.So to write that off and then
once they go to school college, then it's even better.
So well, John has been fun. I'm sorry, I'm I'm was coughing
a little bit. So hopefully.
(01:03:00):
We're going to catch this track.Too much?
No worries. Thanks for being on SO.
Thank you for having. Me on how do we find when will
the website will be open soon orup death row meals.
Deathrowmeal.com So you can go there now and you can kind of
check some things out. We're going to have within the
(01:03:21):
next couple of weeks, we'll havesome content that we're going to
drop that should be fun and funny.
We're trying to keep it pretty late and have a good time with
it. But then, yeah, we'll be
launching shortly. So anyone who's local, who's
watching this, hit me up and we'll we'll bring you to the
launch party and have a good time.
So John, if somebody wanted to follow you on social media,
where would they go? Yeah, so on all the socials
we're at Death Row meal and but yeah, look us up.
(01:03:43):
We're going to start posting some pretty interesting stuff.
So it'll be great to connect. Cool.
And we'll be on the app stores, so Google Play and the Apple App
Store. So for downloads that may take
maybe in a month or so. So I'll keep an eye out for
that, yeah. Cool.
All right. Well, thanks for being on.
All right. Thanks, Randy.
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(00:21):
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abundance, then you're in the right place.
Welcome to the School of Wealth.Hey John, welcome to the show.
(01:04):
Hey, Ronnie, how are you? Good.
In studio today, I'm John McCarty with Death Row Meals.
Not to be confused with Death Row Records.
Correct. Yes, absolutely.
So yeah, we've got an app that we're launching here shortly
that connects people with reallygreat meals, meals that are
worthy of being your last on earth.
And we're also trying to reduce food waste while we do it.
(01:26):
Cool. How was your drive all the way
out here to the farm? It was shorter than I thought it
was going to be. Yeah.
Is it? Yeah.
But once I got here, it's it's acool area.
I haven't been out here before. Yeah, I, I had a guest the other
day and they were a little late.They're like, I didn't know you
lived so far out into the boonies.
Yeah. Well, when I plugged it into
Google Maps, yeah, it it just said like the Township or
(01:46):
something like that. And I was like, oh, OK, excuse.
Me, I'm just getting over a horrible cold, so I apologize
for the coughing. John, I did not want to cancel
on you because I think I had to cancel on you before or
reschedule or. Yeah, no worries.
So. I was like, I woke up this
morning and was like, I think you need to call John and
postpone. I'm like, I'm going to power
(02:06):
through. So I've been sucking down cough
syrup all day hoping to get through this whole thing.
All right. Well, I appreciate.
It so hopefully I don't cough too much.
Yeah, no worries. So, so this is a new company for
you Death row meals, right? So we're still in the start up
phase. We are pre launch right now but
we should be launching in the next couple of weeks where
(02:26):
people can go and submit their death row meal and start to
browse other people's. This is not your first company
though. Correct.
Yeah. So over a decade ago I started
an edtech company and grew that over the course of thirteen
years. I still own 100% of that company
and it still does very well. But shifting focus from that,
the team is really handling a lot of the heavy lifting on that
(02:49):
company now and looking to focuson a new venture.
So you said something that really scares me.
When people say that you own 100%, that's super scary for me.
Yeah. I, I live by the life of own
nothing, control everything, OK.When you own something, people
can take it away from you. Sure.
And the, the world that we live in, the litigious world that we
(03:10):
live in, there are bad people out there.
Just want to take your stuff. You know, the Bernie Sanders of
the world that they hate the rich.
They're not there to help the poor.
They just hate the rich. So, but with the Ed tech, what
is what's your Ed tech? Yeah.
So we help people to prepare forthe Law School Admission test,
the GRE, standardized tests for Graduate School.
(03:30):
So when people want to go to lawschool, they want to go on and
get an advanced degree. That's the kind of the
gatekeeper is that test. And we prep them up for that.
Typically we focus on one-on-onein person prep.
And you know, post COVID, we're about the only people left who
want to do that. So we've got a pretty good
foothold in in that particular niche.
(03:51):
Is that nationwide then? It is, yeah.
Yeah. And it's it's still one-on-one
on one. Yep.
We still primarily focus on one-on-one.
We do have a few classes that we're starting to launch and
that are gaining some traction, but most of our effort and most
of our customers come to us for that one-on-one in person.
How many people have gone through your your program in the
(04:13):
last 10 years? Thousands.
How do you manage thousands of students, clients, customers
with one-on-one, I mean. We hire really great tutors, OK,
Yeah. So we hire tutors in each of the
locations in which we serve, andwe just hire phenomenal people.
You know, so you hire a bunch oftutors.
(04:35):
Like here in Boise, you would hire a tutor and then if I
wanted to apply for law school, I would go and meet with that
person one-on-one. And then you keep them fairly
busy and booked up. Yep, yeah.
And so we do all the training, we provide all the resources.
We've got books and things like that that all the students will
get. We've got our perfect fit
guarantee. We make sure we get you to the
right tutor. If that's not the right fit,
(04:56):
we'll get you to somebody who is.
So we do that matching process and get everybody together.
We train the tutors and then we really rely on them to just go
out and crush it. And they do.
I was just thinking of a, there's a guy I follow on
Instagram. It's probably inappropriate for
this conversation, but I've already brought it up.
So, and he, he is a jet broker. So he arranges private travel.
(05:22):
And there was this very wealthy.Well, she's not wealthy.
Her dad's a billionaire, but she, it was 1 where she had
hired a tutor from Spain and she's in England and she was
ordering a jet. And he goes, well, is it
overnight? And she goes, well, he's really
cute. So it might be overnight.
So that's not the kind of tutories that you have, right?
Not typically. Sorry for that, the coughing.
(05:46):
No worries. So you've been doing that now 10
years? Yep.
Do you have, are these tutors, are they 1099 contractors?
Are they? How does that?
Work Yep, 1099 contractors and they set their own schedules
they teach the way they want to teach we and and that's part of
our matching process too we wantto have different tutors with
different styles because we get a lot of different students with
(06:06):
different styles and we want to individualize it so.
Different learning styles. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah. And that's the hardest thing is
just getting that match correct.Once you have it, it's like
magic. So that's what we've spent 10
years perfecting. What's your with that?
What's your pass rate pre pre your coaching tutoring versus
after year? Yeah.
(06:27):
So the LSAT and similar tests are not pass fail.
Even students who are coming to us, they're like, I want to pass
the LSAT and we're like, well, that's it's not really something
you can do. But our students usually go up
about 20 points on the LSAT. So if you start at A-150, you're
kind of below the median. If you add 20 points to that,
you're in the top 3%. I got you my middle child, my
(06:47):
daughter who's a nurse, it was like an 85% failure rate on the,
I think it's called the NCOLEX, something like that.
And one of my one of my friends who's also a nurse went and
started a similar like school, but it's all online and he
teaches nurse or he teaches students how to pass.
Now it's like 99% pass rate. That's phenomenal, yeah.
(07:09):
So she went through that and shewas telling me that that once
you hit a certain percentage, it's kind of like the DMV test.
You know, if there's 1000 questions, as soon as you hit
your 70%, the test just shuts off and you don't have to go
through the whole thing. Yeah.
So yeah, with the LSAT they makeyou sit through the whole thing.
Yeah. So there's no pass fail.
It's it's a a score then. Right.
(07:30):
How good of a school will you will you be able to get into
what kinds of scholarships will those schools offer you?
The higher the score, the betterthe result.
I got you. Yeah.
Very cool. Yeah, there's I.
Think a lot of people asked I I went to college to get my
certificate in Emergency Management.
I never got any degree or anything, OK, And I've never
(07:53):
been a big proponent of going toschool unless it's like for a
purpose. Sure, like law.
Yeah, doctor and medical for. Sure.
And I had one of my nephews the other day asked me, he's like,
how do I, I want to be a millionaire?
Like what do I got to do? I'm like, you can do one of a
couple things. Become a plumber, a welder,
(08:14):
electrician, an HVAC person, learn how to do drywall and
that's that's the fact in my opinion, that's like the fastest
way to become a millionaire right now 'cause you skip the
four to eight years of school my.
And all the expense? My neighbor behind me has, he's
(08:34):
a welder. And then to the left of him, you
can't quite see it. On the other side of that, my
big pond back there, he's a plumber with Beacon Plumbing,
which stop freaking call Beacon.That's a great line and.
And then the one to the left of him is a roofer and then left of
him is a electrician. So if if you want to be a
(08:57):
millionaire, that's I think one of the fastest way to get there
is and. It's AI, the trade.
And it's AI proof. For now, for now, it's going to
be a while till I think we get like autonomous robots and come,
come out and fix your roof or doyour plumbing.
I did see, AI did see a robot roofing a building the other
day. Wow.
On social media. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
(09:18):
That's why it was literally going.
They put this robot up there. Like a humanoid robot or.
No, it was. It wasn't like a humanoid robot.
It was like a big machine, like what you'd see building cars.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was stripping the roofing
tiles off and then putting the new ones down.
As it. Was stripping as it was
stripping. It was so.
Fast. That's cool, yeah.
(09:39):
But I think that's going to be along ways away.
Yeah. And I think it is AI proof.
I don't know about robot proof, but for a while, for a while.
And I don't see how the robots are going to go in and do
plumbing and electrical for a while.
It's hard. Yeah.
We had a leak today and we had the plumber out and you know,
it's drip, drip, drip down out of the light fixture in the
basement and we're just like OK,guy comes out, he does his
(10:00):
thing. You.
Know how long was he there? He was there three hours.
Yeah, how much you pay? Him, I didn't get the bill.
My wife looked at it, but you know, it's definitely a few 100
bucks if not getting him to 1000plus, you know, but the value's
there, you know, for us to not have a leak in the house is very
valuable. Yeah, very valuable.
And then, you know, you got to fix it.
(10:21):
You can't do the leak and then the mold and all that other
stuff. And he came out quick, too.
Oh good. Yeah.
What was the, what was the reason that you started this
business? Is this your first business that
you had? The.
Educational one. Yeah, yeah, it is.
So I was right out of college when I started it and I had
taken the LSAT and that's how itkind of all got started.
(10:43):
I did pretty well on the LSAT. I was a couple points away from
perfect and started teaching just like kind of putting up
Craigslist ads. This is back in, in 2010, right?
And you know, I was tutoring andit kind of got built up my book
of business and I wanted to launch classes, but my wife
(11:03):
decided to go to medical school in Ireland.
At the time we were living in Atlanta and that's where I was
trying to build the business outof.
So I moved to Ireland and started my company in 2013
officially and then built a remote team from there.
So like we were one of the firstcompanies to be fully remote.
Everything we as far as like ouradmin team was fully remote and
then we would have contractors in each individual city to, you
(11:26):
know, meet with the students anddo in person tutoring.
So you saw a need, Is that something that you went to
college Forest like to learn business or would you go to
college? Yeah, I did business management
as my undergrad with a certificate and
entrepreneurship, so running my own business was always the path
for me. I don't know, it's just always
(11:48):
has been what I wanted to do. I thought I was going to run my
own law firm, but instead, you know, helping people to get into
law school and now helping people find really great food
and, you know. Yeah.
I want to talk about that a little bit more.
I just, I, I'd like to kind of get the background of how you
got into entrepreneurship. Yeah.
I don't think everybody should be an entrepreneur.
(12:09):
I don't think so either. It's.
It's it's a brutal there's. Some tough moments, yeah.
There's some tough months even where you're not sure there's.
Some tough years. There's some tough years.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
And I took a little bit and not a pit stop, but maybe a detour
and maybe 5-6, seven years in and started investing in real
(12:31):
estate. And so that's also been a
passion of mine is investing in real estate and building that
portfolio, as you know, to make sure that like financially we
have another source of income incase one of the business
ventures falls through. What was your what's your
favorite thing to invest in realestate?
Do you have like a niche that you pick or is it just anything
(12:52):
that makes money? I like so the niche that we're
in right now and it's probably because we're maybe an
experienced, we only have, you know, like 7 or 8 doors.
But I like really, I like big houses that we then either
convert to smaller, smaller units and run and do Airbnb.
(13:14):
So we have a, a big house near the Whitewater park and it's got
an Adu and then a unit above theAdu.
And so we've kind of split that up and we've got 4 units running
out of there on Airbnb. Been super profitable been and
it's great. It's appreciating like crazy.
And you manage that yourself. So my wife managed it for a
(13:35):
while, but we've transitioned into having our outsourced team
out of the Philippines manage it.
So they do a great job. I've been working with the same
team for years and years and years out of Philippines.
They help me run my primary business as well and they're
helping me launch this new business.
But there's. People, there's a, I'm not going
to call it a loophole because I don't like that term loopholes.
(13:56):
There is a part of our Internal Revenue Code that says that if
you manage your own short term rental and you do 7 days or
less, that you can qualify as a real estate professional without
doing 750 hours a year. You only have to do 100.
So the advantage of you managingit yourself and if you're using
(14:19):
Filipinos, that still qualifies as you managing yourself.
Right, she manages. Yes, so she could qualify and
your CPA probably already does this, but she can qualify as the
real estate professional, which then allows you to depreciate
that short term rental against your W2 income.
And then because if you're, I'm assuming that one of your other
(14:41):
companies either an S selection,it's not just the LSE.
Yeah. So you probably have a salary,
W2 salary. Yeah.
So the only way to offset your payroll taxes on your W2 is the
short term rental business. If your wife qualifies as a real
estate professional, now you canoffset all of that.
Right. And she does, Yeah.
So we came across this when we first purchased that property,
(15:03):
there was a lot of improvements that needed to be done.
So I popped on a bunch of real estate podcast and I would
listen to them while I'm over there working for, you know,
hundreds of hours and learned a lot of things.
So we do the cost aggregation analysis, we accelerate the
depreciation. She qualifies as real estate
professional from from running them and she keeps the log and
has 750 hours every year, so we're meticulous about that.
(15:26):
And that's, that's all about document.
I I call it my triple DS, you know, document.
So you can defend it and then you can deduct it.
Yeah. Did she?
Did she finish medical school? She did, yeah.
And she was practicing Dr. in the hospitals in Ireland.
They do kind of a general rotation.
First we had our first daughter and we kind of re evaluated life
(15:49):
at that point. She wanted to spend more time
with the kids and she decided towalk away from medicine and
raise the kids. And now the kids are getting
older. My youngest is entering
kindergarten, so we've got kind of like the whole day is now
open. So she's starting to shift her
focus to writing. So she's got 2 fantasy books
that are coming out here shortlyand she's in the final stages of
(16:13):
putting out the finishing touches.
You know, the cover, the gettingthe feedback from the beta
readers and things like that. So.
Is she in? What's your wife's name?
Neve. Is I don't think she's in my
girlfriend's SOP with Amanda andGina.
No, but I know they spent some time together at that recent SOP
(16:33):
event. So yeah, 'cause she was telling
me about somebody had the Airbnbdown there with the AD unit.
We we had brunch down there lastweekend by the surf park.
Yeah, it's great down there. It really is.
It's cool. I was telling my daughter that
my daughter's boyfriend's son lives with them, and once I
think he's 17, so once he moves out on his own, telling her
(16:56):
because she loves the Greenbelt,I was like, there's a really
nice luxury apartment complex now right on the river, yes.
Is it that West of you, that newone, that huge one that kind of
they just put in and. That's like the terrace goes
back and it's got all the restaurants.
And bars. And that looks sweet.
Yeah, that would be really cool to live right there.
Yeah, right on the green for sure.
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(18:22):
Two. Two.
Five and 75. And seven, boy and girl, both
girls, both girls. Yeah, you're going to have more.
No, we're done. Yeah, so we got 2 girls.
We decided to not chance it any further and so our youngest is
five, turning 6 and yes, starting kindergarten.
So we're excited for that. Very cool.
(18:43):
So you have the the 10 year old business and then you're
starting the new one, which is death row meals.
Yep. And the way you explained it to
me when we had the coffee the other day was if you were going,
if you're on death row, you get to pick your own meal, right?
And you you have this app that it will use AI with your
(19:07):
preferences and then it will create your death row meal sort.
Of yeah, so it's yeah, it's, it's more of a matching process
because actually having this conversation with you, it's the
first time that I've put this together that like maybe one of
my core skills is like matching people together and preferences
together. That's what we built the
education business on and that'swhat this app is a lot about.
(19:30):
South. People will submit into the app
what their death row meal would be, which we have defined as,
you know, a meal from a restaurant that's local to you.
So if I was going to die tomorrow, I would get the fiery
seafood from Nam tonight. That's what I would eat.
So I said, I put that into the app and everybody puts their
(19:50):
meals in. And then So what the AI does is
it comes in when I now when I'm hungry and I want to go out to
eat, but maybe I don't want to have my death row meal.
I want to get something a littlebit different.
It will recommend to me your death row meal because it knows
that you and I have similar tastes to each other given my
taste profile and your taste profile.
And then so you can, it'll matchyou up with various different
people's death row meals to for you to then discover great meals
(20:14):
that you may not have otherwise.You know the the this AI thing
in ChatGPT and all of it in Gronk and all of it it's it is
fascinating and scary at the same time.
Sure, I was. So I've been in five states over
the last week and it's the little cough and cold that I got
from traveling so much. But an event I spoke at a credit
(20:36):
repair event in Houston last week and one of the girls said,
hey, what's your ChatGPT avatar look like?
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
She goes ask log into your ChatGPT and ask what you look
like and have it describe you. And it sent me back a
description on me that other than having a shaved head, the
(20:58):
rest of it was like spot on including the beard.
Like how do you know I have a beard?
And how does it know that I, I, I wear suits and ties and that
like it literally it was about on the phone, it was probably
like 5 screens of describing me and what kind of personality I
(21:20):
had and how I interact with people, how I carry myself, how
I speak. It was fascinating.
And I don't spend that much timeon it.
Yeah, it's it is going to be really the next 10 years is
going to be 1 hell of a ride. It is going to be 1 hell of a
ride and I want to be on, you know, on the surfboard riding
(21:41):
the wave and not someone who gets crashed over by it.
I use it almost daily now and mydaughter uses it.
My daughter runs. She's producer of the podcast.
She also does all of the social media and I know she uses it
constantly. Yep, for all the social media.
It's great for content, yeah. It is and and I use it mainly
for my tax, the tax business, just checking on stuff, you
(22:04):
know, Internal Revenue Code and stuff because it's 40,000 pages.
Yeah, it's very difficult to read all of that.
But ChatGPT you can you can typesomething in and almost
instantly you get back a a response.
How much do you trust it that the response is accurate?
So here's what I learned about the ChatGPT is it wants to make
you happy. Yeah, so you got to be really
(22:24):
careful with that. And so I've started using Gronk
to where it's just factual. OK, so I will double check it.
I will too. Yeah.
And So what I'll do is I'll put in my question and it'll give me
a part of the the Internal Revenue Code.
Then you know where to go. And then I go and look at it and
then I read it because I've found a couple mistakes.
(22:47):
But what's interesting on the tax side is Forbes did a study a
while back. It said 93% of business owners
pay more than legally required to pay in taxes.
I'm sure that. They do almost $12,000 more and
then they took 1000 tax returns that the eight largest CPA firms
had filed, ran it through an AI and 100% of them had 10,000 plus
(23:13):
that they overpaid using their CPA.
So it's just, it's fascinating how you can use that in pretty
much any of your businesses. And that seems like a great use
case for it too, right? You're digging through volumes
of text, through the IRS code and figuring out how does that
apply to these very specific like numbers and tables that we
(23:35):
have here? Well, 99% of the tax code, the
40,000 pages, 99% is how to legally not pay taxes.
We're the only country in the world that's a voluntary tax
system, and people will sometimes confuse that with you
don't have to pay income taxes. Yeah.
That, that's not what it says is, but it's voluntary, how much
(23:58):
you pay, that our code allows you to go out and do things to
where you don't have to pay. Yeah, I filed my taxes.
I signed it on Sunday and I paid.
I paid a whopping $356 last year.
In taxes. So I think this year I'll end up
paying about 500 bucks because I'm going to have a little bit
better year than I did last year.
(24:20):
And primarily I was showing you the field where I keep my cows.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Primarily the 356 bucks was the
the tax on the like the aggregate on the cows?
Yeah, yeah. So it wasn't, it technically
wasn't income tax. It was in order to get the AG
reduction on my property taxes, I got to show some profit.
(24:40):
I can't just deduct everything otherwise I can't get the the
$9000 discount on my property tax so I'd rather pay 356 bucks
to save 9 grand. Yeah.
So yeah, for sure. So back to death row meals.
That's still in beta. It is, yeah.
Do you have any restaurants yet that have picked up on this?
So we don't. Right now we're working on
(25:02):
getting the the MVP, the minimumviable product, the beta version
of the app out and into the hands of users.
And then as we start to gather those, we're going to approach
restaurants. And because one thing we'll need
is to get some images of the meals, We won't have to be very
image forward and, and then talkto them about what their pain
(25:24):
points are as far as food waste,food management and seeing how
we can change consumer behavior to alleviate some of that food
waste. Because I mean, it, it causes,
you know, it's just waste in general.
Nobody wants that, but causes a ton of greenhouse gases.
The economic impact of wasting food for restaurants is huge.
(25:45):
So we've got like all the incentives aligned.
We just need to find solutions. Be interesting to see how things
start to change. Last week when I was travelling
I went to the largest regenerative beef cattle ranch.
Beef largest regenerative cattleranch in in the world, and it's
in Georgia, a town called Bluffton, GA.
(26:09):
Is that like North Georgia? South Georgia.
Yeah, 2/2 and 1/2 hour drive from Panama City, FL.
It's the poorest county in the United States.
Really. Yeah, and I met Will Harris.
He's the owner. It's been in his family since
1866. And it was really cool.
(26:30):
I actually, we spent the night in one of his cabins and the
next morning I got up and I, I said to Amanda, I said, let's go
have breakfast at the, the general store, which is a store.
And then they have a. Yeah.
A restaurant with a food truck outside that makes all the food,
Yeah. Yeah.
Because this thing's been, this building's been there since
1866, so it doesn't have a kitchen in it.
(26:52):
Right. Yeah.
So when I walked in, there was aolder gentleman standing there
and I had my service animal Sawyer with me and he just said
something like, that's a really well behaved dog because
Sawyer's rarely ever on a leash.And he started, we started
talking about a dog and the guy actually owned the whole ranch
(27:12):
that we were staying on the 3800acres.
So he's like, what are you here for?
And I said, oh, we're here to see the ranching.
And we start talking and he's like, well, how about I show
you? So then he took the next 4 1/2
hours just driving us around in his Jeep, showing how he raises
the capital. So he's got 10 different types
(27:33):
of animals, sheep and goats and pigs and cows and chickens and
rabbits. Horses, I don't know what the
other ones are, but what they dois they, instead of just keeping
all of the cows in a feed lot, feeding them grain, the cows
will be in one area for a month.So they're there for a day and
(27:53):
they eat it and then they leave.And then they bring the sheep in
and then they bring the pigs in.And what that does is with all
the different types of manure, he's taking it from an
industrial farm to a very to what they call a regenerative
farm. And he was showing us samples of
his side of the fence versus theindustrial side of the fence
(28:16):
where the other ranchers are. And his dirt has 10 1/2 times
more carbon in it. So it was 5.5 whatever parts per
million carbon where the neighbors like half.
Which means things don't grow right and it doesn't absorb the
water. And he was showing videos like
(28:36):
when it rains, the difference inthe pollution.
I saw some runoff videos that were wild.
Yeah, when and he's got like that YouTube where the runoff
and you can see the different colors.
So he was on Joe Rogan's podcasttwice now and that's kind of how
we found out about him. We have a blockchain.
Sure. So we were going there to meet
with his daughter, not with him.And I just happened to run into
(28:56):
him. But they have no waste.
So they have, they slaughter 2525 cows a day.
They take the skin, they make leather out of it, they take all
the bones that grind them up andthey put them in compost piles.
And then over A7 year period, they mix the peanut shells from
(29:18):
the peanut farms. And then when they trim the
trees, they run that through wood chipper.
They mix the mulch in it and then they make this compost and
then that's what they spread on the ground.
They'd use no fertilizers, no hormones, no antibiotics in
their cows, their pigs or their sheep or their chickens.
(29:39):
So it was just really cool seeing.
And So what made me think of that is when you were saying how
much waste these restaurants do that it's a real a shame.
I've been to many of them because I showed you my chickens
and I've gone to these restaurants and asked if I could
have like their food waste. And they'll say stuff like, no,
it's against county code or citycode, and it's a shame they're
(30:02):
just throwing that in the landfill.
And they're paying to throw thatin the landfill, too.
Where they could literally have like a side bucket if you will,
or dumpster for farmers, people like me that could go in and
feed that waste to the chickens which then poop all over the
ground. And what Will was telling me was
when he was an industrial farmer, rancher, every day he
(30:25):
looked for something he could kill on his land, like weeds.
And he said now he doesn't put anything down on it because what
happens when you have cows and pigs and chickens and goats and
sheep, The cows will just eat it.
And if the cow doesn't eat, the sheep eat it, and the sheep
don't want to eat. That pigs eat it and.
(30:46):
He's like, I don't have to, I don't have the control for any
of this waste. So it was really fascinating
just seeing how I think hopefully we can start doing
more regenerative farming because it's it is really
detrimental to the environment. And you can I watch this Netflix
documentary on climate change and pollution.
(31:08):
And you can see it happening right around April when the
farmers go in and start telling the ground and all the dust goes
up and you see like this cloud cover the United States of just
pollution. It's not pollution, but it's,
it's fine particles, fine particles.
My girlfriend could tell you theexact name of it, but it's it's
dust basically. And then we breathe that in and
(31:28):
then that's our topsoil and. Yeah.
I mean, there's the topsoil crisis going on where we're just
depleting it, depleting it, depleting it, Yeah, basically as
fast as we possibly can. What Will said that is in 60
years, if we do not stop in 60 years, we won't have enough
topsoil in the United States to grow anything.
So they have to reverse it. And it's fascinating with what
(31:52):
with AI, what they're able to figure out now.
They just released a study that showed 1 LB of vegan burger, the
Impossible Burger produces 10 times the amount of pollution is
1 LB of beef. So it's the opposite of what
(32:13):
Bill Gates is saying about the cow's methane gas.
Plus, I just the the highly processed nature of those
artificial meats seems to me to be pretty gross territory.
It seems to. See how that stuff is made?
Like I saw a video the other daywith chicken Nuggets, how they
were just like grinding it all up and it's just gross.
(32:34):
But. Any sort of chicken nugget,
whether it's real meat or fake meat, I don't think you'd want
to watch the process. No, no, yeah, it's pretty gross.
But, you know, it's fascinating though.
I, I'm, I'm excited about the future in the next, next 10
years to see what AI will do. So what your app is, it's going
to kind of you'll go find restaurants and then my
daughter's a big foodie. Yeah.
(32:56):
For me, I look for a couple things.
Does it have steak? Fish.
Sure. Or steak.
Yeah. Or eggs, you know, my death row
meal would be probably a flay with poached eggs.
Great. So my daughter though, she, she
loves all kind of foods. So the AI would then learn her
(33:19):
preferences, and then she could go on and say, hey, I don't want
to go have my death row meal tonight, but I want to.
Where should I go tonight? Yeah.
What should I have? What should I have?
And it'll pull up the meal. So for you, as you're swiping
through the app, it's going to be steak after steak, you know,
like, but. Is it going to be a swipe Rev
right, You swipe left, yeah. Yeah.
So it'll be super quick to, if you like the meal that's in
(33:43):
front of you, go for it. If you don't, you can, you know,
swipe, swipe until you find something that that kind of hits
you in the moment because. How are you going to manage the
photography of the food? Because I I watched this thing
on either TikTok or Instagram. I can't remember which one but
but they were showing how they actually do the photography.
(34:03):
Like they were using motor oil on pancakes for Denny's instead
of actual syrup. And how they?
They use all kind of different things to make it look really
good, or they'll put like cardboard in a hamburger to make
it. To fluff it up, yeah.
My daughter tells me all the time you need to do better job
taking your pictures for Instagram, 'cause she takes
(34:25):
these beautiful pictures of foodand I'm just not much of a
person to take pictures of my food to share with the world
when I eat. Sometimes I do, but yeah, 'cause
most of them are tax deduct, especially when it's a really
good meal and I'm like tax deductible meal.
Let's document this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And some people are some, some people aren't as far as taking
pictures of their meals. I'm not really a person who does
(34:45):
that. I did it for my death row meal
and I felt really awkward about it 'cause it's not something
that I typically do. So we don't want to ask people
to have to do that. Right now we have a photography
team that will go out and actually take an image of that
meal, like a professional photograph of the meal.
And that's also like our intro to the owners of the
(35:07):
restaurants, the chefs. And then we get into that
conversation of, you know, how can we help serve you guys and
reduce your food waste and get people in here ordering the this
amazing meal that you have. And then we start driving, you
know, traffic to them. Very cool.
So how how far out are you to launching it with your first
restaurant you think? I would say three weeks, 3
(35:32):
weeks. Oh wow, yeah, it's coming.
It's going to come up here. Quick and you're going to launch
here in Boise. Yep.
So that's the plan. Start locally.
We'll have a big launch party and have everybody that we know
over and we can all hang out, have a good time and everyone
can upload, you know, load theirmeals into the app so that we
get a nice big list of people's death row meals so that we have
a nice variety of meals to startwith.
(35:53):
And then have them start using the app and we'll be talking
with them, seeing what's workingand see what where they're
finding value, where they're not, what features they may need
or what problems they need solved.
And we'll continue to iterate the product until we feel like
we have something super strong and then push more nationally.
Have you been to Pig Latin yet? I've not.
Eagle in State Street. Is that the barbecue joint?
(36:15):
No, it's like a a Mexican steakhouse fusion.
No, it's it's been open for maybe two months now.
It's right on the river. Ohio.
Cool. State Street and Eagle.
It's it's really good. Have you been to KOA?
The new KOA? Yeah, Yeah.
And then just down the street from my house is a new breakfast
place with a line out the door. You know, every there was a
(36:39):
Dick's in there that couldn't stay in business and they're
like, it's a bad location. And now the the breakfast place
is just packed. So it's not really a location.
Yeah. Well, that's that fascinating
that'll make your all of your, your research and development,
(36:59):
all of it tax deductible for you, you and your wife and.
Kids to go. I know it's going to be really
hard R&D going out and eating all those phenomenal meals.
Yeah. Exactly.
So what's your favorite as a business owner?
Because this this show, I try tohelp.
I do three things on the show, teach people how to maximize
their credit, minimize their debt and taxes and then multiply
(37:21):
their assets. And that that's essentially what
I've been doing. That's what you've been doing
with your real estate. And you know, there's, there's
so many experts on social media that it's like most of them
don't know anything about anything.
I was at this, this credit event.
There's over 5000 registered credit repair people there or
5000 credit repair companies in America and like 300 at this
(37:46):
event. And it for the last 18 years has
fascinated me. All of these gurus, I've never
seen any of them at one of theseevents.
And these events are put on and we have speakers like Experian,
Equifax, TransUnion, the FederalTrade Commission, the CFPB,
that's who's there educating, teaching us, right.
So it fascinates me that all of the so-called social media
(38:11):
experts never go to any of the they just keep regurgitating the
same garbage over and over again.
Yeah, and one of those things they say all the time is stuff
like the average millionaire hasfive streams of income.
I don't know if you've ever heard that.
I've, I've heard stuff like thatand diversifying your income
streams. I mean, a lot of it comes down
to where in your career are you?Where in your life are you?
(38:33):
If you're young, go all in on one thing, is what I think.
Exactly. And as you get older and as you
invest and your money is coming from investments, start to
diversify a little bit and protect the those.
Yeah, you can't. That you built.
It's going to be extremely difficult to become wealthy on
five different income streams. Because you can't become an
expert in five different. Areas you focus on one and then
(38:55):
you invest your passive, you invest your extra income in
other things. And that's what you're doing
with your real estate for sure. And then if you needed that, you
can live off of it. But if you don't need it, you
just keep rolling it and just keep reinvesting it and
reinvesting it so. Yeah, my wife and I call it say
that we're building a money machine in our minds.
(39:17):
So we so it gets makes it a little more tactile and we're
like, OK, so we invest into the this real estate.
So the way that we started though I think may be
interesting to some of your viewers is we, you know, I was
running my business. I was solely focused on that.
We were raising kids. We had little kids, and we had
moved to Boise and we didn't know what to do with the extra
money that the company was producing.
(39:39):
And so we had, you know, listened to some Dave Ramsey
stuff and we were like, all right, we're going to pay off
the house. That's what we're going to do.
Horrible idea. Horrible.
OK. So I would argue that, yeah, I
mean, it depends how you look atit.
So we just started throwing money in the house because we
weren't really looking to make broader investments at that
point now. Interest rates hit 2% and we've
(40:03):
got all this equity in the house.
And at that point we decided like, OK, I don't think that.
I don't think this seems like the slowest way to get there.
Now that we've kind of talked tosome people, we've found some
people in real estate in our lives and they kind of told us
what they were doing. And we're like, oh, that seems
like a lot faster to get to where we want to go.
So then we rolled that out of the house and into that property
(40:24):
over by the Whitewater Park. So you got a loan on your on?
Your we refined, yeah, we did a cash out refi.
And we have debt on the House you live in at 2 percent, 3%.
2%, yeah, yeah, which is nothing.
That's way. Smarter.
Way smarter, yeah. But like, if you don't know what
to do, stack cash up somewhere, Yeah.
So that when you learn what to do, that you have something to
(40:45):
deploy, right. Because we could have just
tried, you know, we could have bought fancy cars.
Yeah. For instance, a lot of people do
some. Cars and watches and houses and
right boats and just garbage. But we didn't do anything.
We were just like, we're just going to pay up.
I mean, we did the 5.9 accounts for the kids.
Education was super important, so we did that first 1st and
then we just started plowing money into the house and it was
appreciating at the time too. So we, you know, got a lot of
(41:06):
money out of that to go do the next venture.
Yeah, I, the reason I say it's ahorrible idea to pay off a
mortgage is even at 6%. I, I could do the math, but I, I
don't have the calculator to do it.
But essentially at 6%, it's freemoney.
It's free because you get to deduct it if, if it's under
(41:29):
$750,000 and it's more than $15,000 in interest, which at 6%
it probably is. At two 3%, it might not be.
But the other part with inflation and with leverage, you
know the stock guys always say well the stock market over the
last 100 years has done 10% a year and the average real estate
does 5%. But the.
Times. Five, yeah, but real estate is
(41:51):
leveraged once. You leverage it, yeah.
It's 20% down, right? So it's not $100,000 of you buy
$100,000 of stock, you have to put down 100,000, right?
If you take 100,000, you buy a $500,000 house and now you're.
10% of 100,000 or 5%. Of 500,000.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly, Yeah.
(42:12):
And that's what we realized onceonce our wheels started going,
we wanted to get into investing more because we were really just
building our income at that point, which I think is a great
thing to do when you're young for sure, like.
The other part of it that a lot of people don't realize is we
live in such a litigious society.
In 2019, actually it was 2020, my girlfriend came from Loya to
(42:38):
visit me. And we, I, I have this fetish.
I I like clean like. OK.
So I grew up not too far from here in Parma, which is about 45
minutes away. I've been there and no running
water, no electricity in a shack.
My we raised fighting Roosters and then we, we broke primarily
Mustangs. So we can buy these Mustangs,
(43:01):
the wild horses from the Hawaii's for like 20-30 bucks
and then we could break them andthen sell them for $3000.
So but the other thing was we raised fighting Roosters and we
would ship them to Arizona and they would do the illegal cock
fights and that thing. But we raised these roofs wild
and but we are poor so we didn'thave food to feed the chickens,
(43:26):
but we needed to raise like really strong chickens.
So what my stepdad would do is everybody in Parma knew that if
you had a dead animal, cow, horse, goat, whatever, you'd
have to pay someone. It's so quite a bit of money to
pay someone to come out with a tractor, pick it up, put it in a
trailer, take it to the dump. So he would take it for free and
(43:49):
then he would bring it to our house and leave it in our front
yard or our backyard or our sideyard.
And then the flies would show up, the maggots would show up
and it would be a rotten cow in the front yard and the chickens
eat all the rotten meat and theyeat the the maggots and all that
stuff. In the winter time we would burn
(44:13):
tires because the man that ownedthe property would go to the
tire places and they would pay him to take the tires away and
he would take it to his 80 acre farm out in Parma and just stack
it up. And there was just huge piles of
tires with no foresight or no like what's going to happen to
(44:36):
the end game, right? There's no end game.
So that's what we burnt for winter for fuel.
He would like literally cut up these tires so they.
Burn hot too. Don't.
They they burn really hot and really black, sooty.
And so I was The Dirty kid because of the winter.
So anyway, so I have this fetishwhere I like things really,
really clean. OK.
(44:57):
Makes sense. So I will take my my vehicles to
the car wash once or twice or three or sometimes seven days a
week. Pretty much every day.
I go out for coffee because I work from home and I'll take my
car to the car wash because I like super clean.
So my girlfriend is with me and I said, hey, I'll go inside and
(45:18):
get a Starbucks if you want. If you take the car through the
car wash, because I had to pay with my phone.
She didn't have her purse with her so she went into the car
wash at Linder and Ustick or whatever the road is up there.
I didn't know she'd never been through a car wash before.
Apparently in San Diego the way it works is you drive in and you
(45:38):
put it in park and they're like it sprays around you.
She'd never been in one where you drive in and it drags you
through a tunnel. So she got in there and did not
put it in neutral. So ultimately she bumped into
the brush, which bumped into thecar, shut the whole thing down.
(45:59):
When I come over, you know, they're looking at the guy's
bumper. He's got a little scratch on it.
I don't see any scratch on my truck at all because she
actually never hit him. But the brush hit him.
And because two cars touched thebrush, it shut it down.
So back to litigious. Next thing I know, he sued me
for $100,000 for whiplash, a broken wrist chiropractic, like
(46:23):
all of this stuff. And this is inside a car wash
tunnel where it's dragging you so you're not even doing one
mile an hour. And there was a little tiny
scratch on his car. Nothing on mine.
Yeah, so he, when I'm talking tohim, he figures out I'm a
business owner and so he comes after me for $100,000.
(46:47):
And because we both had GEICO, GEICO, that's how I found out he
was claiming whiplash because they they interviewed me.
Like, were you driving down the road when you hit him in a car
wash? So back to your house.
The reason it scares me, and I say it's a horrible idea to pay
off your house, is there are people out there like him that
(47:08):
if they can take something from you.
So the house that I live in has five times the amount of debt on
it that it's worth. So one of the things that I do
for my clients is in addition toreducing their taxes to nothing
is we will put their businesses so far in debt through other
(47:30):
businesses that we set up through UCC 1 liens.
So I have a one of my 4 mates, I'm meeting with him tomorrow
and he just bought a house and when it's done he'll be $10
million in debt on that house. So what happens with that is
someone goes to sue you and theypull up and it's like a a
$2,000,000 home but you got $10 million of liens against it.
(47:54):
Those ambulance chasers go away.The frivolous lawsuits go away.
The attorneys won't take. It, the attorneys won't take it
because when they see that or they see your business and
they're like, oh, your employee did something and now we're
going to come after you 'cause you're the rich business owner
and your business is $100 million in debt and you're doing
$3,000,000 a year in revenue. And they just go away because
(48:17):
it's, they're never going to getanything because there's part of
it's called first in line, firstin time, which means the first
lien filed. So anybody listening, if you
have a pass paid off or even don't have it, I, I always
recommend my clients put a lot of debt against that file a lot
of liens and there's a proper way to do it.
(48:38):
You can't just go make up stuff.You have to actually create a
line of credit from a business and then put on the on the House
because it just keeps the ambulance chasers away.
So anyway, I'm glad to hear thatyou refinanced that, pulled it
out because now look at you, yougot 7-8 doors and you're it's a
cash cow. It's a money machine, right?
(48:58):
And if that money was sitting inthe house, it's not.
A house is not an asset, it's a liability.
Because if you look at the definition of liability or
asset, a liability takes money from you.
An asset puts money in your pocket.
The house you live in does not put money in your pocket.
But your investment properties, I would argue, are assets, but
your primary is a liability. Yeah, I would agree.
(49:19):
With that, and eventually you know you're going to sell it
because the only way to get money out of your house is to
sell it or refinance it. And the problem is if, if
something happened to your credit or you lose your income,
you can't get money out of your house.
If you have a 400 credit score, no job, even if you have 100%
equity, banks will not, they, they can't, their systems or
(49:43):
guidelines are not going to giveyou, you know, if you have
$1,000,000 house free and clear and, and you need $400,000,
they're not going to give you a loan if you have no way to pay
it back. So I, I always tell people get
a, a mortgage and then always get a line of credit on that
house and keep that line of credit because that's a, that's
an ATM machine. If you use it properly.
Yeah. You know, versus going out and
(50:05):
buying watchers and watches. Yeah.
Do you have collections, charge offs, even repos on your credit
report? Let me tell you what not to do.
Don't ignore it and don't overpay it.
See, most people either panic orthey pay full price, or they
bury their head in the sand and let their credit rot until they
get sued. At Fortress, we help you
(50:26):
restructure your debt, settle itfor a fraction of what you owe.
And because of the way we negotiate with the banks and the
collection companies, we often can get it removed from your
credit report as well. Now, a lot of the time, the
creditor will agree to delete itupfront.
This isn't a trick, it's a strategy.
(50:48):
So click the link in the bio to learn more or go to
fortressu.com. So what's your when you started
the first business and even withthe the new business now, are
you, did you bootstrap it or didyou go out and get business
loans and leverage credit to make everything work?
(51:09):
Yeah. So the first business I just
saved up $20,000. That was my big business plan.
I said if I think if I have $20,000, I think I could make a
business go. And so we did the, what we did
there is we, I made this huge Excel spreadsheet of all the
happy hours around because we like to go out and have a good
time. And we would just hit the happy
(51:31):
hours. We'd be a dollar slice of pizza,
dollar beer and hanging out. Same lifestyle.
Nothing changed. Just the bank account was just
going up, up, up. Got the $20,000 and and I was
like, all right, I'm ready to go.
Started it and bootstrapped it from there.
So that was the first business. This next business will probably
be venture backed to grow it to the scale that I wanted to go
(51:53):
to. Yeah, just a lot of the
technology we're, I think we're funded as of right now.
So my blockchain company, we were looking for $5,000,000 and,
and we have many people offeringthe money.
We just don't want to be in business with them.
But I, I think we're, I think wegot funded today.
But yeah, yeah, it's going to begood.
(52:14):
I'll find out when we get done with it.
The, you know, with technology companies, I, I think it'd be
very difficult to bootstrap that, you know, because what's
the term or something that something of scale where if you
go so long with bootstrapping, someone else going to beat you
(52:34):
to it. You know, there's no such thing
as an original idea. Yeah.
And it's the pace of which you get there, the pace of which you
can get market saturation and the the primary player in the
market, it is a race. It is a race because if you
don't, if you come out with the idea and you start it, someone
(52:55):
else has got it. Yeah.
And you got to beat them there. We have an idea that you and I
were talking about a coffee thatonce we get our blockchain with
tracking rare earth minerals andcarbon credits and methane gas
and that stuff. Amanda and I have this pet
project that has to do with withrestaurants and resorts that I
(53:17):
think it's going to be a gangbusters.
So it's going to be really cool.I just can't say what it's
called because as soon as I say it, someone else is going to be
listening and go I'm going to godo that.
Sure. Now with AI, it doesn't take
much to do anything. I was talking to someone the
other day and they're like, I'm going to go to college and learn
how to build websites and do this.
I'm like, that is such a stupid idea.
Today, yeah. It was a great idea a decade ago
(53:39):
though. I you can just go on a ChatGPT
and within, you know, if you understand it, it'll build your
website. And I mean it does a lot if you
can figure out how to use. AI Yeah, I built a whole whole
demo of of the Death Row meal app just with AI.
Yeah, no technical skills whatsoever.
Yeah, and and you now you have to go out and get some people to
(54:00):
make everything work. But you can get.
I can get a lot of working prototype, yeah with 0 technical
skills. And it looks good too.
Like the design is great. I'm like, I was very impressed.
And then you go and get, then you can take it to an engineer
and say versus here's an idea, this is what I want to do.
And now you got to try to get anengineer to be creative.
(54:21):
You know where with AI you were able to create it?
Get the basic. Just give it to him and say make
this work, make this functional,Yeah.
So another question for you. What's your favorite tax
strategy? I probably should have gave you
these questions upfront, but I kind of like to see what people
say. Sure.
Yeah. I mean, my favorite has been
cost segregation analysis and accelerated depreciation.
(54:42):
And I had a question for you. Do you think 100% bonus
depreciation is coming back thisyear?
I think it is. I think.
It might be. I think, I think the big
beautiful bill will be approved by July and it'll be backdated
and then things are going to go crazy.
Yeah, because it was going to bebackdated to January 20th, is
that correct? I January 1st January 20th.
(55:05):
I don't know if the. I think it was Inauguration Day
was the symbolic probably piece of it.
Yeah, yeah, I think we, there's bipartisan support for it and I,
the administration obviously hasan appetite for it.
So I'm hopeful that it does as well without the bonus
depreciation. Like right now it's down at 40%.
I don't know that that's my favorite tax strategy at 100%.
I really like it though. Are your kids on salary?
(55:28):
They are not. So that's $30,000 of income that
you could take out of your S selection, your S Corp and put
it in your kids bank accounts and pay no income tax.
So with your income bracket outside of the cost segregation,
you and your wife are. So we live in Idaho which is 5%,
(55:49):
federal's 37%. So that's 42% plus
self-employment tax, 57% tax bracket on your 1st 200,042%
after that. So that 30 grand, that's $12,000
of tax that you don't have to pay if you put your kids on
salary. And the way you would do that is
(56:09):
you hire your children to be models, right?
And so a little bit you can't doit through your S corporation,
whether it's an LLC taxes and S or an actual corporation taxes.
You'd have to have a sole proprietor business or another
sole member LLC because S corporations have to pay payroll
(56:30):
taxes where sole proprietors don't.
So you could, your S Corp could hire your sole member LLC for
advertising, marketing expenses,transfer 30 grand to your LLC.
Your LLC now can pay your kids 15,000 each and now that's 100%
tax deductible for your S Corp, tax free for your children.
(56:54):
And now you can take that 15 grand and go do whatever you
want. You can go buy another Airbnb,
you can start Roth Iras for yourkids.
You can pay for a vacation or goto Disney World if you want.
So that's another 12 grand that you could be wiping out, which a
lot of people, they know of it, but they don't do it.
(57:14):
And it's, it's primarily becausemost people trust their Cpas to
tell them what they can do. And Cpas are great, and they're
great at filing taxes, looking at the past and creating a
Ledger and filing it. Cpas are forbidden by the IRS to
(57:35):
create tax strategies, which most people don't know that.
And so I relate it as if you were playing football and you're
down 14 to 0. You call time out as a
quarterback, You don't run over to the referee and ask the
referee what's the next play to score.
You go to your coach. But what most people do is they
(57:58):
run to the referee that AKA the CPA.
And the CPA cannot tell you. They can only tell you what the
rules are. They can't tell you what to do.
Whereas if you hire someone likeme as a tax strategist, I'm
going to give you the strategy and then you go to your CPA and
say, hey, I want to do this. And because you brought them the
(58:19):
strategy, now they're legally allowed to implement the
strategy, but they can't give you the strategy unless you
bring it to them. So kids is the big one.
You know, my kids, when they were little, I used to own a
construction company. I paid them $0.25 to pick up
after the job site was done. I built high end custom decks.
(58:40):
And so we, you know, we're sometimes 2030 feet up in the
ground above the ground buildingthese multi story outdoor living
rooms. And if you dropped a couple
screws, you did not go down the ladder 30 feet to get a screw.
So we'd clean up. And I paid my kids to do it
because I didn't want to pay my,my, my skilled carpenters to do
it. And I remember the one of the
(59:03):
first times that my daughter started showing her entrepreneur
spirit is back in like 2004. So she would have been 14 ish
somewhere in there. 2004, 2003, 2004 when the real estate market
was going absolute crazy. I was putting out the signs.
I'd buy homes, you know, the yellow signs.
(59:26):
And instead of paying for the signs to be pre printed, I paid
my 1314 year old daughter to write.
I buy signs and my phone number on it and I was paying her like
a dollar a sign or something. And then one day I came home and
there's like 10 kids in the living room drawing signs and
she's paying them 1/4 a sign. Yeah, that's great.
(59:47):
So but I'd hired my kids all through elementary school and
high school where I never boughtmy kids clothes, I never got my
kids food, I never paid for their movie tickets.
I'd never sent them to cheerleading camp.
I never paid for it. I made them pay for it.
And that sounds bad on the on the face of it, but what I did
(01:00:07):
is I would pay them from the business and then I would use
their bank account to pay for the food, to pay for the
clothes, pay for cheerleading camps, modeling schools or
whatever. So it's a way that the the code
is 99%. The way it's set up is how to
legally not pay taxes. And if you can just understand
(01:00:27):
that you can eliminate 40% of you can eliminate 100% of your
taxes, but you're basically saving 40% of your income.
And with business owners, you know, that's our business.
Our many times that's our biggest expense is taxes.
And you got to work twice as hard to make the same amount of
(01:00:49):
money. And it all started when I was
17. I went to work for this very
wealthy man and he, he taught me, she says not as important.
How much money you make. It matters how much you keep
'cause if you can keep 4050% more, you can now scale so much
faster. So that's one of my favorite is
the kids. Yeah, yeah.
(01:01:11):
So that's something to think about, putting the kids on
salary. And then with your food app,
it's really something the next time you get that value pack,
you know, the coupons that you, I, I know, I look through it and
I usually throw it away. But, but next time you get that,
open it up and you'll see that 10 to 15% of the ads will have a
kid on it. And like, what is a kid standing
(01:01:33):
in front of a garage door? But it's because it's the
owner's kid. And so now it's a modeling and
they're paying for their likeness to be on this value
pack. So it's a way to leverage,
leverage your kids because, you know, 15 grand once they go to
college, it goes to $35,000. So now the business can
(01:01:56):
technically write off sending your kids to college, still do
your 529, still do your four O 1KS and all that.
But yeah, just a way throw some more money out there.
Yeah, yeah, I'll. Definitely have to start
considering that because it's not something that we had
considered very strongly up until this date.
We try to. Our goal is to buy a property a
year and do the cost segregationanalysis and just keep rolling
(01:02:18):
that way. So pay no taxes instead of what
we would have paid the taxes. That's a down payment on another
property and just keep doing that.
Now at 40% bonus depreciation doesn't work anymore.
Right. But if it goes back to 100%,
we're back. In business on that, well that's
an extra 30 grand now you have for down payment.
Yeah, yeah. And it's, well, it's, you know,
it's technically an extra 12 grand because you're, you're
(01:02:40):
saving 12,000 on the taxes, but still it's 12 grand.
You know, that's a it's worth the one page document that you
have to create and put together.So to write that off and then
once they go to school college, then it's even better.
So well, John has been fun. I'm sorry, I'm I'm was coughing
a little bit. So hopefully.
(01:03:00):
We're going to catch this track.Too much?
No worries. Thanks for being on SO.
Thank you for having. Me on how do we find when will
the website will be open soon orup death row meals.
Deathrowmeal.com So you can go there now and you can kind of
check some things out. We're going to have within the
(01:03:21):
next couple of weeks, we'll havesome content that we're going to
drop that should be fun and funny.
We're trying to keep it pretty late and have a good time with
it. But then, yeah, we'll be
launching shortly. So anyone who's local, who's
watching this, hit me up and we'll we'll bring you to the
launch party and have a good time.
So John, if somebody wanted to follow you on social media,
where would they go? Yeah, so on all the socials
we're at Death Row meal and but yeah, look us up.
(01:03:43):
We're going to start posting some pretty interesting stuff.
So it'll be great to connect. Cool.
And we'll be on the app stores, so Google Play and the Apple App
Store. So for downloads that may take
maybe in a month or so. So I'll keep an eye out for
that, yeah. Cool.
All right. Well, thanks for being on.
All right. Thanks, Randy.
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