The Buddy Foy Jr Show
Buddy Foy Junior Show: A powerful blend of faith, truth, and boldness in today’s complex world. Hosted by Buddy Foy Junior, this podcast explores the deep intersections of Scripture, culture, and personal growth. In an era where government and big business are increasingly intertwined, Buddy emphasizes the importance of staying vigilant—reminding listeners that we must actively speak out and stand firm in our convictions.
With a background as a serial entrepreneur, TV reality star, and advocate for small business rights, Buddy shares insights on leadership, perseverance, and patriotism. Each episode encourages you to live with purpose, embrace faith, and take action—because real change starts when we step up and speak out. Whether you're seeking spiritual inspiration or practical wisdom, this show inspires believers and entrepreneurs alike to carry the torch forward.
The Buddy Foy Jr Show
Navigating Home Building Challenges: From Industry Hurdles to Political Insights with Bob Marini
Bob Marini from Marini Homes joins us to navigate the intricate world of home building and the challenges plaguing the industry today. Discover how Marini Homes has evolved over four generations in Upstate New York, as Bob shares insights into the shift from the modest profit margins of the past to today's demanding 20% gross margin. We'll unpack the hurdles of modern housing, from supply chain issues to inflation, and their impact on both businesses and future homeowners.
The conversation takes a deeper turn as we examine the nationwide impact of COVID-19 mandates, focusing on the contrasting approaches of New York and Florida. We explore the political dynamics that drive these decisions, including the role of governors like Ron DeSantis and the migration trends shaping local economies. The episode doesn't shy away from controversy, either, as we discuss the ripple effects of rising costs on various industries, particularly the restaurant sector, and how inflation continues to stretch the limits of affordability.
In a political twist, we delve into the realm of public discourse and media influence, touching on the backlash faced by Joe Rogan and the potential impact of political division in America. An exclusive glimpse inside Mar-a-Lago reveals Donald Trump's personal reflections on his time in office and his candid thoughts on political adversaries. Whether it's navigating the complexities of the housing market or pondering the broader implications of political and economic turmoil, this episode offers a rich tapestry of insights for our listeners.
This is the Buddy For Junior Show — where faith, truth, and courage come together. Join us as we explore life’s deeper purpose and carry the torch of conviction. The show begins now.
Follow Buddy @BuddyFoyJr
Folks, welcome. Welcome to the Buddy Ford Jr show. I'm pumped up today. I've got a guest on. I've been trying to get on the show for the last six months. He's busy, he travels a lot, he's got the economy and COVID and building homes that he's dealing with and supply chain issues and trying to balance his family and work life and everything else. I've got Bob Marini from Marini Homes in the Capital Region in Upstate New York. Bob is here at location in Anna Maria Island, florida and before we get started, I also want to thank Marini Homes and thank you, bob, for sponsoring the Foy Rush YouTube series. Everyone, if you haven't seen it, we have 14 episodes live. Go to YouTube search for Foy Rush or go to BuddyFoyJrcom and you can find it up there. Bob, tell us a little bit about the company. Give the audience a scale of what you do in the housing business.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all, thanks for having me down here. It's beautiful. I'm about 1,100 miles from my home base and it feels good to be in 75-degree weather as opposed to sleet and freezing rain. My company was started by my grandfather back in 19-.
Speaker 2:Oh third generation, third generation yeah, and if you want to count my children, it's actually four generations in the business now. But we've been building homes in the Capital Region since 1947, 75 years. We've built over 4,000 homes in the Capital Region. It's fun business. You get to meet a lot of great people, a lot of successful business people and we just have fun with it. And we've been perfecting that craft for 75 years. My grandfather used to build all brick homes and I have-.
Speaker 1:Was your grandfather a mason?
Speaker 2:He was, yeah, and he immigrated here from Italy, settled in Yonkers, worked in a couple of factories during the Depression. Wow, moved up here to Albany, started building houses. That's how we got started and I have documents from the homes that he built in the 1940s. It's kind of amazing how you see the sales price of a home at $5,500. Wow, you know. And then he lists all of his expenses at $5,500. Wow, you know. And then he lists all of his expenses that was used to build the home. I think he made about $500 a house.
Speaker 1:No kidding.
Speaker 2:Back in the 40s, yeah.
Speaker 1:Now is the percentage on the sale about the same as today.
Speaker 2:No, so that maybe was about 7%, 8%, and he didn't even deduct his labor out of that number. Wow, yeah, that was just after he paid all of his gross. Yeah, all after he paid all of his hard costs. You know, you know, typically in the home building business today, in order to stay in business you've got to operate on about a 20% gross margin. So if you're doing, you know, $30 million a year in sales, you know you got to do 6 million gross and then you got to pay for your overhead and your sales costs and everything out of that. So our business is not much different. It's very highly capital. It's it's very capital intensive. Right, you know, sometimes we're out eight to ten million dollars buying the land, putting the pipes in the ground to build the roads. Then we get a building permit and it takes us six months to build a house. So sometimes it's two years before we collect back Our first dollar.
Speaker 1:On that $10 million investment. I tell you. So, bob and I talk a lot About politics. And the last podcast. I promised the listeners, bob, that I would take them through our Trump Sit down. Now we're going to tease you all with that. You're going to hang out here until the end of the podcast To listen.
Speaker 1:I figured I might as well have the guy Now we're going to tease you all with that. You're going to hang out here until the end of the podcast to listen. I figured I might as well have the guy who invited me and got me in the door and we'll talk about how we felt about the event and share our event at Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago. So I'm excited to have Bob here In true fashion of business and politics.
Speaker 1:We're going to dive into both, because Bob and I talk about politics all the time. We talk about business a lot. He'll send me at least every other week what's going on with the housing costs and the lumber costs, et cetera. So from a business perspective, I'd love to unpack the generational and how you guys successfully went four generations without killing each other. That's a hard thing to do, it is. And then getting to the inflation conversation and the economy and home sales today. Advice for young entrepreneurs coming up, young kids in college, and then we'll dive into a political conversation and talk about our event at Mar-a-Lago Does that sound good.
Speaker 2:Yep, I think what's going to shock your listeners the most is the inflation that's taking off in my business today and how it's affecting homebuyers today and how it's affecting homebuyers. And then you step away from that and and you, you take a deeper dive into what people have to face every single day between putting gasoline in their cars, going to the grocery store, heating their homes and different things like that. But when I, when I uncover what is going on in the home building business and the cost, the input costs, and how they've risen, people are going to be amazed Wow.
Speaker 1:So, before we get into that, bob and I am amazed by what you share with me with the numbers, with windows and doors and I got a restaurant in Sarasota that we're trying to open up. By the way, bob and I are in Florida right now at our Anna Maria location broadcasting the show. And we're having issues, bob, in Sarasota, with getting permits stamped because of the continuation of changing materials on a job, with a couple hundred different jobs going on, then the permitting process having to get started all over. Maybe that's not the right term, but they've got to submit changes for the permits because of materials.
Speaker 2:Right, you file for permits based on a certain construction specification and now that's changing. So now you've got to go in and amend the permit for the new material that you're putting in the building, and it's all got to be approved by the architect and the engineer and everybody else.
Speaker 1:So it's getting expensive on all sides and the biggest expense and I'm sure you deal with it, is the time, as you delay these projects, you have a certain calendar in mind that you're going to put the money out there.
Speaker 2:I just got done doing a 38-unit apartment building in Clifton Park, new York, and COVID delayed me about seven months on this project. And the funny thing is when you build these things. I got two years of interest-only loan to build it and stabilize it.
Speaker 2:So we rent it and then that converts to a permanent mortgage. Well, usually when you do these things you have about six months' worth of interest-only while you're leasing it up. And I just burned off all the interest-only and I just started filling the building up. So COVID really did a number with us on that.
Speaker 1:Now how does that? When you deal with COVID and you get through COVID, would you say that you came on the other. Well, new York's still in COVID. No, yes.
Speaker 2:Well, if you want to talk about liberal politics and you want to get off on that tangent yeah, it's still in COVID You've got to wear a mask indoors. There's a mandatory mask mandate that Governor Hochul said she was going to evaluate at the end of January.
Speaker 1:Now, does it affect your labor force?
Speaker 2:No, it hasn't, Other than the fact that people when they get COVID they've got to stay home for five days and that kind of delays things. Five versus the 10 that it used to be Right. But she now has instituted, she's extended that mask mandate through the end of February, Even with no science out there, With no science. And then she says she's going to evaluate it then, which means you know what she's going to do. She's going to extend it into March.
Speaker 1:Well, you and I have been talking about this.
Speaker 2:We predicted another shutdown in Florida happening this year, I thought that that was going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we predicted another shutdown in Florida happening this year. I thought that that was going to happen. Yeah, me too, I mean she definitely telegraphed it. I mean electric surgery, elective surgery. That's on hold in the hospitals now in New York.
Speaker 2:Well, one of the things is, I was listening to Kill Me this morning when I was driving here to see you and they're talking about these statistics, about these people who have died because they put off cancer surgery. They put off some of these elective surgeries and it actually has deteriorated their health, which caused other problems, which caused people to die. As opposed to COVID, it's been more harmful to shut things down than it was to keep things open.
Speaker 1:Well, and so the latest research out that got released yesterday and, by the way, this is where we got released this week was the COVID lockdown and all these restrictions, what it did. Is it saved, 0.2 percent or 0.02 percent? I've seen two different reports. Either way, it's either 0.2 percent or 0.02 percent. Lives it saved with these insanely dictated communist lockdowns?
Speaker 2:It hurt a lot of people. It hurt a lot of businesses. There was no reason for it. I'm on a local talk show up in the Albany area with Paul Vanderberg and I got to tell you Paul and I had, from the beginning, had called this whole thing a hoax. Yeah, me too. Too, I'm with you and I firmly believe that this was crafted on some level to get rid of Trump. And you know, if you remember correctly, it was stopped to spread 15 days, to stop the spread, and 15 days turned into two years. And you don't deal with it much down here in Florida because you know you've got a governor, ron DeSantis, that does a great job't deal with it much down here in Florida because you know you've got a governor, ron DeSantis, that does a great job, which is why we came down here, this place is free as free as you can get, but you go up into New York, it's oppressive.
Speaker 1:Well, new Yorkers are starting to come down here and you can tell the New Yorkers when they're in the room. Right, we get bad reviews because we're not wearing masks. Bad reviews because we're not wearing masks. We get bad reviews because we're not social distancing, and they want to bring their paranoia down to Florida from New.
Speaker 2:York. You know it happened in the suburbs when you get into upstate New York. They all used to be Republican-based and then, as the people migrated north out of the city of Albany and out of New York City and they started to come up the Saratoga and you probably even see it up in Bolton Landing, right with the chateau up in Bolton, oh yeah, they bring their politics with them and it changes the dynamic and the fabric of those communities and now they're mostly Democratic.
Speaker 1:Well, here in Florida. For the first time in the history of Florida there's more registered Republican voters than there are Democrat voters. For the first time ever in the state history.
Speaker 2:As I like to say, if you're coming to this area, leave your politics where you came from. Don't New York. My Florida was the T-shirt that I saw Assimilate to what we have here. Don't bring your politics here what I do.
Speaker 1:Tell people, though, and then we'll get back on the business. Ron DeSantis did not win by a landslide, he just won. We'll get back on the business. Ron DeSantis did not win by a landslide, he just won. It was a very tight race, so Florida was literally a handful of votes away from being a lockdown state.
Speaker 2:Think about that Ron DeSantis was elected because Trump endorsed him.
Speaker 1:That's right and that's something that we talked about at Mar-a-Lago, yeah, mar-a-lago, yeah. So I tell people, listen, you know the Florida was not that red as everyone thinks. It is because of the election that Ron DeSantis went through was a tight race. Then Trump endorsed him and took him to another level, but the reality is even the results of the election was tight, so Florida was very. That would have been another blue lockdown state. I wouldn't be here opening restaurants. That's right. And think about the amount of jobs that would be impacted in Florida had it not been a red state. You know.
Speaker 2:I believe that there's a bigger force at work here behind the scenes, controlled by this green movement, you know, in the name of the environment, and all these radical left democrats are trying to push an agenda and I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I, I think you're starting to see the effects of what's really happening because of the cost of of things that that you, we have to go, we have to. First of all, the only thing worse than paying a higher cost for something is not being able to get it. Amen, right, yep, I mean, I'm waiting. I just got word the other day. Anderson Windows has just moved the production of black windows. They're very popular in modern farmhouse-style homes. Ten months to get black exterior-clad windows.
Speaker 1:And is it really ten months or is it a year?
Speaker 2:It's ten months 10. So what do you do, bob? Regular white windows I I uh regular white vinyl windows that we used to, we used to get. We used to wait eight weeks for them, 21 weeks now so what do you do?
Speaker 2:normal windows well, our production system puts those purchase orders in the hands of our suppliers months before we need them. So typically it's not a problem, but waiting 10 months for windows is a problem. So now we have to adjust. Maybe we have to take that modern farmhouse style off of the menu so that people can't choose it because we can't get the product for it.
Speaker 1:Now, is there any delay in manufacturing on your end or building the homes because of these delays? Have you witnessed that? I mean you mentioned the apartment building being behind. Are any of your houses behind?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're behind on average three to four months on a house.
Speaker 1:That's about what I'm behind with opening a restaurant down here in.
Speaker 2:Florida, so it's across the board, it's everybody. But what's interesting is I started to see costs increase in August of 2020. And some of the price increases in August of 2020 was a reaction of natural market forces. Right, not enough supply, too much demand. So naturally you're going to increase the price of a home to try and quell that demand and balance it out. But the other 50 percent of that component I started to see costs increasing in my business and actually got behind the curve. And so from uh, august of um 2020, in April of 21, I didn't. So I didn't touch prices from august of 20 until april of 21, and that's when lumber went from. So, I'm sorry, say that one more time. So from august of 2020 until april of 2021, I didn't touch prices you've left your prices the same.
Speaker 2:I've raised them in in august and, and I thought that that was good and and historically I don't raise my prices a lot you know we've got consistency, um, in pricing and usually you'll get a little bit of an increase here or there every year from your suppliers and your subs, but nothing like I'm seeing right now. And so in April of 2021, lumber went from about $350 to $400 a board foot, 1,000 board feet to $1, feet to 1700. What it went up five fold, 5x, um and so what that did is that put me way behind the curve. So now it's costing me an extra thirty thousand dollars a house to buy lumber when. So when those price increases get to me and I'm calling for lumber, it's an extra extra $30,000 a house.
Speaker 2:That's your margin hit. Oh yeah, it was really bad. But here's the interesting thing now Lumber, between April and November, skyrocketed. Then it corrected, it came down, it retraced about 50 percent, but in that 50 percent retracement, everything else went up and more than doubled what the compensation was, what the reduction in lumber was so other components yeah, so heating and air conditioning furnaces they had three price increases last year.
Speaker 2:We had windows and exterior doors, vinyl siding, roofing, sheetrock, insulation, everything that goes into concrete, everything that goes into concrete, everything that goes into a house, was going up. Where normally you would see 2% to 3% a year, we're seeing 30%, 40%, 50% price increases.
Speaker 1:So do you pull the throttle back in that environment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I actually shut down sales. I couldn't get control of it fast enough, so I just had to pause my sales until I could figure out what was going on. Now here's the interesting thing from august 5th. Now here's here's a house that I built. It's a 2400 square foot, two and a half bath, four, four bedroom home, two car garage, full basement. It was 395 000 in august of 2020. 395 000, yeah, on jan 12th of 22,. Just a couple weeks ago, 514,000. So it goes from 395,000 to 514,000.
Speaker 1:So does that change the demographic you're selling to? No?
Speaker 2:they're still there. The low interest rates hasn't stopped the buyer from buying the house, but once we start getting an uptick in interest rates it's going to hurt. So what does that mean to the average buyer of a new home? Right? So at the 395 number, you take a 30-year mortgage, right? 3.5% Principal and interest on that is $1,439 a month. You take the new number of 514, put the same 3.5% 30-year mortgage on it, it goes to $1,848. It's an increase of $409 a month. It's a car payment. That's taxes. Right, it's $4,800 a year. And that doesn't include increases in insurance. It doesn't include increases in your property taxes. That's just to pay for the house. Wow.
Speaker 1:It's a big number. Taxes that's just to pay for the house wow, it's a big number. So how do these how your demographic for that price of a home at the high threes? Is that a? Is that a new married couple that are just got a job, their first or second job?
Speaker 2:yeah, generally we have really two segment markets, right, we have a lot of ranch plans for the empty nesters, right. Those are these people that we call snowbirds, that want to own a home in new york and and upstate and they'll come down here for the winter, right, and these are pretty much maintenance free homes. We take care of that, that portion of the market, and then we also take care of usually not not so much first time homebuyers but second and third move up type of homebuyers that are young families. Move up type of home buyers that are young families, right, and they're moving out of that that split ranch or that Cape Cod into something bigger in the suburbs, right.
Speaker 2:And that's been in their family maybe Right, exactly, and that's typically my buyer, but what I think, what you're going to see now, and so that was the supply side of the inflation. It just went ballistic.
Speaker 1:That's inflation due to labor increasing and labor shortage because of the mandates Right.
Speaker 2:Labor shortage, right. What's interesting now is so those were all input costs from materials, so those are supply chain restrictions. That's not being able to get product from the port to the factory to make the product that needs to go into the house. What's happening now? And if you want to go back and study inflation in the late 70s because I lived it in early 80s the gas line Right, right labor component of inflation started to take off. Because now, when you have somebody working for you for $20 an hour and all of a sudden they're paying double at the pump for gas right, restore and they see the effect of their wage being eroded by this inflation, they come to you and say I can't work for you for $20 an hour anymore.
Speaker 2:I need 25, I need 28 and as an employer, if it's a good employee, you've got to pay that price. So now you've got to go back to the people that you're working for and say, hey, I have to raise my price just for my labor component. Now we did the material thing six months ago last month. Now I've got to deal with my labor, and so now you have another kick in inflation, and that's the one that really gets away from you when you start talking about inflation.
Speaker 1:Especially if you're in a jam, you're in the middle of a project, you're just throwing. You know, I hate to say throwing raises out, but what do you do?
Speaker 2:Friday. Friday I had a meeting because we have a lot of rental properties and some light industrial properties that we rent to to to tenants and I have one landscaping company that takes care of all this and they've been doing it for years and I had a conversation with the owner of the business on Friday morning and he felt bad. He had to come in and explain to me why he had to raise his prices 23 percent to you, to me that's his labor we have.
Speaker 2:He's got gas yeah, we, we have one community where, um, there's 160 units and it's it's kind of spread out. So there's a lot of spread out, so there's a lot of grass to mow, there's a lot of grass to fertilize and mulch and edging and all that kind of stuff. And that project was around $90,000 for landscape maintenance for the whole season. It just went up to $120,000. My God, and who absorbs that? Well, so now what we've been doing is rents have been going up because of the cost of housing. So this pendulum swings right. The real estate market buying a home goes up. The rental market, because there's a shortage of high-quality rentals now, no matter where you go, no matter where you go, because there's a shortage of high-quality rentals now, no matter where you go, no matter where you go. And the effects, I think, are greater down here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I've heard stories of people where rents have gone from $3,000 to $5,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Overnight. Literally that doesn't happen where we are. It's happened on the East Coast a lot of. Florida.
Speaker 1:And you know we're now getting you to ten percent increase in our rents. And now does this change? When you say, when you talk, you're bringing up a lot of what I'm going through, but in a different industry, right? So we're looking at opening a new restaurant, we're looking at dishware and side plates, etc. So, redoing our menu, we're going to do our menu. Where we're going to decompose or deconstruct our dishes? Where you got it, you want mushrooms, you got to them. We can no longer put them in a dish up front.
Speaker 1:It's going to be up to the consumer how much they want to spend Now. That requires more dishes. We're sitting there looking at things. We're literally saying okay, how long does it take to wash this dish? We love the dish, it looks beautiful, but it's too hard to wash.
Speaker 2:I don't have enough dishwashers, so when you're thinking about landscaping going up, do you start looking at your projects going? You know what we're going to do stone, not grass like? Does this start changing the way we do business overall? It's a consideration and everything that we do design wise. Now we tear things inside and out and look at it and say do we really need this? Wow, and if the answer is no, we eliminate it, so nice to haves are goneaves are gone, they're gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just had that conversation with my wife about the windows At our new location. We want to. First of all, our new location was we wanted to open up in December. We were hoping March. Now we're probably not going to open until October because I'm in a little bit of a pickle.
Speaker 2:Bob.
Speaker 1:Down here you have to play the seasonal game and I got to gun to my head in a month to open down here, replace my New York staff, get them back on the lake in Lake George, and that just creates a major problem for me. So we're probably out to October and then Jen's like well. So now my wife, being a creative designer, starts saying okay, well, that gives me more time to design, you get more creative. No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. Things are too expensive. We can't throw more money at this because there's more. We've got to wait longer to open, I've got to carry the rent. And all of a sudden, you know, she starts having a conversation about pretty doors and bifolds, et cetera, et cetera. The nut goes up. Another hundred grand we used to build.
Speaker 2:you know there's projects that I just finished, that, that if I had to get in the ground with these projects today and build them, it wouldn't pencil out. The project would lose money. So you've got to shelve it, you've got to wait for your input costs to come back down. And I've got news for you. I don't believe I've never had people come to me and say hey, you know what? We've oversupplied the market and therefore your sheetrock price is going to come down by 25%.
Speaker 1:I've never seen that happen.
Speaker 2:So I call this the great reset in terms of inflation and pricing. And a lot of this was all brought on by the far-left liberals and the Democrats and the engineering that they did on this economy by shutting it down. See, that's the effect that is just rearing its ugly head right now, and the fact that they have to come out with these massive spending bills. You know as well as I do, when there's too many dollars, chasing too few goods, that's the match that ignites inflation. That's right. Chasing too few goods, that's the match that ignites inflation. That's right. And we're just beginning to we're in like the third inning of this. Well, how about the?
Speaker 1:money we're printing, yeah, the, the printing of money in the last two years. You, if you're going to do a graph that shows the hockey stick, we would have to remove the three floors above us to do a whiteboard. That's right and yeah, I mean, it's literally straight up. So where does you know? I had a conversation last night. Being in a restaurant business, you get to talk to a lot of people right in a lot of different industries and I I think what I talked about last night when we talked about this new report, that's out that the, that all these restrictions really did nothing.
Speaker 1:Someone said to me well, how many lives is? 0.2%? I'm like, wait a minute, we're not even calculating in there the deaths that took place because people couldn't have surgery, because we're not including in there the psychological damage to our children because they were locked in a bedroom. I moved my kid to Florida, we got out and put her down here. Bolton, they were locked in a bedroom. I moved my kid to Florida, we got out and put her down here.
Speaker 1:Boat landing was a little different. I don't want to get into too much into that, but they did stay open. They're in New York, they're upstate. They stayed open with the masks on. I appreciate that, but a lot of kids were stuck in their bedrooms, no sports, et cetera. So we're not even calculating in the fallout of that, but I do believe we've had a gigantic culture shift in our country through these mandates. Call it 20% of society, 30% of society, whatever you want to call it. I mean you see them walking down the street with a mask on outside. You see people in Florida. There's no helmet law. They're wearing masks on our motorcycles With no helmet. With no helmet, yeah Right. So you see people in their cars by themselves wearing masks and no, they're not uber drivers. I look for the uber tech. So you've got this nutty culture, this almost cult-like culture that has come out and they believe they have more rights than me and you do. And what's the long-term effect on that?
Speaker 2:on all our economy and our businesses, etc and if you don't wear a mask, you're racist and somehow you're insensitive to the people that they're trying to protect, right? So these people make no sense at all. They want to argue from an emotional point of view and not from a factual one, and that's the problem with this country right now is these people are given too much leeway in the media. I mean, you go on TikTok and you look at some of these people that are on TikTok. I want to grind my teeth against a chalkboard because I don't understand it. That's right, right.
Speaker 1:Well, look at the attack on Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan had two doctors on. One owns nine patents. I think it was nine patents of the RNMA. I had it in a podcast a couple weeks ago. I'll put it in the show notes what the actual vaccine is. Pardon me folks, he Dr Malone, it's a three-hour podcast. Bob, it took me five days to listen to it, three-hour podcast, and it was informative. The whole podcast was a soundbite. You know how you like to clip some sounds or take some notes.
Speaker 1:Forget it it like to like clip some sounds or take some notes. Forget it. It's three hours of content. That's all notes. Right, Vaccines for dummies, I would call it, or you know, the lockdown for dummies. And he takes us through all the scientific data. And Joe Rogan is now being threatened to be shut down on Spotify because of disinformation. You get people on the View talking about him. You got Neil Young Right, Neil.
Speaker 2:Who's Neil Young? Anyways, he's all washed up, right.
Speaker 1:You have Neil Young's Younger version of himself Dying right now that he's not standing up Against the big Corporate machine, right, the big government agency, yeah.
Speaker 2:And the reality is.
Speaker 1:Who of these people Actually sat there and listened to Joe Rogan For three hours?
Speaker 2:None of them.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:Neil Young back in the prime of his career. He was anti-government. He was a protester Right Right.
Speaker 1:All these people. It's wild. So I do believe I've said it before. I think I said it to you. I believe that and I said it to my Democratic friends and this podcast we talk to people that are busy like you and I, that aren't necessarily as involved in politics as much as you and I are. You and I consume this stuff 24 7 and we talk about a lot yeah, we consume it because we're around it every single day.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, we're faced with it every day.
Speaker 1:But a lot of people don't? A lot of people that are busy running it out of manhattan, running their jobs, don't feel like they have time to do it. That's why I do this podcast to kind of download it to them as well. As we talk to college kids and Bob, I have said I do and I want to say it again here. There's a couple things I'd like to say.
Speaker 1:First of all, I do think we'll be a I used to say socialist nation. I believe we'll be a communist nation in 10 years or less. I really do believe that. I believe there, the Democrats of my grandfather OK, I don't want one of the parties to be a communist party, right, I don't want the Republican Party than the Communist Party. So I do believe in all that and I want to and talking to the Democrats out there that are listening and talking to the college kids to help them navigate their professors. This lockdown when it, when it came to the risk of our businesses, bob, and seeing a new statistic of 0.2% effect on this, I truly believe, bob, if Hillary Clinton won the election, the lockdowns never would have happened. It would have been a bad flu season.
Speaker 2:Perhaps I truly believe that I would not disagree with that. And while we're talking about 0.2, and let's assume it's not 0.02, and let's assume it's 0.2, because that's the higher number, Right. That means that it didn't affect 99.8% of the population, imagine. And so we went through these exercises and this pain and suffering, and let's not even get into what it's still doing to these kids that are going to school that have to mask up In New York City. If it's above 32 degrees, you've got to go outside and eat your lunch.
Speaker 1:For the kids.
Speaker 2:Yes, Still, still. It's unbelievable. And so these kids now are suffering long-term consequences of having to put these masks on. They can't go to school. They can't see anybody's face, their nose, their mouth. They can't see any expression, no emotion, it's emotionless. They have difficulties learning. Some are suffering from depression, which is the future of our country. Eating disorders, right Drug use, alcoholism All these things are happening to these kids and it shouldn't happen.
Speaker 1:All in the name of political warfare.
Speaker 2:All in the name of political warfare? Yes, all in the name of political warfare. It drives me crazy. Yeah, I got a granddaughter. That's next year she's going to go to preschool and we're already talking about alternative forms of preschool, like even if we went out and got an educator and we got a bunch of people that we knew and we put together our own makeshift school so that these kids don't have to be in masks. That's what we're prepared to do now.
Speaker 1:I do believe that this dramatically impacted our businesses and I do believe that a lot of the country now knows that, so that for the first time in our nation, there shouldn't be a whole lot of debate over the different political sides and what the agendas are. At least I hope there shouldn't be.
Speaker 2:There shouldn't be. There shouldn't be a difference. But given where we are right now in terms of how far radical the left wants to push things Exactly and the media gives them the platform to do it 100%, it doesn't go away. Yep, it stays here. I do believe that what's going on here, in my business in particular, is gonna have Not in 22, but in 23. There's a winter coming. There's a recession coming. There's going to be. There's a lot of houses across the country that are in the pipeline, things that have been approved or are getting approved and are going to go under construction, apartment projects, and I'm talking the Sunbelt too. It's going to happen down here. Just like they overbuilt the housing market in South Florida during the financial crisis 2009, 2010. Oh yeah, a. They overbuilt the housing market in south florida during the financial crisis 2009 2010. You couldn't. You couldn't give a house away.
Speaker 1:yeah, my father had three condos on this island houses got cut in half.
Speaker 2:I remember I was up in palm beach at the time right and the related companies was building city place. They had whole floors of condominiums that were for sale and they were trying to package them up 10 at a time and you could buy them for two hundred thousand dollars a door. You know they're back up to five, six hundred thousand a door right now. How you think this is going to happen in florida again? You think there's going?
Speaker 1:to be a. I think it's going to happen nationwide now, even though the mass migration of florida because we don't have a lot of inventory- yeah, but you have, there's a lot of inventory in the pipeline, okay, okay.
Speaker 2:So, no matter how you slice it across the country, see, builders are no different than anybody else. We're creatures of habit and we're creatures of tending to. When things are good, we overproduce, and when we overproduce, we create an inventory that's out there. And so what you got to realize, too, is that the Fed is withdrawing liquidity from the market, right, they're going to raise interest rates, and if you take interest rates from a three and a half to four to four and a quarter percent, that's going to pull people out of the market.
Speaker 1:But it's going to, hopefully it's supposed to write inflation, you know.
Speaker 2:I heard the statistic the other day 75% of America has mortgages below 4%. Wow, so now, when you take mortgage rates and you shove them up over 4%, let's call to replace that 3.5%, that 3%, that 2.75% mortgage With a new house With 4.5%. Right, yeah, and so that?
Speaker 1:And the refinancing won't happen to take equity out, which stimulates the economy.
Speaker 2:Correct. So you have all this product and it doesn't happen overnight. It could take two years, but as the product builds the inventory and the people withdraw from the market because of other external forces. It could be interest rates, right, could be, you know, could be the fact that house has got so expensive and the affordability index has dropped through the floor.
Speaker 1:nobody can afford them right, and that could leave a lot of inventory on the market and and and the.
Speaker 2:The other phenomena, that's that's taking taking over is single-family homes for rent. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have gone out there and seen this concept of single-family detached homes for rent. There are business models and companies that are funded for the purpose of buying up single-family detached homes and renting them. There's a model. There's a model where that where this what?
Speaker 1:running them on a long-term, year-to-year basis? Yes, not.
Speaker 2:Airbnb, and so what happens?
Speaker 2:is when these guys see the peak in the market and they want to push that inventory from rental to sale because they can cash out, they can make money on these units, that's more inventory that gets added to the market. You see, see how the inventory starts to build now. Oh, yeah, yeah, and so you'll have a correction in pricing. It'll take a good recession. You've got all this inventory that's getting pushed on the market. Then what happens is the lenders they want it back out of the market. They don't want to loan on these projects anymore because the risk factor has gone up, and so now the liquidity for building new stuff dries up and you got this overhang of supply.
Speaker 1:prices have to come down now the difference that's phenomenal and the difference between we talk about financial crisis, the interest rates rising at the last housing crash. A lot of people are holding interest-only product. Is that still a thing now?
Speaker 2:interest-only consumer loans no, but on the commercial side you have interest-only. But on the housing side very rarely do you see anybody getting an interest-only loan.
Speaker 1:Okay, so that's one checkbox. That's for the better. That could avoid a housing crisis.
Speaker 2:But on the commercial side, there's a lot of properties that are financed with interest only loans, whether they're multifamily apartment projects, light industrial buildings. So rent goes up, um well, when those things start to reset. So let's just say, for example um, I've got an interest only 10 year loan. Yeah, at the end of that 10 year period, if interest rates are double and I financed it at 3% and now interest rates are 6% after that 10-year period, I'm going to have problems going out and refinancing that thing because I'm not going to meet my debt coverage ratio that the lenders require me to meet, which means now I have to put up more equity in the building. Right?
Speaker 1:How do you do?
Speaker 2:that. Well, it's cash. But there's some people out there you know that are underfunded, let's say, or undercapitalized, and when that comes time to to do that, to have to cough up more cash to refinance that project. Or they got to raise the rents because if your rents are factored in down here at a three percent right interest rate and now you're paying six, something's got to change right, that the person in that building who's renting that from you has to pay more money. So it's an interesting dynamic. It's happened before but it's happened throughout the last hundred years. And you can't always go on a chart. If you look at a chart right Like, look at the NASDAQ right now it goes from the lower left to the upper right. It just keeps going up and it has been that way for the last 10 years.
Speaker 1:Well, that trend eventually has to reverse well, I think the biggest difference is what the new ingredient or the, the influencer in the equation is. The government right, getting involved with our staff and increasing and inflate our wages. Increased based on competition with government, not with each other, bob, no doubt about it.
Speaker 2:What's that impact?
Speaker 1:because we're paying people more wages all of us, restaurant people and new builders and landscapers. We did it because the government had them collecting a kicker of what $600, $400, whatever it was.
Speaker 2:Well, they paid them to stay home.
Speaker 1:Paid them to stay home, yeah, so now we've got to incentivize them to get off their couch and come to work. So the government competed against us for the increase of wages. So it's really a false increase of wages. It's not based on our industry's booming and our profit margins going up. It's based on a third party getting involved, which is the government.
Speaker 2:And the interesting thing too is my business is a long cycle process, from the time I sign a contract to obtain a building permit to build the house to moving the customer in. That process could take anywhere from seven to 12 months, right, right, and I have no idea what's going to happen to my costs in those seven to 12 months. Historically I did, but I don't anymore. Um and so now you see some builders coming out with escalation clauses in their contracts. They're benchmarked against a certain price. If they exceed, if they bench them at X and they exceed Y, they pass it on to the customer. I haven't done that yet.
Speaker 1:I don't think that there's how do you know your customer's going to?
Speaker 2:afford it. Well, that's the problem. If you have a customer, that's signing.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll pay it but they can't.
Speaker 2:They're putting the minimum amount down and all of a sudden you come to them and you hand them a bill for $10,000 at the end and they don't have the $10,000.
Speaker 2:The bank's not giving it to them. So what happens? Right, you've got a problem. So there's some complications with that kind of rationale, you know. But my cycle time is very long, yours is short, right? So you pretty much know, week to week, what your input costs are, based on the prices that they're charging, and you put those meals on the table and people pay you, right? I'd love to hear from you, buddy, like, if you had a steak on your menu that you charged $40 for a year ago, what do you have to charge for that steak today? $65. Right?
Speaker 1:And yet it cost me $32 today.
Speaker 2:It cost me $11 two years ago, and I think that this is one of the things.
Speaker 1:Bob, I shut down my online ordering, shut my meals. There's a specific amount of customers that were loyal. Those are the only ones we're going to ship to and, by the way, what happened here is FedEx is understaffed. So now, have you ever tried a FedEx package recently?
Speaker 2:They go listen, we can't guarantee it tomorrow.
Speaker 1:What do you mean? You can't guarantee it tomorrow I'm paying you, yeah, but the guarantee's gone. So now I've got food being shipped in Florida. One day spoils the food. Shipped in Florida, they can't get it. One day spoils the food. So it's just right. Right, and that's all because of the labor shortage, that is because of the mandates, because of the shutdown of the economy, because of the kickers to the consumer or the labor people that are collecting unemployment yeah. So my whole business model here. Yeah, we get a look into it week to week. The challenge is, when you build a menu, you're usually doing it for a month, okay, and you put on an autopilot. Now my staff, my chef and I get together once a week and we go through the invoices. The challenge is he's understaffed, so does he have time to go through the invoices? We don't. We're, we're cooking, we're prepping, we're bsing tables. It's a very difficult environment to manage.
Speaker 2:And the point I'm trying to make here is this I'm sure you, like a lot of other restaurateurs, have kind of delayed that move, that jump in prices, by doing other things to compensate the offset.
Speaker 1:As long as we could.
Speaker 2:Because you're probably afraid that if that $40 steak goes to $65, you're going to scare a lot of people away.
Speaker 1:I call it the price tolerance yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I think what's happening right now is we're reaching critical mass in that point where the person does come to the restaurant and they do see that $40 steak at $65. And they're saying what the heck is going on here, right, why am I seeing such an increase? But a lot of people don't understand what, the forces behind your business that caused that, or the forces behind my business. They don't get it because they don't deal with it every single day on the front lines, and I think what you're starting to see now more and more is this stuff is churning up in news, in the media, right, and we're getting back to those days where we used to have this misery index.
Speaker 1:Right, remember from the Carter years.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you're going to start to hear that term more and more over the next three or four years.
Speaker 1:We see the misery index in our reviews. People do give reviews in a pandemic, but they're not a two and one star.
Speaker 2:Well, I remember one time I went to your restaurant at 240 pounds and I walked out at 220 because it took me so long to get my meal it takes bob for it's marini's table whole weight. Don't worry, I'm like, what are you talking about? Get the guy his damn dinner.
Speaker 1:That's, mark, mark, I'm gonna get you for this one, right? So, um, so, all right, back to what you for this one. So, all right, back to what you just said. With the timing we increased our prices before the grocery stores did, and I had a fallout of a couple customers you know a handful and they started talking at the country clubs and in town and they got back to me. My mother came to me. I said, mom, I'm not getting rich off this stuff.
Speaker 1:I made zero money last year because labor was up in the high 40s, food was in the high 30s, and that's your margin in the restaurant industry. Right, your food should be at 25 to 30. Your labor should be at 25 to 30. And then you run your fixed costs and hopefully, you come out of this thing with 10 to 15 points and everything else is based on volume. Right, that's right. So the reality is with us. We were the restaurant industry that didn't have buying power. I'm not talking about the chains, the restaurant industry that didn't have buying power. One, two, three unit operators. We were ahead of the inflation in regards to it hit us quicker when you were in the grocery stores, and I come from a retail background, calvin Klein.
Speaker 1:In the fashion industry, when a retailer had a problem, they made the problem the supplier's problem for a period of time. Bob right. So look, we got an issue. There's a high theft issue in our store. At five locations we have 15% of the merchandise being stolen and you, the provider of my inventory, you're going to take a hit on your margin for 60 days while I figure out how to fix it. If you don't take a hit and give me a discount on your goods, this is the retailer. If you don't take a hit, I'm not going to buy your merchandise, I'll go to someone else. So, essentially, you're going to pay me. You're going to lose money to do business with me for the next 60 days while I figure out my problem. It is my, not yours, mr Calvin Klein, but nevertheless I write the check to buy your jeans. So you're going to take the hit.
Speaker 1:And I do believe, at the grocery store level, with consumer goods meat and proteins, et cetera I do believe for a good 90 days, the big power retailers turn to the vendors and say look, I have people waiting in line to do business with me. Increase my prices 10% or increase them at all, nothing at all for 30 days I'll increase them by 10% or 12% at the store level. Let me build a purse up and hopefully it'll go down and this conversation will be over. But if it increases after 30 days, we'll start increasing my prices at the consumer and a new vendor will start increasing them to me. So 90 days after we started getting hammered for our price increases, the local grocery stores' stakes were going from $9 to $22, like giant jumps right, so it catches up eventually to everybody.
Speaker 2:That's what we're seeing now in the home building business and I, as well as a lot of other home builders, had that same power with a lot of our suppliers, we would be able to get them to forestall a price increase. No, I can't afford it right now, or you've got to lock in the next six months of my production and then make the increase take place after that. I can't get that anymore.
Speaker 2:Right, because they'll be out of business. The other thing is you know competitive forces. You take a plumbing company, for example. You've got ABC Plumbing doing your plumbing, Yep, and XYZ comes in and says, well, you get a lower price. So ABC just raised their price. And XYZ comes in and says, well, I could do that house for $1,000 less To get your business, To get my business. I can't hire him because he's going to be out of business within a year.
Speaker 1:He can't make money Bingo, so you know he's going to lose money and you're going to end up with half your house is not plumbed.
Speaker 2:That plus the other thing is I'm going to end up with maybe 20 houses that are completed and now I have no plumber to go back and service those customers that are already living in their houses.
Speaker 1:For the young entrepreneurs listening to this, that's a huge lesson. Right there, People walking in your door promising you cheaper prices. They're just going to be out of business.
Speaker 2:I've seen it a thousand times. It's happened to me. That's a great point.
Speaker 1:I'm so glad you brought that up. That's huge and I say it to my customers. I'm like, listen, if I don't up my prices, you're not going to have a restaurant to go to. That would be irresponsible, and then there's not going to be jobs and I'm going to get rid of 50 people. Then you figure out how to deal with it from there. Now, bob, back to the talking about all these challenges our country politically. This could be going on for 20 years as political warfare, right? What do you? You're a fourth-generation business. I have young kids For people out there that have younger generation coming up and out of college. Are you worried about your kids taking over your business? Like, where does the future hold for us?
Speaker 2:entrepreneurs. Yeah, I'm worried about it. Um, I'm probably worried about it the same way that my grandfather is worried about my father taking over. You think, right, um, and if you go back through history and you look at all the things that I saw my grandfather and my father go through, some of these things kind of pale in comparison because there was a lot of unknowns throughout history. You had the Vietnam War, you had the oil embargo, the oil crisis, right, we had the S&L crisis in the 1980s. You know, we had the financial crisis. We had a lot of those crises. But one of the things that's different today than what was different back then is the divisiveness in this country, the divisiveness in politics.
Speaker 1:The wanting to flip our nation.
Speaker 2:There doesn't seem to be any unity or any common ground in all of that.
Speaker 1:Capitalism or communism.
Speaker 2:And I believe that divided, we fall, we implode. And I believe that divided, we fall, we implode. And if there's some kind of common ground. But the problem is is that the liberal media is one sided, it's all fake news. I mean, if it wasn't for Donald Trump, we would have never been exposed to the term fake news. And they have a platform and they give the progressives and the radicals the entire stage to promote their agenda and everybody else is anti-climate, racist and divisive. That's their agenda and we're talking maybe 20% of the population here, but they're controlling 90% of the microphone Right.
Speaker 1:So what do our kids do for business?
Speaker 2:And in the universities because I I had. This is a true story. My son was going to a college of massachusetts and he was in a philosophy class and the uh, which is a required mandatory class to take right an elective, a liberal art elective.
Speaker 1:That's all by design.
Speaker 2:The first day of class he walks in and instructs the classroom that he's not a Trump fan.
Speaker 1:He's a never the professor.
Speaker 2:The professor. He's a never-Trumper and he never wants to hear any of those views espoused in his classroom.
Speaker 1:Now why say anything at?
Speaker 2:all as a professor espoused in his classroom Now why say anything at all as a professor, because he felt that that podium was his and it was going to be his way, or the highway, you know. I said to my son. I said, tyler, what did you say to this professor? He goes Dad now he's a freshman, right, he's first semester freshman. He's taken back by the comment, but too scared to say anything about it. And I said well, tyler, let me tell you what I would have said, given where I've been throughout the course of my life. Right, and we all are allowed to speak our point of view in this country. Amen, okay, and I'm the one that's writing the check for that college tuition.
Speaker 2:I'm the one that's putting the check for that college tuition.
Speaker 2:I'm the one that's putting the food on his table, I would say excuse me, mr Professor, I happen to like Donald Trump and that's my political view. Your political beliefs have nothing to do in a philosophy classroom, Amen. So here's what I'm doing I'm taking my books back to the bookstore, I'm going to turn them in and I'm going to go to the Bursar and I'm going to get a refund for this class. Amen, and I'm walking out of here. That's what you got to start doing, and if this happens more and more in this college, I'm just going to withdraw from the entire college.
Speaker 1:All right, donald Trump meeting event that we went to in Mar-a-Lago two weeks ago. Now, that's key, right there, right. So people say what do we do Customers last night, buddy, what do I do Right there? Walk out, demand a refund from your class, hold them accountable. Right, run for school board elections, get involved. But you did something else and we don't have to say the name of it or whatnot.
Speaker 2:But you were sponsoring you wanna. No, we were sponsoring something. I was just going to bring that up, so I'm glad you did. Yeah, so I was. I was sponsoring a, a university sports venue. Yep, and their beliefs in terms of what was going on a couple of years ago with Black Lives Matter and a bunch of different socialist kind of, and then it got into.
Speaker 1:COVID Very very progressive.
Speaker 2:Then it got into COVID and masks were a requirement to actually go to the venue right and the players were taking a knee during the national anthem and that really drove me crazy, you know.
Speaker 1:So they have the right to take a knee, but you have the right to do what I have a right to withdraw my money from their program.
Speaker 2:So I said to the AD who I'm friends with, I said look, I want to do this, but I want a clawback provision. I want a clawback provision in my agreement with you that says the first time that I hear that the players are taking a knee during the national anthem, you give me my sponsor money back. And he couldn't do it. He says because we're a state-run institution, we have no control over that. I said well, I have control over who gets my money. Amen, and you can't have it if you can't promise me that. What happened? Not only did I do it that way, but there's other people that I know in different colleges and universities. As this story spread, they did the same thing and it started to affect a little bit of change. One college in particular in our hometown I have another friend that did the same thing and all that stuff went away. See that, see that. See, when more and more people do that and you band together, it starts to hurt.
Speaker 2:You're not canceling them, you're just not giving them your money, it starts to hurt from their perspective. Right, their programs are funded based on us donors that we believe in the program, we believe in the people that are running the program. But now, when that cuts against our values and what we believe in, we've got to stand up for them. We've got to stand up for ourselves right, the wallet, yeah Amen.
Speaker 1:Now we talked about Trump and you talked about the classroom. Let's pivot to Mar-a-Lago.
Speaker 2:What a night that was.
Speaker 1:How do you explain? A lot of people ask me, buddy, how was it? How was he, what would how? What's your recap of the evening? First of all, it's such a setting, right, you know, mar-a-lago is gorgeous yes, uh, I've been there before, you know I never.
Speaker 2:That was your first time there and it's overwhelming, to say the least, beautiful, you know it's 11 aculate what's the word?
Speaker 1:Meticulous?
Speaker 2:Well, trump is meticulous, yeah Right. I've heard stories that when he walks on to his 757 airplane if the carpets aren't vacuumed, all the right way he makes him get the vacuum out and changes them.
Speaker 1:You know he gets angry and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you asked me, in a word or two, to describe Donald Trump, I would say real, empathetic and emotional, like very passionate, not just about he. Was very passionate that night about the people sitting in that room.
Speaker 1:My God. He addressed us by name.
Speaker 2:Right. So when you think about that night, 31 of us, 31.
Speaker 1:Set in a very intimate setting, it felt like 10.
Speaker 2:He talked to us as if he had known us for a very long time, right, and he broke things down in a way to us that you don't see him on TV. Talk about how, about when he talked about the first night in the White House, which he says is probably the most remarkable property that he's ever been in, and he was definitely humbled by that, right, and here's a guy that develops beautiful properties all over the world.
Speaker 1:It's like gold toilets.
Speaker 2:And he's talking about how this is the most beautiful property that he's ever been in and having the ability to be able to live there for four years and stare at what Lincoln stared at. And he says the first night I get into the White House and I just stand in awe in front of the Lincoln bedroom which is a national monument and he talked about the emotions that came over him right as he stood there and he couldn't believe that he was in that situation. He was actually there in the White House.
Speaker 1:That's a great story.
Speaker 2:And so he gave people the floor. They got to ask questions. He was very humble, he was very genuine.
Speaker 1:He wasn't in a hurry, no, the Secret very genuine. He wasn't in a hurry, no, the Secret Service was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we couldn't even get a glass of wine. Yeah, we'll tell him about that. That's a great story too.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that took me back and it shouldn't have that, he said is a question was asked about foreign leaders and who was the most? I don't know it was, I don't remember the exact question. Do you?
Speaker 2:yeah, was it who? Who was the? Who was the toughest foreign leader that you ever had to negotiate against right and his answer?
Speaker 1:nancy pelosi. Yeah, nancy pelosi, chuck schumer in uh, who's the other knucklehead?
Speaker 2:shifty shift, yeah, and.
Speaker 1:And he said uh, they're demonic, he said.
Speaker 2:They're evil, evil people, he said I've dealt with the toughest leaders and leaders in the world and they paled in comparison to the people that are running our country yep.
Speaker 1:The democratic party, the democratic leadership, is the most evil power hungry people he's ever sat in a room and he said it just like that too right, yeah, I mean he made it sound as if they took over north korea tomorrow. Now he didn't say this. This is my interpretation. If they took over, if those three took over north korea tomorrow, they wouldn't change a damn thing that's right, they just loved every minute of the power yeah that really hit me when? Yeah, that really hit me, that really hit me.
Speaker 2:When he said being in a room with those people when they left, you knew they wouldn't honor a damn word we talked about. And then there was a question about somebody asked if you could go back and change anything in the four years that you were president. What would be the one thing that you would change? And right away he didn't even have to think about it. He said I would have changed some of the people that I appointed to certain cabinet positions and if I get in office again I'll know who to appoint. That's right, and I think a lot of that. If you read behind the scenes on that, because he never said this some of those people are put there because they're owed political favors, whether Trump wants them there or not.
Speaker 2:They say, sir, you got to do it, you got to do this. So you know, we talked about a multitude of things and I think it lasted about an hour and a half.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at least.
Speaker 2:An hour and a half and Buddy and I are looking at each other and we're saying you know, there's no water.
Speaker 1:No water. I was very disappointed in that. We had no water for an hour and a half.
Speaker 2:I had no water. I was very disappointed in that. We had no water for an hour and a half and then we finally get out of there and we get into the general they had a cocktail reception, so there was a couple levels of donors, right, we got to the top tier and so out there they're having this cocktail party.
Speaker 2:And we finally get our way to the bar and we hadn't had anything to drink since we'd been there and all of a sudden this Secret Service guy comes out. I just get to the bar, just sit up. Literally they served in front of us Two glasses of red wine, please. The guy says bar's closed. This guy gets between.
Speaker 2:He comes between me and the bartender, bar's closed. I thought he was joking, right, you know he wasn't. We're dying to thirst. Yeah, he goes bar's closed. Then he kicked us out. That was pretty wild Because people were hanging around after they were instructed to leave.
Speaker 1:Well doing pictures with Elise Devonic yes, right.
Speaker 2:By the way, does.
Speaker 1:Trump love her, or what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, elise is remarkable, she really is. She's also very humble, very smart, um, and she's, she's got a lot of power, you know, in, in, in the Republican party.
Speaker 1:Man, she, she apparently does. I, trump, couldn't say enough about her Right.
Speaker 2:You know the what I, what I love about it? She's from, she's from your home district up in Bolton, right? I mean she she's in our district that's the 21st district, I think, in upstate New York, right? Yeah, so I'm happy. I'm in Saratoga, I build in Saratoga County, so I'm happy to be one of her constituents and have her represent me in Washington. I certainly love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, she'll come a long way in a short period of time. One thing that took me back I'm a tall guy, 6'1". Trump's a monster, yeah.
Speaker 2:That guy's like a giant, I know he is yeah, remember doing the pictures next to him.
Speaker 1:I was actually. I got caught off guard. I was a little intimidated standing next to him doing a picture. I didn't shake his. Did you shake his hand on the picture?
Speaker 2:I did. Yeah, I didn't shake his hand, I don't know why. Well, not during the picture, just as I walked out. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, I walked away and he looked at me and he gave me the nod and said thank you, and I and I, for some reason, you know I didn't shake his hand. I'm like oh, covid, we can't shake his hand, but meanwhile he shook everyone's hand when he walked in a room. I just had a moment where I was a little overwhelmed by him.
Speaker 2:Um, the last time that I was at Mar-a-Lago was probably they had a Ferrari car show there, you know, and they have served brunch on the patio overlooking the intercoastal, and Trump had made his way to the event and I was amazed because I was only—and this was before he announced that he was running for president. I was maybe 8 to 10 feet away from him and I was kind of amazed at how he worked his way around the crowd and made it a point to go and talk to people and shake their hands.
Speaker 1:At the tables.
Speaker 2:And politic with them. Yeah, I heard that yeah, before he was president.
Speaker 1:Yep, when I shared with someone, we were there or someone saw that write-up and they called me. I didn't know, you were at Mar-a-Lago. And they tell me stories, because they're members there on how, listen, before he was a president or before he was a candidate, he would literally go table we call that table touching. And then it hit me he's in the hospitality business, that's right. I think what hit me more than anything is when you're, if all he had was Mar-a-Lago, that was his only asset, what the hell is he running for president for? That's what hit me like. Why does he want that grief? And meanwhile he owns a hell of a lot more than mar-a-lago.
Speaker 2:Right, his assets are a lot bigger than that property, although that's a hell of a property yeah, it's 11 acres from intercoastal to the ocean in palm beach and I heard he bought it in like the late 80s, early 90s, and I'm going off the top of my head so taxed? Yeah, this might be misinformation a little bit, but it goes something like this eight million, nine million. It was a disrepair, yeah I think it was even less.
Speaker 2:He had to put a. He had to put a lot of money into it, yeah, okay, and then he built the ballroom off the side. I think the place is worth 450 million dollars, right?
Speaker 1:now yeah, beautiful beautiful spot, all right. Well, this has been great, bob. You want to hang out and do a little bonus session, bob?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd love to. I don't have anything to do this afternoon. Awesome yeah.
Speaker 1:So stay tuned. Bob and I are going to take a little break here. We're going to do a little bonus episode and dive into some business. Deeper business conversation Be great Love to.
Speaker 2:Can I work for you, yeah?
Speaker 1:Awesome, excellent. Well, you're listening to the Buddy Ford Jr show. Appreciate you all for tuning in. If you don't listen to the bonus, we'll see you next week, and God bless, have a great week.
